Principle or Expediency

The only difference between a multi-national corporation and an oligarchical government is that one has an army and the other does not. With this perspective, it is easy to see that centralized power of any kind is prejudicial to human liberty. Corporate executives have the same incentives as politicians. If a politician or an executive must choose between principle and keeping her job, she will nearly always choose to keep her job.

For example, the prankster, Andy Bichlbaum, posed as Jude Finisterra, a Dow Chemical spokesperson, to speak about the deadly gas leak at a chemical plant in Bhopal, India that has now killed an estimated 25,000 people and injured another 120,000. He announced that Dow will accept full responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster and will pay $12 Billion for the health coverage of these 120,000 people.

Within a half hour, DOW Chemical's stock dropped $2 Billion until the company announced that, "Jude Finisterra is not an employee nor a spokesperson for DOW Chemical." To this day, the company has not accepted responsibility for its actions in Bhopal, India.

The Federal Reserve: The Undemocratic Branch of Government

Democracy is More Cumbersome than Dictatorship

Semco went through a radical, democratic transformation beginning in 1980. In 1980, Semco employees "each produced an average of $10,800 worth of goods a year." When Ricardo Semler wrote Maverick in 1993, his employees each produced an average of "$92,000 worth of goods a year (adjusted for inflation)--four times the national average; by the value-added standard, productivity rose six and a half times."

If democratic businesses are more profitable and motivating, then why do people insist on creating oligarchical/command-control organizations? Because...
(1) "so often it is power and greed and plain stubbornness that make bigger automatically seem better."
(2) "secrecy is a strong incentive to be conspicuously greedy."
(3) "bureaucracies are built by and for people who busy themselves proving they are necessary, especially when they are not."

"The era of using people as production tools is coming to an end. Participation is infinitely more complex to practice than conventional corporate unilateralsm, just as democracy is much more cumbersome than dictatorship."

(Quotes taken from Maverick by Ricardo Semler)