Published in the Financial Post, December 5, 2003, p. FP-11.
Watch Out for Politically Correct State-talk
by
Pierre Lemieux
On a recent Financial Post front page, a subhead read: "Loss of contract forces Cara's Phelan family to rethink privatization plans." How can Cara both belong to the Phelan family and be a state corporation to be privatized? The answer is that Cara is not a "public" state corporation but a "public" corporation traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. But why use the word "public" to refer to such different realities?
Or are they different realities? If all companies quoted on stock exchanges are sort of public companies, then public standards of governance should be imposed on them, their CEOs should be treated like public servants, and citizen-stakeholders should take precedence over their shareholders. Indeed this is the danger: "Public company" is a very loaded expression.
Of course, some things can be "public" without being run by the state, but the confusion can be very dangerous, especially in state-controlled matters.
As our culture has become more collectivist and statist, language has similarly drifted. Friedrich Hayek, the 1974 economics Nobel Prize winner, talked about "our poisoned language." He argued that we are going back to a tribal, animistic conception of society, and away from the ideal of the extended, impersonal, market order that has made Western civilization possible. "Public" or "social" have become synonyms of "good." Politically correct state-talk is everywhere.
The Financial Post is not alone to slip into state-talk, and is not by far the worst sinner. But we should hold it to higher standards, and make sure that it remains, in linguistic matters too, what a Toronto Star columnist called "the most dangerous piece of paper in the country."
I am not the Englishman here, but I would be very surprised if the language of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill did not have a word to describe a private company that sells shares on (still nominally) private stock exchanges. Indeed, there is one: It is called a "quoted company" (the same as the French cotée, but I don't know what they say in Quebec). The Financial Times regularly uses the term: For example, on the same day that my preferred newspaper transformed Cara into a state corporation, the London financial daily talked about "Britannic, the U.K.'s smallest quoted life assurer." Although far from immune to the "public company" syndrome, The Wall Street Journal often uses "listed," as in "the 600 largest listed companies."
Interestingly, even the Ontario Securities Commission knows the terms "listed" and "quoted," and uses them occasionally. But it much prefers "public company," and for a very good reason: It is easier to pronounce 15-year work bans in a world of public companies. Kapitch, Ivanov?
Words matter. While they serve to communicate, they also express a way to look at the world and they are "guides to action," as Hayek put it. In George Orwell's 1984, the power of Newspeak is that it does not permit to articulate thoughts against the established order. Of course, 1984 will never come to Canada. Never, never. Yet, it is difficult to think in terms of economic freedom and entrepreneurship while using a language where "public corporation" means "private company" and where self-righteous kleptocrats -- pardon me! I meant bureaucrats -- are hailed as "The Regulator."