The Sid Goldberg Rule and Big Business

The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg

November 15, 2013

Dear Reader (including those of you grandfathered into stupid substandard "news"letters),

So yesterday Barack Obama in effect borrowed a line from Darth Vader. He told the insurance companies, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

Now one doesn't have to have sympathy for the insurance companies -- I don't -- to still acknowledge they're being screwed. If you've ever watched a mob movie you'd understand that bad guys can betray other bad guys.

I'm not saying that the insurance companies are outright villains, but they are fools of a sort. Like a prostitute who agrees to go to bed with a total stranger for a certain price to do a certain thing, the insurance companies are suddenly balking when the John decides to get creative. "Whoa, whoa, whoa. We didn't say anything about a capuchin monkey and a salad spinner!"

That, in a nutshell, is the problem when Big Business and Big Government get into bed together. The government, like a Toronto mayor in a stupor, thinks it's free to take whatever liberties it can get away with. Big Business keeps telling itself, "Just one more degrading act and this will all be over and I can take the money off the bedside table."

But the john will always have more money and at least one more degrading act to go along with it. And at some point, it's very hard to suddenly draw a line and say, "I was fine with the capuchin monkey, and I said okay to the thing with the salad spinner filled. But this thing with the chocolate sauce and Anthony Weiner in the corner saying 'Can you hear me now?' No way. What kind of a girl do you think I am?"

The Sid Goldberg Rule

Whenever one of my friends gets offered a new job or has to negotiate a salary, I always bring up the Sid Goldberg rule. If you don't know, Sid Goldberg was my dad. And he was brilliant and funny and I loved him dearly. Among his gifts: He could cut through vast swaths of BS with a few words.

In the 1990s when I was a TV producer/policy gnome, I was offered a job I really, really didn't want. There's no need to get deep into the specific circumstances since some of the people involved probably read this "news"letter. But the salient point was I was being offered good money to do a job I didn't want to do. So I called my dad. I explained everything, including the fact that I really didn't want to take the job. And like many a twentysomething is wont to do, I imbued my anxiety with Great Cosmic Significance, as if never before in human history had a young man faced the dilemma of a job offer.

Anyway, after hearing me out and after I said for the nth time that I didn't want to do this other job, my dad said, "So ask for a lot of money." I responded, "Dad, you don't understand. I really don't want the job! Can you not grasp the bottomless abyss of dread I am conjuring at the prospect of taking it!" (Okay, I'm probably embellishing, but I was being quite dramatic.)

My dad sighed. And said, "Well then ask for a lot more money."

"Dad you don't understand!" I erupted.

"No, Jonah, you don't understand," he said, cutting me off. "Look. If a task or job doesn't violate your morals or your principles, there's a price you can charge that will make you happy to do it."

"But Dad, I blah blah blah, wah wah wah."

He cut me off again. "How do I explain this to you?" he asked rhetorically. And then he said in a total deadpan, "Look: I would be very happy to eat dogsh** for one billion dollars."

The Sid Goldberg Rule and Big Business

Maybe because he was my dad and I understood what he was getting at better than a stranger might, let me expand on that. My dad was a terribly dignified and reserved guy. He also was a fastidious sort who hated messiness, stickiness, and all kinds of ickiness. He almost never cursed either. So when he said he'd happily eat the Affordable Care Act (heh) for one billion dollars it immediately clarified things for me. His point was that just because something is distasteful or unpleasant -- even if stings your pride -- that doesn't mean there's a moral or principled reason not to do it. At the same time, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you have to. That's where price comes in -- what's it worth to you?

In a situation where your conscience is silent, there is always an amount of money that would make you not only willing, but happy, to do something you'd never do for free or a little money. Barring some dire circumstance, I would not clear road kill from highways in Alabama for minimum wage. But, I have no moral or principled objection to such a job. It's honorable labor after all. I just don't need the money that bad. So therefore, if you told me that I would be paid 10 million dollars for each putrefied dead skunk and every moldering possum, I'd be out there with a grin on my face grabbing them like I was a Walmart shopper and they were the last GI Joes with the Kung Fu Grip on Christmas Eve.

