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Enron was a relatively new company. Yet because of an unrestrained global investment strategy, the company was able to raise billions of dollars in equity capital. This is good.
What is bad is that the company used that money to buy legislative influence from politicians sympathetic to their wants while silencing those unsympathetic.
Not so bad, however, if Enron’s aims were to have been beneficial to the public good. But uprooting normal market forces to gain an advantage for highly polluting energy companies around the world is decidedly NOT in the public good.
And how do we know that only market forces were uprooted? How many government related security forces are being commanded to maintain the ill-gotten political gain? How much are these security forces being used to influence the media and free market businesses in this country and around the world?
As marketers, we know how powerful media persuasion can be; especially if it’s coordinated throughout various news services. We also know that when people smell a rat they get scared. Fear devastates normal market activity. And our current recession is proof positive of that.
America’s founding fathers separated religion from government. At the time, organized religion represented the only real global threat to an individual citizen's rights or local business interests. Today, the threat of global religious prejudice still exists, but no more so than the selfish goals of national or global business conglomerates.
If America is going to maintain free market leadership in the world, we should abandon the strategy of imposing business or civil imperatives on other countries. Rather, let’s correct investment-induced cancers in our own country. If successful, we’ll easily convince others that individual opportunities for life, liberty and the pursuit of free market happiness really do exist in the world. —J.D. Kinney.
PS: Email me, jdk@devkinney.com, with some practical tips concerning ways to separate business and state in the USA— or tell me why you think big business should control government.
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