The catalogue of modern books — along with academic papers, media commentaries and broadcasts — targeting corporations as evil products of shareholder and executive greed and unregulated capitalism has been building for decades. The influence of this flood of ideological products has now reached the point where many now believe there is some justice or appropriateness in the assassination of a corporate executive.
Is it any wonder? It was only a matter of time before the anti-capitalist classics produced dramatic consequences. The leftist publications include such bestsellers as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Matt Stoller’s Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life, along with other tomes with such put-down titles as The Myth of Capitalism,The New Media Monopoly, and The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.
No wonder corporate America — and corporate Canada — are under constant attack. One of the more recent anti-market offerings is The Road to Freedom by Columbia University Professor Joseph Stiglitz, who opens his work by claiming that unfettered free markets have led to “crimes” that include allowing “financial markets to precipitate the largest financial crisis in three-quarters of a century; freeing trade to accelerate de-industrialization; and freeing corporations to exploit consumers, workers and the environment alike.” Free market ideas, says Stiglitz, have led to “massive inequalities and provided fertile ground for populists.”
The reaction of many Americans to the assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of the insurance arm of the US$400-billion-revenue UnitedHealth corporation, suggests that the decades of ideological warfare against free markets and corporate America have now trickled down, deep into the political thinking of perhaps millions of individuals, their beliefs fanned by professional activists.
Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged Monday with the murder of Thompson, has already been cast as something of a hero on social media for having directly taken on a major private player in the U.S. health-care system. A New York Times columnist described the social media celebration of Thompson’s assassination as unprecedented. “The rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic.” The columnist, Princeton sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, said, “I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.”
In the view of many 21st-century Americans, the conclusion is that CEO Lives Don’t Matter. When comedians on stage at a midtown Manhattan theatre on Thursday night joked about the shooter, the entire audience erupted in cheers.
It looks like Mangione had consumed the anti-corporate message. “The parasites had it coming,” he said a statement in his possession. Even members of the medical profession are all too willing to brush the killing into the moral background and see it as at least partially justified. “If you’re the CEO of one of the most comically evil companies in the U.S., you should be prepared for consequences, and the only surprise should be that this doesn’t happen more often,” said one self-identified anesthesiologist. In another New York Times commentary, Helen Ouyang, an emergency physician and academic at Columbia University, said that while the “gleeful responses have been horrifying,” it’s important to note that the “objectionable vitriol” lays bare Americans’ “deep-seated anger toward health care.”
This two-sided reaction — essentially reduced to the idea that the killing of the CEO was a horrible act that had some justification — is fundamentally and deeply immoral, and ideologically driven. After decades of indoctrination from the anti-corporate left and its academic and media advocates, there is a growing acceptance that the corporate pursuit of profits is manifestly evil and in need of control if not elimination. Almost daily in the media, whatever corporations do — be it raising prices on food, controlling airline baggage, altering health insurance plans or raising cable television fees — the monster in the room is the corporation and its CEO.
The obvious willingness to somehow portray an executive assassination as having some justification ranks as a breakdown in moral thinking. This would be true even if the political, economic and corporate problems of the U.S. health insurance and service delivery system were as flawed as claimed.
There seems little doubt that there are serious problems that need to be resolved within the U.S. health-care system, but what is the source of the problem? The corporations? A Wall Street Journal investigation earlier this year claimed to have uncovered evidence that the US$1-trillion-a-year private U.S. health business comprised of firms such as UnitedHealthcare “pocketed” $50 billion by failing to help patients. UnitedHealth filed detailed critiques of the investigation. On the other side of the issue are credible arguments that the health-care insurance problems are a product of constantly changing federal and state government interventions, including via Obamacare and Biden administration actions.
But such debates are entirely beside the point, which is that nothing in the problems facing health care — nothing — justifies the moral breakdown demonstrated in the wake of the assassination of a health insurance CEO. A former FBI investigator told CNN that “we have an ideologue” in Mangione, an upper-middle-class university grad from Baltimore. It’s an ideology shared by millions and promoted by thousands of intellectuals, politicians and activists.
National Post