"Zombie Corporations" Are Destroying Our Economy

Giant corporations are producing little value, killing jobs, and sucking the life out of the global economy. This is not what capitalism was supposed to look like.

May 12, 2020

by Ari Rutenberg

IT CAME FROM... THE 80’S - and like cocaine mountains and shoulder pads, we should have left it there.

I studied Economics in college — I even managed to get the degree. Now admittedly there’s plenty I don’t remember, but I do recall this much: in the philosophies of the men who “created” capitalism (Adam Smith and David Ricardo for example), there is no mention of “shareholder value” or “analyst expectations”. In Smith’s The Wealth of Nations he does not discuss “stock markets” or “share buybacks”.

Now these terms are synonymous with capitalism, and since the 1980’s have created modern day Zombie Companies that are eating our economy alive.

The Founding Fathers’ vision of capitalism

While there is much to criticize the Founding Fathers for (slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, women for example), their concept of corporations and their relationship to capitalism was remarkably progressive. Like the creators of capitalism, the Founding Fathers would have no doubt seen share buybacks (the re-acquisition by a company of its own shares) as market manipulation, and the obsession with stock price as risky speculation.

Though all the old white men certainly would have been aware of joint stock companies and the few extant European Bourses at the time, those markets were very niche and operated nothing like stock, bond, and commodities markets do today. Golden parachutes, poverty wages and share buybacks at profitable companies would have been seen as confusingly inefficient, and an immoral, pointless allocation of scarce capital and resources. Those resources could be much better used by reinvesting in innovation and the labor force.

The original purveyors of capitalism believed companies should grow and profit because they innovate and add value to the economy, not because of gimmicks created to attract day traders. The shareholder should receive growth through share appreciation because the company is creating products or services people want to buy, not because executives are pumping the price to line their own pockets.

“Thank you for helping keep us sane during insane times”

- Banter reader

Become a Banter Member today, and get 50% off your first year!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Enter the zombie companies

After the Great Crash in 1929, financial tools used to manipulate markets were made illegal over fears executives could use them to inflate their company’s stock value. Under Ronald Reagan’s SEC however, these rules were relaxed in the early 1980’s, paving the way for extraordinary abuse and manipulation that has only accelerated in recent times.

The Reagan era idea of profitable companies laying off workers to please analysts and shareholders has proven poisonous and contagious. It creates zombie (or if you prefer, cancerous) companies that don’t add anything or improve our lives in any way, and often leads them to mistreat their workers and communities.

These companies continue to grow financially while actually extracting value from the economy and resources from workers. Just like a cancer, a parasite or a zombie virus, oil giants, hedge funds and health insurance companies simply consume what others create, destroy smaller companies, and provide no real value to anyone. In many cases they even refuse to pay a living wage, and demand bailouts from the taxpayer when market conditions become too difficult.

The original purpose of capitalism

For Smith, Ricardo and the Founding Fathers, the “free market” wasn’t at all what modern conservatives claim it is: an ‘efficient’ (read inhumane and cruel) consumption machine that acts with no concern for its environment, society, or workers except what it can suck out of them. Instead, for these thinkers capitalism was a means to increase quality of life — not simply through material acquisition — but through education, new technology and ideas that allow us to work less, be more compassionate to the poor and sick, and friendly but motivated competition between mostly small to medium size enterprises. And when those companies can no longer add value, rather than being kept alive simply to continue to produce gains for their shareholders as they do now, they should fail and make space for newer and more innovative enterprises.

To early capitalists like the Founding Fathers, a free market was specifically one unencumbered by economic privilege (large corporations getting irregular tax breaks), monopolies (Facebook, Amazon, Walmart) and artificial scarcities (hoarding N95 masks or toilet roll). They believed that ‘economic rents’, which is essentially money made by what we would call “gouging” or “screwing people”, were not only immoral but a key sign of an inefficient free market. A truly free market was efficient for all of its participants, not just its largest and wealthiest. That means companies get to make a profit for their owners, but people are also paid fair, competitive, living wages for their work, and there is competition amongst both capital and labor.

All this nonsense about “supply-side”, “shareholder value” etc, etc. didn’t come about until Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman began justifying a return to greed and inequality during the comparatively equal post WWII period. And none if it has anything to do with the type of capitalism Washington, Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were familiar with. None of them would see this as a free market, but instead one designed to be (and being) manipulated by those with the most money.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Capitalism doesn’t have to be like this. So voracious, full of destruction, and mindlessly cruel to so many. There is a kinder and more loving version that can foster a compassionate society where people live abundant, happy, and long lives while treating the environment and each other with respect.

We might start this new paradigm by first labeling these destructive byproducts of degenerative capitalism. Zombie Corporations no longer provide value and innovation and should not continue to exist in order to prevent shareholders from losing value. Investing entails risk, and shareholders should not expect every company to last and grow forever. Like a zombie or cancer, these companies will simply continue to destroy and consume more and more of the value being created in other parts of the economy to keep their lifeless carcasses moving while not actually doing anything of value. They will suck economic rents out of the rest of us that will never be reinvested in their workers or infrastructure, never be paid to subcontractors, never go to increased wages, and never be used to its full potential.

The money accumulated by these Zombie Corporations will instead sit in the accounts of the super rich, waiting to be used for new opportunities to create more powerful Zombie Corporations. These ruinous entities are not just getting richer, they are ensuring the rest of the economy remains incapable of fighting back. And just like every good Zombie movie reminds us, the only way to stop them is to kill them.