Sounds like Trump, for better or for worse
Post WW2, we had gradually managed to build a less violent society, and at some point, some CEOs decided: "You know, the Ludlow massacre and the Bisbee deportation were not that bad". And now, we get the pushback, where some employees think that murdering a CEO in the middle of Manhattan is fair game.
Rules didn't disappear. But people are more willing to go to conflict about them.
What many free market advocates don’t seem to understand is that free markets aren’t actually a default but require the right environment with certain government regulation and societal norms.
Folks like Jack Welch and Milton Friedman helped diminish those conditions. Now after 4 decades we’re seeing the results.
Agreed, Welch didn’t invent shareholder primacy, but he industrialized it. What makes him so consequential isn’t that he played the game better, but that he normalized a playbook that treated human capital as expendable
This feels like a whitewashing of a lot of post WWII history. That “less violent society” included the Korean and Vietnam wars, multiple assassinations, civil rights riots, the Kent State massacre and the Cold War.
Was it that society was less violent or that we became more diverse in our ability to commit violence?
What he was good at was exploiting the system for personal gain.
I don't think this is an accurate assessment. More of the violence was swept under the rug, but it was still there.
Post WW2 the US did well because a lot of old incumbent industries were disrupted by the war and swift technological advancements in many areas that opened up a lot of opportunities for scrappy startups. Also, the baby boom meant the workforce was skewed young and entitlements were not a major factor in the economy. Finally, the US had a federal government that was willing to tax the rich and not yet fully infiltrated by moneyed interests as well as an independent news media. Well, more independent than today's news media at least.
The primary problem with capitalism is that once you accumulate enough money it is easy to create a feedback loop where that money creates more money with little to no input on your part. This causes money to accumulate at the top where it has nothing to do but make more money. The primary advantage of capitalistic economies is that the power is pushed down to the edges closer to where the information is, but when allowed to run unchecked that advantage is lost as the power accumulates at the top, just like a command economy. This is why it is so important to tax the rich and to avoid creating billionaires, they can't efficient spend the money they have for the same reason communism doesn't scale well: the information bottleneck.
I'm saying prior to WW2, sending the army (or just any hired goons) to shoot at workers was a common way to handle a strike in western countries. I'm saying at the turn of 20th century, people in colonies had their hands cut for not meeting rubber quota. etc.
You are right to point out that things weren't (and aren't) perfect, but you'd be a fool to think that there was no improvement.
Think Warren Buffett style billionaire versus Elon Musk style.
Welch wasn't a problem until what he feared, backlash from people who had been around for the last cycle of cruelty precipitated by his ideas, sufficiently died/attritioned out.
Give Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames a read.
He does an excellent job at laying out the pedigree of thought from slave/plantation management to modern American management theory, and charting out the trends and consequences that arise from political shifts in the equilibrium between capital and labor.
https://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Col...
what a man! Sorry, but while I claim no great ethical or moral standing myself I do dislike anything that smacks of applauding their absence in others.