The Orwellian Dystopia of Business Regulation

G. Stolyarov II

Issue XIX-- February 20, 2004

           The principle of capitalism poses a severe threat to the Party in 1984 as the vehicle moving toward a meritocratic society and a technological paradise, both key to the improvement of living standards. The pseudo-histories of Oceania include thoughtless slander against financial giants of the past and lies concerning the "improvements" brought about by the regulations of the bureaucrats, which had amounted to the theft (or "confiscation") of property earned through the effort and innovation of superlative individuals. In order to halt the advance of industry, the Party seeks to bring industry into its grasp, to subsequently apply it not to the material gain sought by the capitalists but to the mental indoctrination required for tribal supremacy. The process of dismantling private enterprise has been lengthy and devastating in the United States as well. It proceeded at a more gradual tempo, with fewer outbreaks of violence against entrepreneurs, yet it was no less coercive. From the molding of businessmen into blackguards of the media to the stringent enforcement of the abomination that is antitrust to the intervenient policy of minimum wage, the paws of Big Brother lunged at another target of the oligarchy, the economy, the gears of progress which the Witch Doctors had struggled for seventy years to dismantle.

Antitrust: Suffering for Suffering’s Sake

          Microsoft, a leading manufacturer of widely embraced computer software, recently stood trial for "monopolizing" the market and violating antitrust regulations designed to prevent "unfair competition". Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the company split, from which the corporation escaped years later as a successor on the bench became struck by the commonsense realization that the disunion of a major stock contributor to the market would be followed by the augmentation of an already receding economy. The life's work of Bill Gates had escaped demolition, yet the force, fervor, fear, and hatred with which its opponents had conducted their campaign demonstrated the potency of regulators in the modern economic arena.

A key accusation hurled against Microsoft was of the illegitimacy of its business dealings. Microsoft had informed the manufacturers of personal computers that, should they wish to employ its programs on their machinery, they must install none of the competing brands. Such firms possessed the opportunity to refuse the offer and sever commercial ties with Mr. Gates's company. However, they resolved, under no pressures but those of a rational market system, that the demand of the public is centered around Microsoft products and that they would thus gain money by accepting the proposal. Of course, this reduced the profit of miscellaneous enterprises manufacturing computer software, for there was fewer demand for it. From the will of the consumers as well as the consensual bargain between the producers, they were unable to sustain their sales. Because Microsoft's software was favored to an immensely greater extent, a trial was initiated.

Another charge against the firm was its automatic inclusion of a web browser with its Windows operating systems. This convenience was advantageous to consumers, but it evoked fury from less competent companies who would rather drain the time and opportunities of customers by forcing them to select a browser independently, so that they would perhaps possess the likelihood of purchasing competing products. Yet if a man wishes to be spared the hassle and expense of purchasing a given commodity and is content with the offer before him, is this reason to sue the company that rendered the offer existent? For the envious firms of the competition, it was. And they possessed statist legislation to assist them.

"The Microsoft trial is an egregious example of the immorality of antitrust laws. ‘The case exemplifies all that is immoral about antitrust, which punishes the productive and able because they are productive and able. Microsoft is a giant in the computer market because it has created products of value to its customers, not because it has forced junk onto unwilling consumers,' said Michael S. Berliner, ARI's executive director. The Microsoft antitrust trial has been fueled by the envy of its competitors, among them Netscape, which feared that it would lose its market because Microsoft was delivering a web browser with its Windows software packages. Instead of creating a better product, Netscape simply decided to keep Microsoft, its more popular rival, from competing with it by pressuring the Department of Justice to bring the suit. Explaining the consequences of antitrust laws to successful businesses, Ayn Rand wrote: 'The threat of sudden destruction, of unpredictable retaliation for unnamed offenses leaves men no other policy save one: to please the authorities without standards or principles. Anyone possessing such a stranglehold on businessmen possesses a stranglehold on the wealth and material resources of the country, which means: a stranglehold on the country.'" (Ayn Rand Institute Press Release, October 26, 1998)

The purpose of antitrust laws is precisely antithetical to that of a laissez-faire economy. In a capitalist system, an efficient and inexpensive product by one company will result in a product of superior performance and lower cost by a rival, should the latter wish to remain in business. The constant amelioration of goods causes the indolent to confront a choice; to mend their practices or to wither away. The most competent, innovative, and consumer-friendly enterprises fare best and continue to expand. Commodities are affordable, in high demand, and of superb quality. Antitrust laws, on the other hand, favor the slothful. A firm which cannot furnish a preferred product or service is permitted to limit the capacities of one which can for the sake of "fair play", i.e. the same wicked morality of an "even playing field" which drives forced volunteerism initiatives. This, of course, causes the market to stagnate or decline, along with the living conditions of the general population. Such regulations design the ideal background for the emergence and "stable" reign of a collectivist oligarchy which seeks precisely the aforementioned effects. Savage and irrational emotions such as envy result in a primitive tribal state to which the remaining mindless parasites unworthy of the name "businessmen" must defer in order to maintain their idleness.

