| Four propositions on
global business
'This house believes that global business is overwhelmingly a force
for good'. British Marketing Group debate, London, November 6, 2002
Proposed by rdn
This is an excellent motion: it asks us about global business,
and global business now - not a fanciful, future business, but a
real one.
I don't want to argue for Capitalism Lite. I am not interested
in what goody-goody capitalism may become when the NGOs have crawled
all over it and made it swallow a pill with Corporate Social Responsibility
written on it. I'm not interested in business as politics by another
name. I want to describe the merits of good old fashioned, globalised,
economic growth of the kind we've been cooking for four hundred
years and which we should hope will now happen to and in poor hot
countries in much faster time scales. And more than that: I am in
favour of western-based multinationals. Local businesses can produce
a "barbed wire" elite. Multinationals are more inclined
to produce a real middle class of professionals.
Global firms
1 overcome local cultures - so help societies lose bigotry, tedium
and backache
2 create a middle class - so help develop a stratum of society which
knows how to get good done - not a barbed wire elite, but a bossy-boots
one
3 turn people into consumers - so put cash into people's pockets
which first frees them from hunger, then disease and then liberates
their spirits
4 Why do we know these things are good? Because the left-liberal
intelligentsia deep down hate them all.
Apropos proposition 1:
Airlines take tourists and their money to poor places, and poor
people get a chance to interact with the rich and learn from them.
World tourism is the homage affluence pays to poverty, but luckily
it transforms the places it visits. Naturally, I am a patriot and
prefer above all airlines, BA: bomber command with a dash of Roedean.
(Not the tricksy, ethnicised PC version marketers foisted on it).
Apropos proposition 2:
Oil companies produce oil in tough places and pay huge revenues
to those states whilst providing challenging work for the educated
young of the region - and the families of those engineers, etc,
become the locus of transformed society. My favourite used to be
BP - the commercial arm of the Foreign Office, British and Proud
- not Beyond Petroleum, ashamed of its core business. Now I'm a
fan of Exxon - not afraid to speak its mind.
Apropos proposition 3:
Our buying African beans in supermarkets gives the people of hot
countries a chance to have a world class agricultural business,
in which people get to throw away the back-hoe and ride in tractors.
It's economies which beat hunger by beating poverty, not peasants.
People in the country become workers and managers and owners of
businesses - not condemned to scratch in the soil getting organic
starvation for their pains. So I'm a big fan of the chemicals business
which brings fertiliser and pesticide to the third world, and I
loved Monsanto best of all because it once had the courage to talk
about the real agricultural revolution, GMOs.
Apropos proposition 4:
Globalised business doesn't do good by being nice. It does it by
trying to make profits. To do so it needs stable, open, peaceful,
law-abiding societies - and it helps build them. With a bit of enlightened
self-interest and useful bullying by the World Bank and IMF, governments
are learning to be a bit less bad as they seek to attract global
business.
The left-liberal intelligentsia in the West has always hated commerce
and trade. Having failed altogether to halt economic growth at home,
it now seeks to do be more effective abroad. Oxfam, Christian Aid
and Friends of the Earth are far too powerful, and we need to support
business when it seeks to ignore them and we should criticise business
when it pretends to share their agenda.
ends
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