Down to the basic basics, gang:

Can you think of anything less suited to a market economy than a Corporate Culture? Lots and lots of people discovered that term, but nobody decided they had discovered something WRONG.

You see, the first thing they should have noticed was that they had found that corporate promotions were not a response to the one thing a corporation is supposed to respond to: the MARKET.

And corporations are run by conformist dunderheads.

I remember many a neophyte clown appointed by Reagan showing how Old School he was. I always wore short-sleeve shirts with my coat and tie. This guy had a professional conservative’s dream view of real business.

So he asked, “How would you answer an Old Fashioned Manager who asked you, ‘How far up your coat sleeve would I have to look to find your sleeve?’”

It’s a nut question, but remember this was a professional conservative asking it.

I replied, “I’d file a complaint of sexual harassment.”

He was totally stunned. But that is exactly what I would do it some nut was denying me a job based on pulling off my clothes.

If the boss insists I wear long sleeved shirts, I will wear them if I want his job. My doctor brother wears long sleeves when he wears a suit, because doctors do that. But no sane doctor is going to ask about looking up his coat sleeve.

Dressing down is used in California because it WORKS. We live in a world of heated offices, and people do not work as well if they have on wool pants and coats and vests and long-sleeved shirts.

It would be all right if this nonsense were confined to respectable conservatives, but I have seen it in private business and in the Intelligence Community. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was one of many, many books about corporate Culture.

But such works would not have been funny if they were not so near to the truth.

Not one thing the hero of How to Succeed concentrated on had the slightest concern with the market.

So we have an economy that has selected its executives within the Corporate Culture and the corporations have collapsed like flies.

In Japan, the economy was supposed to take over the world, but about the time it reached the US level of production it stagnated, as all Oriental societies do when they have used up what they get from the whites.

Then the Japanese economy collapsed. It collapsed because it was built on a business clique. It was inevitable, because it was the ultimate networking. They had their “own” and made arrangements among Themselves. The arrangements within their Corporate Culture became the only thing.

Japanese business had grown by being fixated with the Market. They produced things and when “Made in Japan” became synonymous with shoddy they heard and changed it. Then the Corporate Culture grew up. They promoted people with how they fit, not into the market, but into their own conformism.

People who know when to wear long-sleeved shirts are not necessarily the same ones customers want to buy from, or people who know financial structuring or even common sense.

Corporate Culture is the natural product of a Politically Correct society. Certainly no one was promoted in the Soviet Union for appealing to consumers.

You learn to act right and talk right to get promoted.

Which is fine until the whole damned system comes down around your ears.