          Antitrust laws in their intention are devastating to the perpetuation of material prosperity in the United States. They had been upheld by the mediocrities of the market, but also by the academic and political left, which at the core of its filosofy pleads for the restriction of free economy. As a disguise, the statists employ terms inapplicable to matters such as the Microsoft case. They accuse corporations of "monopoly," "ruthlessness," "anti-competitiveness." Anyone who ponders the matter logically would however realize that the public still possesses the opportunity to purchase the software and services of Microsoft's rivals, that Microsoft is undertaking the most humane and moral of ventures by acting for the benefit of its members while depriving none of their rights and granting customers preferred commodities, that Microsoft epitomizes competition by crafting outstanding computer systems and therefore encouraging other enterprises in the business to surpass them and act for their own benefit.

Though a choice strategy, superficial Newspeak is not the driving force behind the left's campaign. What is? Dr. Edwin A. Locke reveals that the genuine motivation is evil at its roots.

"There is only one fundamental reason why great businessmen or great companies are hated, and it has nothing to do with so-called monopolies. They are hated... because they are good, that is, smarter, more visionary, more creative, more tenacious, more action-focused, more ambitious, and more successful than everyone else. Haters of the good do not want the less able to be raised up to the level of the great producers (which is impossible); they want the great producers to be brought down. They want to use government coercion to cripple the greatest minds so that lesser minds will not feel inferior. Government coercion against the productive is a clear violation of their moral right to trade freely with other men. Furthermore, depriving great minds, such as that of Bill Gates, of their right to economic freedom also deprives the rest of us of what they could produce. The freer such people are to function, the richer we all will be." (Edwin A. Locke. "Hatred of the Good: Envy of Great Entrepreneurs Drives Microsoft Attacks."

 And it is precisely the overall increase of wealth, the glory of intellectual competence, the freedom to improve one's life, that mediocrity in pursuit of power seeks to undermine. The less innovative men, like the less efficient companies, will struggle to destroy the good, instead of rising to their level, due to such creatures’ mentalities of sloth, fear, hatred, envy, and ignorance. They (being tacit or deliberate agents of the modern Party oligarchy) are unwilling to comprehend reason and act on its principles; their schemes are irrational and harmful to all. It is fitting that such blatant negligence of truth should be founded upon nihilism, the hatred of the good for being the good, all the more evil because it lacks justification. The verdict on Microsoft may have been rescinded, but the antitrust laws remain, upheld by the very academic cliques which epitomize the slavery of weaker men to the suicidal designs of tribalism.

The Minimum Wage and the Institutionalized Proletariat

Yet companies face a menace from another direction which deprives them of their funds and rights, the ever increasing minimum wage. It is of no mind-boggling challenge to resolve that the artificial determination of salaries results in widespread unemployment; a man will not remain hired by a company in a situation where the quality of his labor does not warrant his cost to the employer. A minimum wage is an effective prohibition of employment for any person who possesses insufficient capacity to be worth the current hourly rate of $5.15. It is detrimental to businesses, who will lose a substantial portion of the pool of potential labor as well as current employees. Policy analyst James Bovard describes the toll each subsequent increase of the minimum wage had taken upon the laborers of the United States.

"Congress raised the minimum wage in nominal terms by 46 percent between 1977 and 1981; a federal commission estimated that the minimum wage hikes resulted in the loss of 644,000 jobs, including jobs that were not created. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that minimum wage hikes in 1980 and 1981 reduced the employment of minimum wage workers by 3 to 4 percent. A 1983 General Accounting Office report entitled 'Minimum Wage Policy Questions Persist' found 'virtually total agreement that employment is lower than it would have been if no minimum wage existed... Teenage workers have greater job losses, relative to their share of the population or the employed work force, than adults. Congress... voted to raise the minimum wage in 1989-- from $3.35 to $4.25 an hour. A 1991 National Restaurant Association survey found that, as a result, 44 percent of restaurants were forced to reduce the number of employee hours worked, and 42 percent reduced the number of people employed. Professor Welch estimated that the 1989 increase in minimum wages reduced teenage employment by roughly 240,000 jobs." (James Bovard,  Associate Policy Analyst with the Cato Institute. Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, 1994. "How Fair are the Fair Labor Standards?")