But, in situations where your conscience is an issue, price should be irrelevant (barring some Thomistic hypotheticals where you need the money to save your child's life or some such).

The moral of the old Churchill story is that a prostitute is a prostitute regardless of price. If you have no moral opposition to being a whore, then all that's left to talk about is price. But if you do have a principled problem with being a whore, price shouldn't be an issue. Or, put another way, if you have a moral objection to selling your soul in the process of throwing Thomas More under the bus, the fact that you'll get to run Wales as a reward shouldn't change your thinking. ("I think they phrased it better in the movie" -- The Couch).

As a broad generalization, big businesses have no moral objections to being whores. Getting into bed with Uncle Sam is all a question of price, not principle.

Obviously, there are exceptions and degrees to all this. I'm sure Koch Industries takes whatever tax write-offs they're entitled to under the law, but I'm also sure they're not going to burst out of a cake at a Vegas-penthouse stag party for Uncle Sam either. The problem for the insurance companies is that they've been willing concubines for several years now and suddenly they're discovering that this isn't what they bargained for.

On Corporate Responsibility

Milton Friedman was famously opposed to the whole idea of "corporate social responsibility." His argument was that corporations have a single obligation: to maximize profits for shareholders. When CEOs spend money on gitchy-goo feel-good projects, they are exceeding their authority and wandering outside the lines of their job description. I've always been very sympathetic to this view. If you asked me to invest $10,000 dollars in your startup company and then I found out you spent $5,000 of it to sponsor a program to teach prison-gang members to settle their disagreements by acting out scenes from Little Women, I'd be pretty pissed. That's not why I gave you the money. And it's pretty shabby of you to buy fame and praise for your generosity while spending someone else's money. Indeed, it's not much less selfish than blowing it on a three-day bender with the mayor of Toronto.

There are lots of different takes on this argument and, because this is my "news"letter, I choose not to deal with most of them. My problem with the profit-maximizing-über-alles creed for Big Business is that it offers no principled or moral reason for Big Business to stay out of Uncle Sam's bed. If the federal government can make it rain Benjamins for any business willing to twerk for its amusement, why should GE or Big Pharma or the insurance companies demur?

Of course, some businessmen understand the risks of getting in bed with the government. But, since there's lots of money to be made, there will always be other businessmen perfectly happy to put on the French-maid uniform and bark like a dog.

Even Adam Smith said, "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." That's true. What's even more true is that when government officials and business leaders sit down to talk, the inevitable result is a new "public-private partnership" that uses government force to limit competition from non-whorish corporations. Railroad magnates lobbied for the Interstate Commerce Commission. AT&T asked the government to make them a monopoly in the name of "efficiency" so they could clear the field of competition. Andrew Carnegie wanted government control of the steel industry so he could rely on Uncle Sam to guarantee his profit margins. GE loves Obama's green-energy stuff, because without the inherent subsidies and regulations, it couldn't make money off of its green tech.

I have no problem with contractors doing work for the government. It's better that the guys building roads and bridges work for the private sector. But when big businesses agree to make the country less free, the market less competitive, Americans less prosperous, and the state more powerful just to make a few more bucks for their shareholders, it makes me think that Milton Friedman was wrong. We need a free-market version of corporate social responsibility. We need to equip businessmen with an ethical code that tells them there's a principled reason not to get in bed with the government. They'd still be free to violate that principle, of course, but if they did, I hope they'd have the good sense not to come running to us to complain that the government has asked them to eat a bowl of dogsh**t.

