Our Threatened Freedom

How Big Are The Big Corporations? (04:40)

R.J. Rushdoony

Transcript:

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:01 How big are the big corporations? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:09 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.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:33 However, the bible makes clear that we must tell the truth about someone irrespective of our personal feelings. Michael Novack 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. It’s largest branch in Michigan employees at peak, no more than 14,000 people. In 1979 General Motors was much better off than it is now and its total number of employees than was 839,000.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:13 In Washington D.C. the Executive Branch of the federal government, in that same year listed 2,806,513 employees and the Department of Defense, close to 980,000 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 Electric, and almost five times as big as U.S. Steel, one of the biggest corporations.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:52 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 interest 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 is worse now by all of the big 500 corporations, save one smaller one.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:51 How big are the big corporations? Not very big indeed. If you put a handful of the biggest Federal Agencies together, you would far out weigh in money and man power 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 lie about bigness. We have been looking in the wrong direction as to the nature of our problem. The federal government creates inflation by a deficit spending but the corner grocery store and the power company get the blame for raising prices when they are simply trying to keep pace with inflation.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:04 When I was quite young haircuts were $.25, my last one cost me $4.00, the barber like the grocer, like 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.