I’ve often thought to myself: why am I majoring in business if the corporation is something I so much despise? Business is not just the corporation. Business is everywhere. It exists in many forms and is hardly avoidable. There are good businesses and bad businesses, necessary businesses and unnecessary businesses. Wherever there is a (potential) market for something, there is a business. There’s very little that can stop business. There are government regulations placed on businesses and there are third party watchdogs monitoring business activity, but when it comes down to it…business is often inevasible and free of regulation, for at least some period of time. Maybe you’ve thought about business’ impact on you. Business has made you healthy, fat, smart, entertained, and a bunch of other adjectives too abounding to enumerate individually. Business is not God, even though the corporation, through branding and excessive marketing, tries to make itself appear omnipresent and omnipotent. The corporation is an enemy to business because of this. Business is not its own legal entity. A business is a human run operation that involves humans providing goods and services. We mustn’t let a particular organization take on certain human characteristics. This is where profit kind of fucks everything up. Because profit must be delivered to shareholders in a corporation, that’s a corporation’s only “obligation.” But, in essence, the humans running these organizations owe their earnings to a lot more people, or at least they should. Earning money for X corporation alone does not really allow for humanity to function sanely. The incentive to, for example, improve the livelihood of employees is usually not present because improving the livelihood of employees is a business expense, instead of a true “profit” to society. Most things that would otherwise help society economically or otherwise are corporations’ enemies. With small and midsized businesses, they have grassroots level focus; most customers, employees, and products consume, work, and are manufactured in a small bubble of area, as opposed to jobs and products that are outsourced. This way people will be less prone to exploit other people and/or the environment around them; the powerless (the poor, the working class, the non-corporations) are more likely to become self-sufficient and treated with dignity. I’ve kind of diverted, but what I’m trying to say is that I’m fully in favor of business.  I love business and the potential value it serves to humanity. We (future business leaders) have to find feasible means of intimately bringing good to the entire world by scaling back so called “global” operations. It can be done. Just give us some time.

Glen Maganzini