Manufacturing Equality

FOR YEARS, Wal Mart was the biggest company in the world, remember? Or maybe it was merely the biggest retailer. Either way, it was, and remains, big. Has Amazon Dot Com passed it yet? In terms of market value, Facebook has indeed surpassed Wal mart. The purpose of a business is to generate a profit for its owners, provide fair pay for its workers, and so supply reasonably priced high quality goods and services to the community, and society, or should be. Right? Which one does all that better? Wal mart, or Facebook? Could they both do a better job than they have done and are now doing, and if so , how? Can we the consuming public force them to improve? Though extremely valuable market wise, in fact Facebook is has twice the market value of Wal Mart, the experts and the numbers tell us, Facebook has no tangible assets, other than a page on a computer screen, a lot of electronic money, and a huge quantity of personal information about its two billion members, which it uses to make a profit by selling it to advertisers, as everyone knows. Facebook delivers services, not goods. Wal Mart, which its stores crammed with tangible material wealth at low prices, provides employment for about a million people: Facebook for only about twenty five thousand. The Facebook folks are far better paid. The intellectual father of modern capitalism, everyone agrees, is Adam Smith, whose 1776 book "The Wealth of Nations" has long been considered a sort of Bible of free market capitalism. Fair enough. We often hear that smith explained why free market capitalism works best as an economic system, why supply and demand work for everyone, but we do not often hear that he also said that properly functioning free markets should produce equality of outcomes, as well as equality of opportunity. Or that government action on behalf of the wealthy is always to be avoided, or that government action on behalf of the poor is always good. Wal Mart and Facebook both, demonstrably, make a relatively few people very wealthy, but do not make many workers nearly as prosperous. Outcomes are not equal. Adam Smith never envisioned capitalism as a system which divides society into the few rich and the many poor. But that is exactly what we have done with capitalism. And to the extant that our largest corporations contribute to that division, they should be forced by the public to do otherwise, and that can be done best in the free market place, where we all consume, or don't consume, goods and services.