Why are people so down on big business all the time? I can understand people's fear of the big boys getting out of control, but big businesses were at one time little people. They just had the moxy and courage to take their ideas and run with them. Are the rest of us afraid of them because we secretly envy their power, and crave it ourselves? Or is it something else entirely?

Put simply, the fact that "little people" created big businesses doesn't matter. The problem is the mindset of our macro-economic system, which favors profit and "economic growth" over harm to cultural values, the ecosystem, and many other things. Once big businesses become part of this macro-economic system by entering the stock market, they too are required to ignore important factors like cultural values and the ecosystem; they are forced to care only about what investors care about--profit--because it is the only thing that allows them to survive.

Suppose you have a five-year old daughter. You're watching a TV program with her. During the commercial breaks, a Calvin Klein advertisement trophying an emaciated woman as a sex symbol airs and you feel the urgent need to explain to your daughter that she doesn't have to look like a stick to be beautiful, or to be a worthy human being. The next ad is a fun McDonald's ad that makes McD's look like the best place on earth to eat, at which point your daughter says that she wants to eat at Mickey Dee's for dinner, with the sort of look in her eyes that says that she really wants to eat there every day for the rest of her life. You have trouble explaining to her that over 50% of the calories from a Big Mac come from fat, and that McDonald's food is very unhealthy for her (it seems to her as though your rather boring explanation wasn't nearly as enticing as the spectacle of the Mickey Dee's ad; she frowns at you and turns her eyes back to the screen). An SUV ad airs next, and your daughter thinks you should get one of those "big and cool" SUV's as the next family car, but you have to explain to her that the car actually guzzles gas like a maniac and is bad for the environment, amongst a host of other disadvantages. Even if you prohibited your daughter from watching TV, she would still get the same corporate messages from billboards, ads on the sides of buses, banner ads on the Internet, and every other place that advertising is constantly invading. And if people like Kalle Lasn hadn't fought to promote anti-smoking ads in the 1960's and to get tobacco companies to tell the truth about smoking, your daughter would, from the ads she saw everywhere, probably also want you to buy cigarettes for her once she reached legal age.

One of the most dangerous themes that all manipulative advertisements send out is the message that "You are imperfect. Buying our product will make you more perfect. If you do not buy our product, you will be less perfect and less happy than those who do not. You're free to decide: either buy our product, or be a worse, less happy person than those who do buy our product. It's your choice." In other words, current advertising sends out the message that happiness becomes based on consumption, and people are by default incredibly pathetic organisms unless they buy into consumer culture.

My point is that a parent shouldn't have to fight with corporate advertising to raise a healthy child with good values and self-image, or to raise a child that isn't hooked up to an IV of excessive consumerism in order to survive. The truth is that, due to the ubiquitous nature of advertising, we see it everywhere and it affects us all the time. Large corporations now wield more power than small nations and are now so ever-present in all sectors of society that they have the power to shape the values and beliefs of a culture. Due to the nature of our current economic system, consumers and investors aren't made to care about the impacts a corporation's policies have on our culture, the ecosystem, or a number of other important factors. The only thing that investors are made to care about is the company's profit margin, and as a result the only thing the companies care about is their profit margin. So, the corporations meld culture it into whatever will make consumers buy their product so the company gains enough profit that investors will buy their stock, which ultimately allows the corporation to survive. In the end, the corporations manipulate the culture, the environment, the government, and everything else, usually in very negative ways, in order to reap greater profits and stay in business.

In Smithian terms, I believe that large corporations are not controlled by The Invisible Hand: rather, they control it. A large corporation doesn't need to make a product based on what consumers want, because it will use advertising to make consumers want whatever the company produces.

I think this can be changed in at least two ways. Firstly, by educating the consumers and investors: If the bulk of people were conscious of the impacts companies had on the environment, the culture, the way the companies treated their employees and clients, and so forth, then the companies would be forced to be conscious of those things in order to keep their consumers and their shareholders. Another option, which Lasn points out in his book, is that the harmful investor ethic can also be changed if the way our economic system works is changed--and no, it doesn't mean we have to give up capitalism. The former idea would maintain the concept of Lassiez-Faire capitalism, but the latter might not.

However, one of the biggest roadblocks to any potential solution for these problems is getting information out to the general public.

Corporations have their fingers in a ton of pies; they essentially run a lot of the services that the government is supposed to run, or at least regulate. For instance, for the past several years Lasn and his organization have been trying to get a 30-second TV spot to air that accuses the beauty industry of giving women an incredibly harmful self-image that tells them that they need to starve themselves to be beautiful; all the major networks, however, refuse to air this ad because they know that if they do, the beauty industries will pull their advertising money out of the TV network. In this way, many such mediums of communication and organizations (like schools) have been crippled, having "sworn allegiance" to corporations in order to have access to the goods, services, or money that they need. In America the people are supposed to be free and have a right to free speech, but when we try to speak out against corporations, we are rejected by these organizations which have pledged allegiance to them. And as more and more parts of America swear fealty to these corporations, America becomes a less free place to live.