Since labor costs are the largest single part of many company’s budgets, it seems logical that a company would try to control those costs.  If you can cut labor costs, but maintain production, then the company profits should soar.  Automation and outsourcing to low wage countries are very logical ways of keeping costs down.  Such efforts have helped companies to increase their profits, their stock values, and their executives’ wages.

In a purely capitalist system, there is no reason for any well run company to pursue any other strategy.

Of course company executives want to eliminate as many workers as they can and cut the salaries and benefits of the workers that they cannot eliminate.  What they also want is for their customers to keep buying the company’s products.  This would all work if the population of workers did not overlap with the population of customers.  For most large companies that make products for the middle-class consumer, their is tremendous overlap in the population of their workers and their customers.  This is certainly true for the economy as a whole.

There seems to be a conflict in what is logical for one company to do  and what is logical to support the well being of the whole of society.  As a citizens of the society as a whole, should we just ignore this conflict and hope it will all work out? Or should we be looking for solutions that make society work for all of our benefits?

Think about this when you vote for a politician who tells you that her or his business experience will make her or him particularly adept at running the government in a business like way.  How many business people consider it a primary business responsibility to hire as many people as they can and pay them as well as they can, so that the workers can live a decent life?  As a politician, they will tell you that they want to create well paying jobs, but their primary mission as a business person was never that; it was the opposite.

Another way for a company to cut costs is to try to get some other entity to pay for the resources a company needs. This shifting of expenses works well for educating people to be able to do industrial work.  It works well for creating the infrastructure of transportation and energy distribution that a company uses.  It also works well for providing the legal framework and the enforcement mechanisms that make running a business possible.  Exposing the logical fallacy is to ask who is going to provide the money for this other entity to provide all these freebies to the company?  Does your business savvy potential political leader who has made a career of foisting the costs onto others have the requisite knowledge for providing those services they have previously shunned?

Ideally, we should be looking for political leaders who understand what motivates business, what makes it succeed, and what are the needs of the whole system that makes it all work.

The Real News Network has the interview U.S. Will Fail In Attempt to Create Proxy Army in Syria.

BENNIS: I have no doubt that those who support the idea that the U.S. should actually send ground troops into one more war in the Middle East–something that the American people are vastly opposed to, that analysts who understand what the consequences are are enormously opposed to. But nonetheless there are political actors who are calling for it, as you say, and they will no doubt use this as more evidence that it never works unless there are U.S. troops on the ground.

The problem is, number one, it hasn’t worked when there are U.S. troops on the ground. So the argument simply falls apart.

But I think there’s also the possibility that some in the CIA may have leaked this report not as a way of justifying putting more troops on the ground, although that’s possible, but as a way of explaining their inevitable failure, that these air raids are not going to succeed, not because there aren’t also troops on the ground, but because there are no military solutions. This is what President Obama has said over and over again, and it’s the one right thing that he has been consistent about in his rhetoric, and it’s the one thing he has consistently violated in his actions.

There are no military solutions here. And claiming that there are, trying to use military solutions, is inevitably going to fail. It will fail dramatically if it’s only airstrikes. It will fail even more dramatically if it is airstrikes plus U.S. ground forces. There are no military solutions.

And the political solutions that are necessary are not yet being put in place, because all of the focus is going towards the military, despite the claim that the military actions are only one part and we’re really working on the diplomacy, the military actions are preventing any serious diplomatic move from going forward.

What’s needed in Iraq is an end to the understanding of Iraq’s Sunni population that the government in Baghdad, backed by the United States, has no interest in protecting their rights. That’s why they began to support ISIS and organizations like it in the past. The Sunni tribal leaders, the Sunni former generals, and ordinary Sunnis started to support organizations like ISIS because they felt that the government in Baghdad was consistently attacking them through its own sectarian militias and its army, which is really, historically, one more Shia sectarian militia in Iraq, albeit the biggest one.

In that context, every time the U.S. goes in with airstrikes in support of the Kurds and the Shia against ISIS, it’s seen by Sunnis as one more airstrike against Sunnis, and it’s going to undermine any possibility of changing the politics.

What seemed to have worked to get former Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki off the dime and retire was Obama’s refusal to help with the ISIS problem until Maliki relented. Putting pressure on Iraq to have a more inclusive government is the non-military way of solving the problem. If we take the pressure off of the Iraqi politicians by using our military powers to hide the reality from them, then we will never get them to do what they must do. That is why there is no US backed military solution to the problem. The military “solution” is actually one cause of the problem in that it allows the Iraqi politicians to avoid facing reality.