It caused quite a chortle in political circles when Republican presidential nominee Carly Fiorina’s campaign team failed to lock-down an important website. Specifically, a critic of Fiorina grabbed CarlyFiorina.org and used it to condemn the massive layoffs she oversaw while CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
Now apparently the quotes attributed to Fiorina at the website are taken out of context-she was referring to management, not the rank and file workers. Furthermore, people have defended Fiorina by explaining that the massive layoffs occurred during a merger with Compaq, in order to eliminate redundancy. However, even on its own terms, there is nothing horrible about a CEO laying off thousands of workers in an effort to improve the profitability of a firm. It is a mistake for voters to only cherish those running for State office if they “created jobs” while in the private sector.
On the contrary, if someone is going to go to the trouble of voting-not that I recommend doing so-then other things equal, I would recommend that the voter cast the ballot for someone from the private sector who had slashed costs and workers in a bloated firm. That’s exactly what the State needs, after all.
In a pure free market economy, wages and salaries adjust so that able-bodied workers (with a marginal product above $0) can find a job. In the real world, with various State restrictions, this ideal is not attained. Even so, it is not the responsibility of corporate CEOs to go out of their way to “create jobs.” If every business manager (or owner) seeks to maximize profit, then labor and other resources will naturally be steered to their best niches in the market.
It would actually be somewhat astonishing if, right now, every single firm in the country had juuuuust the right number of employees. It would be even more incredible if that condition held, year after year, into the future, even as consumer tastes, resource supplies, and technology changed.
Clearly, in the real world the “optimal” number of workers at each firm will possibly vary over time, and perhaps drastically so. It is necessary for the people running firms to occasionally hire new workers, or lay off existing ones, to make sure the overall structure of production in the economy is matching production plans with consumer preferences.
I have not investigated Carly Fiorina’s campaign, and I am quite sure that if I did, I would very much oppose her becoming the next U.S. president. My modest point in this blog post is that the United States federal government is currently spending far more money, and employing far more people, than any reasonable person could defend-let alone people (like me) who have ideological and moral objections to the State per se. In this respect, if I hear that a particular candidate has experience in laying people off when she thought it was in the long-term interest of the organization, then that’s a plus, not a minus.
Facebook
YouTube
RSS