At left, a woman who attended a recent Occupy Las Cruces protest, and at right, a man who attended a 2009 Tea Party rally in Las Cruces. (Photos by Heath Haussamen)
If I were to pick the ringleaders out of the local Occupy and Tea Party groups and buy them all lunch, they’d probably find that they have more in common than they know
Looking at photographs of a recent Occupy protest at NMSU, I saw two groups of protesters (one larger than the other) squabbling over current issues. Politics can be a pretty divisive issue, but if I were to pick the ringleaders out of each group and buy them all lunch, they’d probably find that they have more in common than they know.
This reminds me of a scene in The Wizard of Oz. The army of the wicked witch corners Dorothy and her friends (and her little dog, too), but neither Dorothy’s group nor the soldiers know that they have a common enemy until the witch melts from water exposure.
Paying attention to the man behind the curtain
It is nearly impossible for two people or two groups to come to any agreement if they aren’t speaking the same language. You have the OWS movement criticizing corporations, and the Tea Party defending them. Before moving on, we need to have a solid definition for the word.
A corporation is a person-like legal entity that people can use as an intermediary when interacting with others for the purpose of organizing commonly owned property and limiting liability for actions taken by the company.
Going back to The Wizard of Oz, a corporation is like the curtain the wizard uses to hide himself from view while manipulating the controls for the big, scary light show.
Good witches and bad witches
Corporations aren’t just for Wall Street. This very website is run by a small corporate entity (Haussamen Publications, Inc.) and my firearms safety training business is a corporate-like entity (a limited liability company, or LLC). There are many mom-and-pop places that have chosen to take on a corporate structure of some sort to further their business goals.
A corporation is much like explosives, automobiles and firearms. In the hands of decent people, explosives can help build roads, cars can take people places, and firearms can help defend life while traveling. I don’t think I need to explain the bad things that can happen when any of the above items are in the wrong hands. We can’t blame the evil acts of evil people on the tools they use. They alone are responsible for their actions.
What people on the political right need to understand is that when the Occupy movement criticizes corporations, they aren’t criticizing all corporations – they are just criticizing the bad ones. If we were to peel back the curtain, we could all see that the criticism isn’t aimed at the light show, it’s aimed at the people who negligently or maliciously use corporate entities to do evil things to other people.
How good witches become bad witches
I used to run the marketing department of a mid-sized corporation. During the economic boom times, the outfit was a successful high-end jewelry and watch store. When bad times came, they turned to buying valuables and selling them either to out-of-towners or for metal value.
When it came to marketing, the big trick was to keep the operation looking like a fine jewelry store when in actual operation it was a pawnshop. In one year alone, the sales department lost $1.1 million, but keeping up appearances drew people in, especially in the “upscale” suburb where the store was located. People didn’t want to feel like they were “low-class pawnshop hockers.”
As times got harder, smaller companies of all kinds got into buying valuables. Payday loan places, convenience stores and even mobile food vendors had “WE BUY GOLD” signs up. With the low overhead, they were able to pay enough more for valuables that even the snootiest of customers started going elsewhere.
Secondhand dealers are required to report purchases to the local police and keep items for 30 days in case the item is stolen. My boss started lobbying the local governments to charge dealers for the reporting forms. In essence, this amounted to a $3-$5 tax on every item bought. He knew he could afford the extra overhead but many of his small competitors would have to either pay less or go out of business.
Ironically, the owner would spend a significant portion of his day on oddball websites researching the ills of the Obama administration, and would then spend hours telling the employees and some of the customers all about the horrors of regulation and taxation, but in his next breath was dreaming up more ways to use local and state governments to shut down the competition.
How this works on Wall Street
The big players in any industry often become inefficient. Overhead grows, and as more people are involved in decision-making, they become slow. Small businesses are eventually able to beat the big player in terms of both price and service. When this happens, they use government to shut the small competition down by erecting barriers to market entry. This forces new players to either quit or become as inefficient as the big player.
Governments are overrun with lawyers. To keep their fellow lawyers employed, the legislative lawyers churn out legislation that’s thousands of pages long, and other lawyers in the executive branch churn out regulations that are many times longer. The lawyers in the courts are then tasked with making sense of it all.
Mega-corporations have armies of lawyers and accountants to navigate the complex legal landscape, so they don’t care much when increasing layers of complexity are added each year. When the little guy wants to compete, he alone must navigate the minefield with minimal resources, and if he gets sued or prosecuted, he often doesn’t have the resources to prevail in court.
Working on common goals instead of picking sides
When regulations serve to keep big, inefficient business entities afloat instead of actually protecting consumers and the environment, nobody but the big businesses and the corrupt politicians benefit. People are forced to take a job working for the corporations, getting paid barely enough to survive because there are no alternatives.
In an environment friendly to small business, many more would be self employed or work for a small business and get to keep much more of the fruits of their labor. Instead of profits going to fatten the already fat wallets on Wall Street and in Washington, American families could keep that money at home where it is needed.
Increased levels of income equality can be achieved without creating more government regulations and increasing taxes on the rich. Working toward this goal, the OWS and Tea Party movements can find acres of common ground.
Dusty Sensiba is a firearms instructor in Las Cruces and El Paso. He has a bachelor’s of individualized studies from NMSU with coursework in history, journalism, computer technology and economics, and he enjoys researching politics and public safety issues in his spare time.