Really? Pray tell, what was the colonist's position on the East India Company (think Boston Tea Party)?
What role did corporations play in our early days as a nation? Under what rules did they operate?
What role did Hamilton think the government should play in the development of US industries?
There is a lot of excellent examples of men who came from humble roots and built substantial companies where they actually considered their employees as part of their success.... one was
Henry Ford
- he developed and manufactured the first automobile that many
middle class Americans could afford to buy.
- he is credited with developing
mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers.
- he believed consumerism was the key to peace.
- he was committed to using both technical and business innovations to keep costs down and product affordable...
- he started a franchise system to place Ford dealerships throughout the USA and most of the world...
- he designed the structure of his company to always have a "Ford" running the company so they would always remember where the company came from....
and Doctor Beckman -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Orville_Beckman Doctor Beckman founded the company I retired from... he used to love to tell the story of he and Mabel, his wife, coming across country in his Model A and the tires kept failing, but they finally made it to California where with a degree and a shoestring he started what became a multi-national corporation......
While he was at Caltech they allowed him to do some outside consulting and he developed the pH Meter for Sunkist Corp and from this invention the company was formed in Pasadena, CA. Then he developed the Spectrophotometer as part of a top secret project for producing rubber during WWII.. Next in the mid-50's he established the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to fund Shockley's research into semiconductor technology. Shockley's aging mother lived in Palo Alto, Shockley established the laboratory in nearby Mountain View, California. Thus, Silicon Valley was born... and eventually the Palo Alto division of Beckman Instruments... creating even more jobs.... I don't remember the total number of employees we had world-wide at one point, but it was a lot of people with multiple divisions. I was in the Scientific instruments division. The main headquarters, until recently, remained in California and the lions-share of the employees were in the USA...
None of us considered our jobs there as charity. We all worked hard and loved where we worked and what we did... and without outsourcing all our jobs to China.
The Beckman Foundation has, to date, donated over $400 million to charity and organizations - much going to grants for science and engineering studies, they helped found a high school in his name in Irvine, He is also the namesake of the Beckman Institute, Beckman Auditorium, Beckman Laboratory of Behavioral Sciences, and Beckman Laboratory of Chemical Synthesis at the California Institute of Technology. He was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1985. In 1987, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1999, was also inducted into the Alpha Chi Sigma Hall of Fame in 1996. BTW he was a Republican... I think almost everyone was a Republican in that company....
And amazing he did all this keeping his company onshore... we were always working together, Accounting, Manufacturing, Engineering, etc., to come up with methods of reducing manufacturing cost and increasing productivity without cutting quality.. One of the things we developed right around the time I retired was the DNA sequencer... Beckman was on the leading technological edge in DNA development...one of the last products my husband - who was a Industrial/Graphic designer in the engineering department did was a cartoon slide show that explained what in the world DNA was...
Oh and I almost forgot. In my senior high school class to graduate we had to take and pass Econ 101 (I got an A). Our teacher, Mr. Clamp used to tell the class how stupid we were and that the holy grail of jobs in OC (at the time) was whether Beckman Instruments would hire you. Years later I always wanted to go back and tell him I made a career there.