These statistics are mere reinforcement for common sense. Yet the sheer horror of the initiatives lies in that they create a permanent impoverished underclass. For the under-qualified, entry-level positions of low salary are required to obtain experience in the workplace and thus the enhancement of their capacities. An increase in their wages will be voluntarily agreed to by an employer who would value them for their services to his enterprise. In order to retain them on his payroll, he would be required to furnish them with such funds as they deem acceptable in exchange for their efforts. In a free-market system devoid of government interference in salary contracts, one who believes himself not to be earning a sufficient amount will abandon the present place of his employment and seek another. It is then common sense to assume that the persons who are yet inadequately skilled to earn the minimum wage would have been eager to attain a lesser amount had bureaucratic intervention not barred them from such an option. Unable to improve their value through practical experience and unwelcome in the workplace as they are (although many companies, in a genuinely capitalist setting, would have been pleased to hire them in performing basic tasks compatible with their expertise), they are left to languish in poverty, maintained to a level of mere subsistence by government welfare programs, becoming utterly dependent upon the state.

Renowned Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises describes this fenomenon as institutional unemployment, a chronic condition unique to settings in which coercive regulation of the economy is implemented. The expanding underclass has been the major beneficiary of distribution initiatives and the motive behind their rising expense, behind what is in essence the broadening of government influence upon private lives. Let readers recall the proles in Orwell’s dystopia, who are compared to cattle subsisting off of government handouts in basic goods as well as “popular culture,” the State stuffing them with food from one hand and inculcating them with decadence from the other. The proles, over generations, have become content with their undignified animal-like life cycles of birth in poverty, consumption of whatever is available, breeding by thoughtless impulse, and death at sixty. Winston Smith finds these shells of men to be so inextricably attached to the oligarchy that any hope for their defiance is illusory. Are the parallels to the current beneficiaries of America’s welfare system not lucid?

In addition, the expenditures of businesses had become augmented by their inability to obtain a work force at its rightful market value. In order to function profitably, it is of frequent necessity for an employer to reduce output and/or the improvement of his production capacities, both qualities requiring the support of a sound financial base. The overall economy becomes threatened by decline, for any nationwide wage hike affects numerous enterprises, small and large. Consumers do not receive their products, producers are unable to develop and innovate, workers are barred from labor, under circumstances in which a better alternative is available, to be reached through the absence of minimum wage regulations and the permission by the government of a capitalist economy intervening in which is beyond the state's right in the first place!

          However, instead of recognizing the elementary and rational option gleaming before them, the bureaucrats continue to devastate the country with additions to the minimum wage. The Democratic Party, reinforced by labor union propaganda, is at present attempting to elevate this dreadful sum to $6.75 per hour. Its demagogues demonstrate vehement and at times fysical opposition to anyone who dares oppose their dogma. Ludwig von Mises, in 1949 (which was, incidentally, the year of 1984's publication), had, too, spotted alarming tendencies of denunciation and censorship applied to dissenters.

"The very essence of the interventionist politicians' wisdom is to raise the prices of labor either by government decree or by violent action or the threat of such action on the part of labor unions. To raise wage rates above the height at which the unhampered market would determine them is considered a postulate of the eternal laws of morality as well as indispensable from the economic point of view. Whoever dares to challenge this ethical and economic dogma is scorned both as depraved and ignorant. Many of our contemporaries look upon people who are foolhardy enough 'to cross a picket line' as primitive tribesmen looked upon those who violated the precepts of taboo conceptions. Millions are jubilant if such scabs receive their well-deserved punishment from the hands of the strikers while the police, the public attorneys, and the penal courts preserve a lofty neutrality or openly side with the strikers." (Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 1949. "XXX. Interference with the Structure of Prices.")

An irrational aversion to basic economic science drives the socialist left and the labor unions, themselves collective organizations which claim to uphold the rights of the worker but in reality diminish them. This is due to the inherent flaw of "collective bargaining", the robbing of individual capacity to negotiate contracts and working conditions and its surrender to a behemoth of an organization with a rigid agenda not pliable to the will of a single rank-and-file member. The only measures successfully implemented through the advocacy of such amorfous "wholes" are simplistic and obedient to the tribal principle of "one size fits all". Considerations of particular persons and their rational interests are impossible in a union and not desired by its leadership. Should an individual find his wage or his employer's overall wage policy adequate, he is nevertheless pressured to strike and crush violently any resistance to a dogma antithetical to logic.

