Our Threatened Freedom

How Big Are the Big Corporations

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 108-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 108

Dictation Name: Vol. I - Part 04 - How Big Are the Big Corporations

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] How big are the big corporations? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

We hear a great deal of talk these days about the menace of big corporations, and statements about how big they are. Are these statements true? Now I am no friend of corporations, in fact I have just wound up a loser in a battle with an insurance company, and it has left me wound up and mad. However, the Bible makes clear that we must tell the truth about someone, irrespective of our personal feelings.

Michael {?} has recently given some data on the 500 largest industrial corporations in America. The largest of these is General Motors, with more than 200 units. Its largest branch in Michigan employs, at peak, no more 14,000 people. In 1979, General Motors was much better off than it is now, and its total number of employees then was 839,000.

In Washington D.C. the executive branch of the federal government in that same year listed 2 million, 8 hundred and 6 thousand, 5 hundred and 13 employees, and the Department of Defense close to 9 hundred and 80 thousand employees. On top of that, General Motors as a corporation is much larger than most of the 500 big corporations, more than twice as big as General and Electric, and almost 5 times as big as U.S. Deal, one of the biggest corporations. The smallest of the 500 largest corporations has only 529 employees. In other words, no corporation compares with our biggest federal agencies, and some are quite small in reality.

Most of our bigger corporations are closer in size to a big university system, such as the University of California. But this is not all. In 1979, General Motors had to pay out in interests on loans, 93 cents of every dollar of net profit. This means that General Motors was in a very shaky financial situation. In varying degrees, this same bad financial outlook was faced in 1979, and it’s worse now, by all of the big 500 corporations, save one small one.

How big are the big corporations? Not very big indeed. If you put a handful of the biggest federal agencies together, you would far outweigh in money and manpower all 500 of the biggest corporations. Where bigness is concerned, our problem is in Washington D.C. and the federal government.

Our problem is not big business, nor big labor, but big government on city, county, state and federal levels.

This does not mean that we do not have problems with some big business and big banking. For one thing, they are on the whole, gutless when it comes to fighting big government, especially on the federal level.

My point is that we have been fed a line about bigness. We have been looking in the wrong direction as to the nature of our problem. The federal government creates inflation by deficit spending, but the corner grocery story and the power company get the blame for raising prices, when they are simply trying to keep pace with inflation.

When I was quite young, haircuts were 25 cents. My last one cost 4 dollars. The barber, like the grocer, the service station, and the power company is simply reflecting the fact of inflation. He did not make it. Inflation is made in Washington D.C. and exported everywhere. Bigness is indeed a problem, but it is the bigness of the federal government which is threatening all of us.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.