It’s not enough to talk about the Constitution as it applies to the government and the people who elect it. One of my concerns about the purpose of my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is to more appropriately define the relationship that corporations have with society and government in general. This has essentially been a problem since the Jackson administration, where Cornelius Vanderbilt first exposed the cracks of corporate power in the years that followed. Now, of course, I’m not a believer in heavy regulation, and I do not think the government can manage power well at all. So they are certainly not capable of controlling corporate governance and shouldn’t even try. By nature, they always need money, and corporations all too easily buy them off with donations, which is why most of the corruption we see these days is happening. Corporations do not care about the Constitution. I have never been in a business exchange in all my years where business people suddenly said, “oh, that might be unconstitutional.” They simply will say, “well, if people want to get paid, they’ll put up with it.” That is why Biden attacked the vaccine mandates the way he did. The American Republic is most vulnerable through its corporations rather than through Constitutional mandates, so this is a long-time problem that needs a very modern solution. I have started to tackle this need in my book, and I’m sure many discussions will spawn from the continued necessity.
So it is in that context, I say, especially among the new tech companies, that corporate America does not respect the people they do business with, and that needs to change dramatically. It is a good thing that all companies should cherish to have a customer. But, corporations, whether it’s McDonald’s, Disney, network television, Wal-Mart, etc., have evolved over the years under government protections to disregard the customer experience. With more and more technology emerging, they have really come to abuse their relationship with consumers. And consumers have accepted this abuse by default because it’s coming from every direction so fast and furious that we haven’t really taken the time to understand what is happening to us. This is most obvious in the complete disregard of our personal time and freedoms concerning our corporations. Corporations, by their nature, are like only children; they assume they have exclusive access to the attention they want without considering all the other elements that are competing for the same time and money. For instance, McDonald’s isn’t thinking about the time and money that P&G is committing to new shampoo when it comes out with a new fish sandwich for the season of Lent. But the consumer only has so many hours in the day and so much expendable income. So when all these various elements seek selfishly to consume every waking hour of a customer’s life, there are lots of adverse effects that cascade off the experience that has a negative impact on the nature of our government in general.
For instance, I’m a Call of Duty player. I’d play it a lot more if I could, but I sleep about 7 hours a day these days. The rest of my 24 hour day is carefully planned in 15-minute increments. I do not have “free time.” I have lots of managed time, but I do not have empty time that is filled by random behavior. So I maybe get a half-hour a day to play Call of Duty which I consider a luxury. Now when you are in the Call of Duty world, or the platform of PlayStation in general, they make it so that you could easily spend 24 hours a day playing their game and their game only. It is quite a culture of game players, and I can see why many people who want to be good at it would easily stay home and play that game all day, all night, for seven days a week. There is enough content to really just live in the Call of Duty world. No wonder our employment numbers are so low now that the government has taught people that they are willing to pay people to stay home. I look at the number of people playing Call of Duty with me whenever I am playing and think a lot about all the lost productive time spent on that game. Sometimes, if I worry about something and can’t sleep very well, I get up at 2 AM and play a few rounds, and there are always thousands and thousands of players in the queue ready to play any game I pick within the Call of Duty environment. But it gets even more complicated than that. Call of Duty is just one game out there; many other games are just as popular, such as the Madden games, Fortnite, and many others, all that have their game bases filled with people willing to spend their time and money on those products. But, time in a day is not infinite, so there is a management problem that we have to deal with as a modern consideration. And the corporate influence is committing the same problem they always do. They assume that the consuming public will put 100% of their time into their product in the same way that an only child expects their parents always to be available to them.
But, while we are trying to find all our passwords to all our media accounts, and playing all these games, and are under pressure constantly to update our media accounts and to read all the legal agreements with each one, people have no room to figure out the origin of Covid, or the FBI tampering in Michigan with the Whitmer case, or the paradox of Ray Epps and the FBI attempting a false flag on January 6th, as they usually do when the government needs to make a political case beneficial to them, there is no time for people to give to these subjects because they are too worried about what their password is to their Diseny+ account. Or their bank is changing their account number because they are doing a system update. And at work, people might have an account for Microsoft Teams, their inventory systems, their clocking systems. Everywhere people turn these days, there is some technological incursion for their time that is not being managed, hurting the American family and their productive output. I would say that the solution is not more regulation, but is more like I say in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. The way to punch back at corporate selfishness is to hit them where they genuinely care to protect, in their self-preservation. Right now, they assume that consumers will always be there for them whenever they decide they want them. But by applying constitutional concepts to even corporate culture, as it should have always have been from the start going all the way back to the Jackson administration, many of these modern problems could have been alleviated. Consumers could still be consumers, but they would be more than that to the world of corporate America. And that’s what’s missing now, is that people are people who should be respected first and foremost, starting with their time and money. Because just as every only child must learn at some point, they are not the only things in the world that matter. And to truly be balanced in the world and good, they must learn to deal with the rest of the world respectfully and with excellent quality.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 