Labor Unions and Collectivism

The fanaticism with which minimum wage had been upheld by such groups is an alarming revelation of its fundamental evil.

"In all countries the labor unions have actually acquired the privilege of violent action. The governments have abandoned in their favor the essential attribute of government, the exclusive power and right to resort to violent coercion and compulsion. Of course, the laws which make it a criminal offense for any citizen to resort-- except in the case of self-defense-- to violent action have not been formally repealed or amended. However, actually labor union violence is tolerated within broad limits. The labor unions are practically free to prevent by force anybody defying their orders concerning wage rates and other labor conditions. They are free to inflict with impunity bodily evils upon strikebreakers and upon entrepreneurs... who employ strikebreakers. They are free to destroy property of such employers and even to injure customers patronizing their shops. The authorities, with the approval of public opinion, condone such acts. The police do not stop such offenders, the state attorneys do not arraign them, and no opportunity is offered to the penal courts to pass judgment on their actions. In excessive cases, if the deeds of violence go too far, some lame and timid attempts at repression and prevention are ventured. But as a rule they fail. Their failure is sometimes due to bureaucratic inefficiency or to the insufficiency of the means at the disposal of the authorities, but more often to the unwillingness of the whole government apparatus to interfere successfully." (Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 1949. "XXX. Interference with the Structure of Prices.")

Not merely do the bureaucrats frequently assist the unions in legalizing their ludicrous demands, but they remain deliberately passive toward blatant violations of human rights. A man who earns a prosperous existence and deems his present contract to be satisfying is assailed, with his life under fire, for refusing to relinquish his well-being and for rejecting, in essence, the infliction of a similar act upon other human beings. Unions are not content with mere discussion and debate on such a topic, for they are well aware of the fact that all reason stands opposed to them. Their outright neglect of the law stems from the irrationality of their doctrine, and it is evident that the government's condonement of them stems from the irrationality of key government officials.

          If one considers the effects of the minimum wage and the nature of its support, flowing from the most authoritarian and socialist cliques of the country, one will realize that it is a tool of the Witch Doctors designed to achieve the very consequences of economic deterioration, unemployment, expansion of government intrusion into private life, and general decline of living conditions. Suffering is a desired condition for the persons practicing obsequious deference to the epitome of mindlessness, the Party. The moral cloaking the would-be oligarchs provide for the dogma is capable of being exposed by persons of insight, such as Ludwig von Mises.

"The problems of labor unionism have been obfuscated and utterly confused by pseudo-humanitarian blather. The advocates of minimum wage rates, whether decreed and enforced by government or by violent action, contend that they are fighting for the improvement of conditions for the working masses. They do not permit anyone to question their dogma that minimum wage rates are the only appropriate means of raising wage rates permanently and for all those eager to earn wages. They pride themselves on being the only true friends of 'labor', of the 'common man', of 'progress', and of the eternal principles of 'social justice'." (Ludwig von Mises, Doctor of Economics from the University of Vienna, globally renowned economic theorist. Human Action, 1949. "XXX. Interference with the Structure of Prices.")

Yet labor is degraded by the unions' crusade, the common man is left jobless, progress is halted, and social justice becomes a dim memory from the age of near-laissez-faire. The practical results of the minimum wage utterly refute the deceptive imagery associated with it by the indoctrinators. The mask, however, is strengthened by its appeal to the impulses of the ignorami, namely to sloth. The man who is the greatest beneficiary of minimum wage initiatives is one who remains employed at a higher rate than his capacities would normally have permitted him to receive. In a majority of cases, due to a lack of material stimulus for him to improve in his skills, he will remain incompetent and perfectly content, possessing the knowledge that his wallet will not become thinned as a result. A large quantity of such depraved persons occupying posts essential to the economy would result in the overall plummeting of quality in goods and services and a deterioration of living standards, another pathway to the world which the nihilistic evil of the Party seeks to impose.

