Imagine if nations acted like businesses...First of all, they'd all be dictatorships. If you complained, you would be told to that you're always free to go to another dictatorship. If you continued to show dissent, you would be deported.
Human rights wouldn't exist. Atrocities would be acceptable. "Crime exists only in the mind of an individual," says Jeffrey Parker, a professor of law at George Mason University Law School "Since a corporation has no mind, it can commit no crime." (But then, governments don't have minds either!)
Bigger nations would be considered better - "if they weren't a good country, they wouldn't be big". The USSR and red China would be admired for their success
If this sounds far-fetched, take a look at how a corporation is run - no matter how much business media talks about how they love "markets" and "competition", companies don't have markets in them, and they don't compete against themselves. In fact, most corporations try to buy ("merge") their competitors!
Corporations are really just controlled economies in miniature - so really, if nations acted like businesses, we'd think ourselves free because we get to choose which communist dictatorship we live in!
"There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery.
In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee.
Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?" --Bob Black, The Abolition of Work
When I say jump, you say "how high"...
When American managers are transferred from state to state it said that it is to "widen their experience". This is probably true, but it also prevents them from forming attachments to neighbors and friends in the community rather than the company. Killing two birds with one stone. (Source: Rosabeth Moss Kanter)