Obamacare vs. Katrina

The New York Times today compares the Obamacare debacle to Bush's problems with Katrina. It's a comparison I've made several times myself. But the obvious difference is that George W. Bush didn't spend years forcing the Affordable Hurricane Act on the American people. And he didn't have three years to plan for its arrival, either. Nor did he have a national press corps desperate to minimize the downside of the storm. Unless you're Louis Farrakhan or Spike Lee, nobody entertains the idea that flooding New Orleans has been a goal of conservatism for decades. Oh and conservatives didn't go around saying that they had completely and totally mastered all of the nuances of meteorology and climate. And -- wait -- I should also mention that Republicans never said that any criticism of their Affordable Hurricane Act was racist and extremist. Aha! I almost forgot. Bush didn't promise every single living American: "You can keep your current weather if you like it. Period."

But other than that, I guess the comparison is spot on.

Understanding and Forgiveness

There's something almost poignant in jihadis asking for "understanding and forgiveness" for beheading a fellow jihadi by mistake. This reminded me of the al-Qaeda letter from a few months ago that everyone was comparing to Office Space (Apparently Khaled Abu Abbas wouldn't return calls or file his expense reports on time. No word on whether he obsessively clung to his red stapler).

Anyway, I kind of like the idea of the interoffice e-mail explaining to staff what happened with the beheading.

Hi Everyone,

First let me say that sign-ups for dead-goat polo are almost complete. Practices will be every Thursday after evening prayers. I really feel good about our prospects to go all the way this year. And, if you can, please bring your own dead goat. We can always use extras.

Also, please people, can you please remember that we empty out the cool-food cave every Friday. Sometimes the hummus really piles up in there. And label your containers, people! And not just your first name, otherwise almost everything will be marked "Property of Mohammed! Do not eat."

Anyway, the reason I'm writing should be obvious. Last week we got our signals crossed and beheaded Mohammed Fares. Now I understand that Omar and Mohammed (that is "Fat Mohammed" -- see what I mean, guys? So many Mohammeds!) didn't know Fares. But he was a good guy. He hated all the right people. Always talked about wanting to kill the Jews, the Christians, the atheists, etc.

Anyway, let me say this clearly: Please check IDs before cutting off someone's head. I understand mistakes happen, but c'mon. You know how awkward this is going to make the next inter-agency meeting? He was supposed to bring the doughnuts.

Oh, but there is some good news. Fares was the best player on Ahrar al-Sham's dead-goat polo team. Playoffs, here we come!

Various & Sundry

I'd intended today's G-File to be a heavier historical affair on corporatism and big government (a topic near to my heart), but it just got away from me, like a greased pig at a kosher butcher shop ("That just makes like no sense." -- The Couch).

My column today is on the bizarre situation we find ourselves in where the Democrats are acting as if they were surprised by the fact that the law they wrote did what they intended.

Meanwhile, the updated version of my magazine essay on Obamacare-failure schadenfreude just took off yesterday. I did not expect it to go viral the way it did. But apparently it struck a chord with a lot of people. Or, maybe, people just dig lots of chicken references. Either way, thanks for all the kind words. Though, I'll tell ya, I never like to hear "this is the best thing you've ever written." I know it's meant as a very high compliment, but it makes me think: "What was wrong with all the other stuff!?"

This is one of the most compelling, odd, entertaining, and uncomfortable videos I've seen in a while. Still, it pretty much captures what it's like working at National Review.

This however is frickin' adorable and if you don't at least smile at the end of it, you have no soul.

About time! Pennsylvania newspaper finally retracts its editorial calling the Gettysburg address "silly." Looks like John Dingle's century of writing angry letters to the editor finally paid off.

Here are some less historically potent retractions of late.

And here is one of the greatest newspaper corrections of all time.

I've been saying this for years. The Ford Pinto was framed.

So. Much. Ew. Herpes found on library copies of 50 Shades of Grey.

So much awesome. Ron Swanson's Instagram pics.

Sixteen American cities foreign governments warn their citizens about.

Given all the talk about dog poop today, this seems appropriate.

Debbie's Friday links!

Quick Links: Jonah's Latest Column National Review Online E-Mail Jonah

Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital.

National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives.