From Peter’s Desk: Creating Widespread Ownership

News of Capital One’s plan to acquire Discover Financial Services caught my attention last week. The $35 billion stock deal would catapult Capital One to the nation’s top credit card network. This week’s mega-merger news belongs to Kroger and Albertsons, the supermarket chains, who are being sued by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to prohibit the former from acquiring the latter. Then again, is word of a corporate behemoth seeking to become bigger really news?

And if news about the making of monopolies is not your cup of tea, perhaps antitrust activity among them is more to your taste, such as the Department of Justice's probe into UnitedHealth?

In the modern era of shareholder interests, increasingly called the “new business order,” workers and consumers often suffer rather than benefit from the resulting implementation of “corporate efficiencies.” This code for getting bigger to serve our customers better, often results in just the opposite. If not lost jobs for frontline workers, it’s frequently suppressed hours, wages, or access to benefits. Stores might suffer reduced maintenance or closure if deemed insufficiently profitable.

When corporate size dominates and competition diminishes, what incentive is there for benchmarking prices or offering discount promotions? What becomes of rival efforts to hire and maintain workers? Where does the ambition go for a business to remain clean and inviting, when there is no other consumer option?

Despite claims of workforce improvements and better consumer options, mergers too often produce monoliths. In its platform, the American Solidarity Party states that, “political economy is a branch of political ethics, and therefore rejects models of economic behavior that undermine human dignity with greed and naked self-interest. We advocate for an economic system which liberates people from being cogs in a pitiless machine, instead creating a society of widespread ownership, or distributism.

Our Democrat-Republican duopoly and the administration too wilfully allow business to prevail in legislative outcomes and regulatory practices. I advocate for tough rather than lenient oversight, more rather than less competition, and smaller rather than larger businesses for the benefit of workers and customers, rather than executives and shareholders.