Dear Friends,
It shocks me how stupid the executives at our corporations are. Were I to list examples, I would fill this page ending in, etc… It’s like the executives are trying to harm their companies and shareholder interests. They don’t even want their businesses to survive. Some might chalk it up to ineptitude. Though ineptitude cuts both ways. Sometimes a random dart hits the target. Not with this bunch. The only reasonable explanations are Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity or outright malevolent intent. We can’t totally rule out malevolence since our political leaders seem to be leading by example in that realm. Yet in the corporate sense I think its still a stretch. So we’re left with stupidity. Since the road to executive status follows that status quo, group think is inevitable.
Alienating customers is about as stupid as it gets. I suspect though that the executives at Budweiser, Harley Davidson and John Deere, thought their appeal to those with severe mental illnesses, would draw in a ton of new business. In the echo chamber they live in, the notion that there’s a large number of people confused about their sex, with tons of money to buy tractors, motorcycles and beer, made perfect sense. They couldn’t fathom that leather clad men with wallets connected to chains, who drink beer and ride Harley Davidson motorcycles, wouldn’t want to be associated with the gay lifestyle and effeminate men? They thought largely conservative Christian framers would appreciate being lectured to? I suspect the echo chamber’s resonant frequency comes from the likes of Black Rock and Vanguard.
In nature there’s perfect competition for resources. Only in the state of free enterprise is there such a thing as surplus. Nevertheless, having learned to live in a state of nature, we still seek the easiest path. So executives in business take easy profit rather than become prosperous. Which means, giving up trade secrets to future competitors, to get your products made a bit cheaper. Like when Kentucky Fried Chicken gave its secret recipe to the CCP. In those cases the executives gave away the company’s core asset for temporary profit. Then demand politicians to protect them from the competition they created. Even as they exploit regulation to hamstring local small businesses to protect their markets. In doing so creating an economy that extracts from producers to give to non producers.
Contrary to the accepted notion of an extractive economy, I think the term better refers to an economy with a large parasite faction, that produces nothing, but extracts wealth from those that do. As opposed to a productive economy where most people produce wealth rather than extract it. It’s where firms stop innovating and producing new products, instead use lobbying to extract profit. Taking the easy path is human nature but it creates an extractive economy. Executives abandon innovation for extraction, transforming from being productive engines of growth, to extractive leeches. They lobby for profit instead of innovating to compete. The acme of this was the Covid shot. Despite providing negative benefits it was widely used because of government coercion. Making it a purely extractive exercise.
From alienating customers to creating an extractive economy our corporate executives epitomize stupidity. Then export their stupidity to the political realm with copious amounts of graft. The echo chamber then includes all the elites, political, cultural and corporate. Taking the easy path they build an extractive economy from the productive one they were born into. Despite having every opportunity to see and avoid their own foolishness. Even giving up permanent trade secrets for a temporary cut in production costs. Our corporate executives are just the kind of people, who would ride a horse to death, to get to a bar before happy hour ends. They wouldn’t do it out of meanness but out of pure unadulterated stupidity. In our case the figurative horse is both their firm and our economy.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
