Chapter 1 — Big Business or Screw the Customer and Full Speed Ahead
Angus Black draws his sword out to rattle against business, especially big business, and their chummy relationship with government.
The opening paragraph could resonate with today’s atmosphere. “They set outrageously high prices on their products, bombard you with advertising so that you’ll buy something you don’t want and didn’t even need, and then make sure that what you’ve bought falls apart just when you get it home. They pay their workers the lowest wages and give them the crappiest working conditions possible.”
Angus goes on to say these businesses use their excess profits to get conservative flunkies elected to the White House and Congress. I propose it is not limited to conservative flunkies.
This theory assumes the consumer is a mindless fool that advertising persuades they can manipulate. Does this describe our merchandising world today? In some cases I think it does. How many places on the internet bombard the visitor with mindless advertising, tracking our every shopping cart even after we bought what we were searching for?
Moving on from there Angus next lays out the exploitation and monopoly permitted by those flunkies. I think we see that today just as he wrote about in 1970. Has the world changed? Only in how it is done now versus then. Today we use and abuse technology to advance those two. Some of the monopolies are created and allowed to exist by our government others just sneak into existence.
Is big bad just because it is big? Mergers approved by government seem to only benefit the merged entity but often fail to live up to the promises made and then broken with no consequences. Consumer protectionism from the government is a failure because the flunkies can manipulate the enforcement to their benefit. I believe big government has the same problems that the author lays out in the opening paragraph. We as citizens are bombarded with propaganda selling us some government program or promise we don’t want and don’t need and it fails not long after it is put into effect with unexpected consequences no one considered.
Chapter 1 closes with these words, “Our government’s inability to prevent Capitalists from doing what they damn well pleas extends to its impotence at getting any of their ill-earned billions.”