Government regulations are stifling our company! No child workers, safety rules, weekends and holidays off, mandatory breaks for food and toilets, sanitation, no flogging, investigations for injuries and deaths, I’m telling you there must be thousands of pages of regulations, that nobody can read, preventing us from making as much profit as we can as quickly as possible without regard to anything else. That’s why we exist, to enrich our owner.
These Republican candidates have it right. The only thing holding back America is government regulation. Take our small toy retailer for example. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has taken many popular toys off the shelf, for asbestos, arsenic, uranium and other toxic and radioactive ingredients, which otherwise could have been sold to make a few quick bucks for our owner.
Corporations like ours don’t have hearts or care about people in any way. We exist solely to maximize wealth for our owner. Sure we lie to our employees about that, but ultimately they have to follow orders or lose their jobs. If we destroy the environment, kill children (customers or labor), or cause any other problems or pain, we don't care. As long as we can get away with it for at least a little while, then it is our obligation to do it as quickly and as massively as possible to maximize our short run profit. If some do-gooder company isn’t as heartless as they should be, then we’ll drive them into the ground or buy them out. In the long run, the most purely avaricious company will own everything, that's our reason to exist.
We usually have no trouble staying ahead of laws, since we have the resources to act as soon as any opportunity presents itself, we advertise constantly, we’re immortal, and we can hire lawyers, lobbyists or even bribe politicians. You lack information, time, money and expertise to fight us, and you're easily manipulated. We protect our secrets, but you tell us everything about yourself just to sign up on our website. Not only do you tell us the name of you childhood sweetheart, if we ask, but we also make you give up your right to sue us.
If there are long term consequences to our business decisions, that doesn't matter, because we can hide what we did, fight in court, apologize, rebrand, discontinue, spin off, and write off any losses. Our executives certainly don’t care, since they're almost never punished. We pay them to keep quiet and they can simply change firms or retire if needed. Think of all the ill gotten gains from capitalism in history, from slavery, war profiteering, tobacco, gambling, guns, pornography, polluters, fraud, money laundering, to tax evasion and ask yourself what percentage was ever clawed back and given to the victims? Jail is for common criminals. The rich have always been well rewarded for their crimes.
You think you can stop us somehow? You haven’t had an even slightly effective Progressive government since Roosevelt. We control the courts, Congress, and most of your local governments. Our Republican minions are dismantling the last of your old democracy, openly calling for your government to shut down, and for all your public goods to be privatized. We own almost all the assets, we write your laws, we send you to die for oil, we imprison many of you for free labor and profit, and we even program your voting machines. You barely pay attention, let alone object.
Just give up, let us decide how little we can pay you (if at all), and be grateful we can't replace all of you with machines yet. Let the Republicans cut taxes on the rich and cut services for the rest. Sounds fair to us! Stop these futile efforts to hold us accountable, limit our power or influence, and just let us take all the money as quickly as we can. We’ll tell you what to do, what you can think, what you like, and we’ll give you shiny new things, fattening junk food, drugs and vacuous entertainment. If we can make just one more cent by killing you all and everything else on earth, then we will, because that’s all we are, without regulations.