Maga wants to end capitalism as we know it

CORPORATE America is learning the truth of former UK prime minister Winston Churchill’s warning about the appetite of crocodiles. US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on friendly countries, which were reaffirmed on Wednesday (Mar 5), will be only the beginning of his assault on the pillars of post-war prosperity. Some of the most influential people in the Trump world are determined to go even further and deconstruct the great workhorse of American capitalism: the publicly owned and professionally managed corporation.

The managerial corporation emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when entrepreneurs hired professional managers to boost business efficiency and sold shares to the general public to raise corporate capital. The great historian of the corporation Alfred Chandler argued that the managerial company complemented the invisible hand of the market with the visible hand of management, thereby moving it to the centre of the US economy, particularly during the long post-war boom, and providing a global template for countries that wanted to imitate America’s economic success.

Today some of the most influential people in Washington want to downgrade Chandler’s visible hand – first by giving it a good biting so that it loses its self-confidence, and then by binding it so tightly with new rules that it plays a much less important part in the economy. Maga’s (Make America Great Again) plans present a much more fundamental challenge to the workings of US capitalism than anything that senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders have ever dreamed up.