Oooh, yes, this’ll work now, won’t it?
He said a Labour government would establish a series of powerful commissions to oversee corporate behaviour. An overarching business commission would contain within it three separate watchdogs – a companies commission, a finance commission, and an enforcement commission.
Multiple interacting bureaucracies to tell everyone what to do. That’s just never been tried and will obviously work, no?
No, really. Economic decisions being taken by political timeservers just will work so well.
Isn’t that what killed off Sinclair Radionics in the 1970s, leaving Clive Sinclair to dump the whole lot on the government’s desk and go off and found Sinclair Research.
Isn’t State direction of private business to serve the interests of the State a key tenet of Fascism?
Two problems here: That corporate decisions will suddenly be made by persons who never pay any price for being wrong; and that everyone in the corporation now has three masters to serve (and why, ultimately, only three?).
It’s high time someone proposes the reverse of this nonsense. Get up three independent corporate groups to oversee the operations of the government. That’s where the real damage to ordinary people is taking place.
Here is a simpler idea — require every director of a company to invest 20% of his personal net worth in stock of the company, and put that stock into a trust which can not be liquidated until at least 3 years after he leaves the Board. Directors will then have real skin in the game, and will do a much better job of running the company, taking care of its finances, and enforcing good behavior on the management. Oh! And ban companies from buying back their own stock while we are at it.
The town librarian insists to me that she pays property taxes! but it’s still true that self-dealing thus punishes her a little and rewards her a lot. An executive would still be able to pad his net worth far exceeding the resulting loss of value of company stock.
Separately, companies buy back their stock because they believe it’s undervalued, and that self-consumption is more lucrative than using the capital to do actual work. This is a symptom not a problem.