From Captains of Industry to Blackguards

          The educational institutions in America, as in Oceania, are integral to maintaining the public toleration required for atrocities committed by legislators and unions alike to remain unpunished. This is a suitable location for the Dewey system to employ its catch frases and "mutate" the past into a scenario in which government regulations are perceived to have been the sole cure to the "desolate conditions of the Victorian Age". It is not surprising that great entrepreneurs such as John D. Rockefeller, James J. Hill, J. P. Morgan, George Pullman, and Henry Ford are labeled as "robber barons", "thieves", and "capitalist pigs". Little is taught in regard to the immense boost in transportation and passenger convenience emerging from the concept of mass production and the release of the Model T, or the fuel supplied by Standard Oil to consumers, whose patronization rendered the venture possible on a widespread scale. Rockefeller is accused of "mercilessly acquiring possessions and ruthlessly buying out competitors" when in reality he had crafted consensual agreements with less successful oilmen who comprehended that the sale of their enterprises would bring them more substantial amounts of profit than competition against Rockefeller would have. None of the aforementioned industrialists had violated any principles of the free market; they did not employ violence, they did not intrude upon other men's rights. They had crafted their empires through trade and customer appeal, yet their greatness is insufficient cover against the slandering remarks of ex-hippies who bear proudly the badge of mediocrity. It is elementary to disprove the insults hurled at the great producers, but such actions will only earn one immense hatred from the entrenched paradigm. One will be condemned as being "immoral" because he defends a man's right to material profit, "uncaring" because he condones “the colossal prosperity of some while many others languish in destitute circumstances", "dry" because he attempts to furnish rational and concrete proof for his claims, "old-fashioned" because he advocates the concept of individualistic moral absolutism.  The indoctrinators do not seek to evaluate objectively, nor to attain greater understanding, nor to grant students valuable tools of independent thought. Their goal is to firmly imprint an agenda which will subsequently fuel self-destructive scheme in the witchlings themselves. They possess a "moral" framework with which to support their rants, the nihilistic mutant of altruism. Ms. Rand writes of this in The Fountainhead:

"Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution- or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement."

The "heroes" lauded by the statist/altruist paradigm are precisely those who surrender their wealth for a purpose of no benefit to them. The ones acclaimed are not even the wealthy entrepreneurs who contributed regularly to the "less fortunate" without undermining the range of financial opportunities available to them, but those who had relinquished funds for the benefit of another while harming themselves, i.e. acting in accordance with the mentality of sacrifice. According to the sacrificial framework, Ford and Rockefeller were evil because they were successful and intellectually competent as a prerequisite to their success. Anyone who defends them is branded a "selfish bastard" for attempting to assert the egoistic values of one's own life and pursuit of happiness.

          As in 1984, the educational system preaches of the despicable living conditions encountered by the masses during the Industrial Revolution and the growth of entrepreneurship. Textbooks are devoted to the desolation of the urban slums and the arduous factory labor performed by their residents. They neglect to state that institutional poverty had not been in existence until the advent of the regulators, that a majority of these occupants (over 35% of the inhabitants of New York City in 1910, for example) had been immigrants from other lands, who had arrived penniless in the United States and for whom the slums were a transition stage toward middle-classmanship, in any case an improvement over their previous status of no means of support whatsoever. They omit the fact that life expectancy had surged by twenty years during the nineteenth century, and another twenty-five in the early years of the twentieth, that commodities had become available to the “common man” previously accessible (due to the immense difficulty of manufacturing in an age of unit production by hand) only to the privileged few. The Deweyites and their political comrades disregard the truth that, absent the efforts of the great capitalists, the United States would have remained blighted as are regions of Africa and South East Asia today. Men like Ford and Rockefeller had performed the public a greater service as a side effect than the hordes of establishment altruists could have directly, because self-interest is advantageous to all those seeking ascent, while sacrifice is detrimental to all things living.

          Consider, in contrast, that the United States life expectancy increased from 1950 to 2004 by a mere seven years, from 71 to 78, while Americans still fly on the same jumbo jets of thirty-five years ago, use the same obsolete, congested roads, and are unable to make a step of progress in space since the space shuttle debacle, all due to government regulation. Yet the oligarchy practices the ultimate evil by refusing to acknowledge the above conclusions of reason and common sense, for it is opposed to both. Its foolhardy war against the very essence of humanity has become the root of and its justification for the shackling of the economy.

Collectivist and altruist excuses of the need for "charity" and "class justice" are naught but calls for sloth and tribalism. When the bureaucrats play favorites with labor unions and "the interests of the proletariat," the effects are devastating to all. In the words of Ayn Rand, "It makes no difference whether government controls allegedly favor the interests of labor or business, of the poor or the rich, of a special class or a special race: the results are the same. The notion that a dictatorship can benefit any one social group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of the Marxist mythology of class warfare, refuted by half a century of factual evidence. All men are victims and losers under a dictatorship; nobody wins-- except the ruling clique." Nobody wins except the ruling clique driven by suicidal impulses and the desire to see men suffer.  Nothing wins except the grim boot that tramples on the face and the spirit of man in Oceania.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent filosofical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician and composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right and SoloHQ, writer for Objective Medicine, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator. He can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

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