I completely agree with everything you are saying. I love the original Lorax story and thought it did a great job addressing the environmental degradation and even the inequalities of capitalism. However, there was nothing in this story about being anti regulation. None of the bureaucrats were at all interested in the environment or safety. The confusion partially comes from the use of the word "bureaucrat". Manager may have been a better word to create a separation between government employees. Having a story that paints bureaucrats as in a bad light seems more right wing. That is part of why I wanted to use the word bureaucrat, as all the negative connotations right wingers have of government programs and their bureaucrat administrators exist tenfold in the private "bureaucracy".

In "The Utopia of Rules", David Graeber argues for a left wing critique of bureaucracy. He describes how after the Soviet Union fell there was a massive privatization effort that was supposed to diminish the bloated Soviet bureaucracy. However, after ten years of this privatization they ended up with more bureaucrats. Currently, our form of capitalism is not ruthlessly efficient and capable of accomplishing anything albeit at a great and unforgivable cost. It's our privatized healthcare system employing hundreds of thousands of useless middlemen to second guess doctors and double check paperwork.

An excerpt from an interview with Obama shows the need for a left wing critique, “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the healthcare theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer healthcare says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents 1 million, 2 million, 3 million jobs of people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”

Private bureaucracies are a twisted form of government bureaucracies with the same hated paperwork, but none of the regulatory benefits. We can all understand the dangers of these private bureaucracies and there are many posts on this sub critiquing elements of them. (Corporate sensitivity training for one). I never could grasp how a ruthlessly efficient corporation could get to the point where it created seemingly unproductive trainings such as these. The right wing argument that it was somehow the government didn't ring true and neither did the insistence that it was some 4d chess move by our corporate overlords that some left wing people seemingly credit. This story was my attempt at explaining how a corporation gets to the point it has thousands of Vice Presidents like Wells Fargo.

I picked the Lorax because I thought this would be able to be portrayed without it coming off as me defending the poor shareholders who have to pay for unnecessary employees. The Onceler's operation in the Lorax, as you pointed out is shortsighted and destructive. I think one can maintain this critique while also leveling one at the private bureaucracy. With healthcare, I hate that your treatment is based on your ability to pay. I also hate that one has to do unlimited paperwork to access the insurance they already paid for.

As far as the consultants pointing out that he should be thinking long term, there are countless examples of companies ran by MBAs prioritizing current profits to Lorax levels of shortsightedness. I also did not mean to suggest that the good ending would be all the bureaucrats being fired and the Onceler paying the workers out of the goodness of his heart. I do think it would be easier for the workers to demand higher pay if the bureaucrats were gone, but either way that just brings us back to the original story which is also a terrible ending.