There was a time when successful corporations built towns and villages to house the people who worked for them.
There was a time when basic education was provided in company schools and company advanced training programs. One of the last examples of such was the Structural Engineering Program at Carolina Steel which I attended while working there many years ago. No, we didn't get college degrees but we got the education necessary to do the job and those who finished the program were sought out by every structural engineering firm in the world.
Company stores, while sometimes predatory, provided a place to shop for everything you needed. Often, streets and roads were built by the companies who needed them most. Companies often built churches.
When I first entered the work force most every large employer had company doctors and company nurses available to us for all our medical needs. Larger companies had medical professionals on-site, smaller companies contracted with doctors and nurses in the neighborhood. We didn't know what co-payments were. Here in Greensboro, industrialists like the Sternbergers, who founded Revolution Mill and built Sternberger Hospital on Summit Ave are slowly being erased from public memory by the Cones and the Tannenbaums.
The Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts in Detroit, Michigan was built not by tax dollars or bonds but from a gift from the Dodge family who founded Dodge Automobiles. That's how most of the performing arts centers in the nation and the world were built.
Little America, Wyoming is a town built entirely by the oil company who built a truck stop/motel there. Thousands of company built towns exist all over America. Much of Greensboro was once a company built town.
Companies provided police protection. In my youth I sometimes had to deal with the Cone Mills Police when caught necking with one of the girls over in Millville as well called it back then.
But in this day and age corporations no longer see infrastructure and social needs as their responsibility, preferring instead to place those responsibilities squarely on the shoulders of the working class. And I'm okay with that. That is: as long as we maintain a level playing field.
Now I know a lot of my more conservative friends are going to balk at this and I understand why. I don't believe that government and non profits should compete with private companies just like you don't believe that government and non profits should compete with private companies but... If private companies are not going to be responsible for the things that good old fashioned conservative values have always expected private corporations to be responsible for then perhaps it's time we rewrote the rules. Perhaps it's time that governments and non profits started competing with corporations allowing citizens to vote with their wallets and reduce the overall stress on the taxpayers. No, I don't like the idea of government competing with business but if big business refuses to fufil their civic obligations then perhaps we'll just have to do it for them and lower our taxes at the same time. The other option is to raise taxes and we all know how well that goes over.
