Thinking again about the ways that corporations screw everyone over, and why it happens, and why it’s so damn hard to fix.

Why does it seem like everything you can buy gets both worse and more expensive over time? And also has worse customer service, because all the employees involved in making and selling it are overworked and understaffed and generally miserable?

Because lots of things have reached the maximum number of people they can be sold to. So the only way to increase profit is to raise prices and cut corners. (And laws restricting what corporations can do to make money have been relaxed, so they’re going wild.)

And why do they need to increase profit, instead of just keep making the same amount of profit every year? Because shareholders who own part of the company expect it to keep increasing in value.

And why is that? Because that’s the whole point of investing. If you own stocks or shares and they don’t increase in value, you might as well just sell them and hoard cash or gold or something instead.

And you can say that a good business should just never have shareholders, never sell out like that, should just keep being good and not be evil.

But… unfortunately when they get big enough, they always do go evil.

And it’s not just the corrupting influence of power, the gradual creep of “what good things could I do with this increase in money? Can I convince myself it’s worth the bad things I would do to get the money? Okay now how about this increase…”

It’s not just the carrot of money temptation. There’s sticks as well as carrots, they’re just more hidden.

Story from my pharmacy technician job. One pharmacist used to own his own local independent pharmacy. Determined to keep it independent, focus only on the local community, never sell out.

One of the big chain pharmacies wanted to expand into his area. Asked to buy his business. He refused.

They told him: if you don’t sell, we will buy other nearby buildings and set up a branch on every corner all around you, undercutting you on every price. You will go out of business, and then we’ll get your pharmacy anyway, and you’ll get nothing.

I don’t know if they’d have done it for real. It would have been horribly unethical.

(Not just against the poor local pharmacy owner, but also everyone they’d have hired to work in branches that I’d assume were only ever meant to be temporary, since they’d be built only to crowd out the independent pharmacy– which I doubt they’d have told the new hires, who’d be thinking they were getting stable jobs. Or the customers, who’d think they were getting a stable place to have their prescriptions filled.)

But, whether or not they’d have followed through on the threat… they did feel comfortable using that threat to intimidate an independent pharmacist into selling his business, making him think he had no choice.

And that’s just what they do semi-openly. Who knows what else they do under the table– what else they threaten– whenever they think they can get away with it.

How many other small, apparently ethical businesses face a hidden “choice” like that, right before they do something that we see on the outside as a selling-out, a turn towards evil and corruption?

Is it even possible to run a business and not eventually fall to this?

Is there anything that can be done to stop the trend? Anything the government can do? Or do all government officials also get faced with similar corrupting not-really-choices, at some point in their career?

Will every human society eventually, inevitably, develop corporations that take all they can get, and a government that eventually sells out to them? Even if it all burned down and started over again? Will it just keep coming back?

I don’t know.

Sigh.