Phone Hacking

The News of the World Phone Hacking Scandal is in many ways a symptom of the rise of market based negative liberty, the idea that the public show what is in their interest by putting their money in it. This is probably a much more genuine feeling within these boardrooms than we might wish to think, and it is to be expected considering the trend of business elites (though other groups are guilty.) to recast themselves as public servants by offering the public what they want. In many ways this is the final destination of Hayek's theories, all our desires are fulfilled by the invisible hand of the market.

While the actions committed could be considered horrific we must understand that these are corporations, and it is the duty of the corporation to maximise profits, if doing such low things were what was necessary to sell papers, then that is what it must do. We should not expect anything more of them, not until either those founding laws are changed or we move to a different style of economy. But remember if a company has to choose between breaking human lives and losing money, they will take the former, it is what they are supposed to only care about after all, anything else is a deviation from the expectations of the shareholder, which leads them open to a tidal wave of lawsuits. 

What might be most telling about the whole affair is how the Right have sought to turn this into Lefty bitching, which considering the range of phone hacking scandals is a rather disgusting move on their part, I think it suggests that other tabloids have been involved in similar illicit activity and there is genuine fear that they might get uncovered, I speak on this because I remember talking to a more conservative friend of mine, who talks while half laughing about his work with the conservative party. - "It is all one big gentlemen’s club, they cover each others backs, but the moment it gets impossible to deny, it all becomes fair game."  I think we are hitting a part where this one exposed secret might leak onto a few others if the Right are already getting so riled up over Murdoch bashing as they seem to be forgetting that this company in fact ruined scores of lives for no reason other than short term profits.

Still, we cannot expect any different from them, the sooner we realize this the sooner we can move on to getting something genuinely better, and i do not mean some kind of peer review system, the masses of corporate atrocities of the last few decades, are showing increasingly that the corporation is not some divine instrument of our holy market, merely a psychopath whose only thought about you is how to get you to give them more of your money.