Gracious.
I thought capitalism was having a bad PR DECADE. Then comes this Forbes article linking business practices employed in capitalism with slavery tactics.
In her article “The Messy Link Between Slave Owners And Modern Management”, Katie Johnson discusses with Harvard Business School Researcher Caitlin Rosenthal research Rosenthal conducted with revealed the embarrassing connection. It seems many of the corporate practices seen today – rewards and punishments, minimum worker output levels and using meticulous data to “determine how far they could push their workers to get the most profit.”
A recurring theme I’ve run into lately while developing Copiosis is the reality that history is rarely if ever faithful to what really happened. In her research Rosenthal points out that several business practices originally claimed to have come from the Railroad days, actually stem from slave plantations in the south.
Rosenthal says the rise of the railroad is often credited with creating new units of production, including the cost per ton mile, but slavery’s comparable “bales per prime hand” unit was developed earlier in the nineteenth century. Comparing the number of cotton bales that different types of workers produced to similar workers on other farms, planters calculated the worth of each slave. A healthy 30-year-old male, for instance, would be considered one worker, known as a hand, whereas a child may be recorded as half a hand, and an older slave might be three-quarters of a hand. Figuring out the total number of “hands” on a farm allowed owners and overseers to compare their results.
Holy molaka! Interestingly Rosenthal says she didn’t set out to purposely uncover the nasty origins of capitalist practices, she was really only looking for a history of such practices. Apparently, she is surprised as anyone about where these practices originated, and even how controversial her research may eventually become.
~~~
The trouble with capitalism isn’t its roots. The trouble with capitalism today is that it’s failing under the weight of the waste it creates, yet fails to mitigate. Pollution, crime, unemployment, cyclical economic downturns and downright disasters are so relatively common we fail to bat an eye anymore when they happen. Combine this with the corruptive influence capitalism has on representative politics and you have exactly what you see today: ineffective political leaders more focused on winning votes, fundraising and keeping their jobs than getting sh*t done, and markets that create nearly as many problems as they create products and services of value.
That’s why we here at Copiosis are pushing for the economic upgrade known as Copiosis Economics. Our upgraded form of capitalism virtually eliminates then makes impossible all these problems and more. Then it makes every American completely free in the literal sense of that word. Americans don’t know freedom today. With Copiosis they will.
We acknowledge there’s not much detail on our site about the details of Copiosis. That will be covered in our first book, due out later this fall. Stay tuned, you’ll be glad you did.
In the meantime, as we watch capitalism deal with the worst PR moments in decades, our government paralyzed and our nation on the brink of another financial collapse, think about why it is that we put up with all this….