Maybe I’m missing something.
It could be that I simply don’t understand, in a comprehensive
way, the complex relations between government and commerce, between the ethics
of the personal human conscience and the inhibitions enforced by legal
mandate. But even so, I see some
patterns that I can’t help but point out.
For example, I often find myself, as a natural converser
with people, meandering into conversations about politics, the economy, regulation,
and so forth. Such conversations are, of
course, treacherous territory in modern America. I was raised largely by Texans and Southerners
and was often told never to talk about religion or politics. Apparently those subjects are too emotionally
charged to be included in genteel discourse.
But those particular subjects happen to be my very favorite, so they
always seem to come up when I’m around.
Of course, in broaching those topics, especially politics, and
especially insofar as politics relates to the economy, one immediately runs the
risk of being branded either with the ominous epithet “Liberal,” or still more
ominous “Conservative.” Generally, I
cheerfully run the risk and talk to people, and emotions get charged, and then
I get to practice my conflict resolution skills, another hobby of mine.
Here’s the example I was making: When I do talk politics and
economy with people, I often find that those who brand themselves
“Conservative” hold great contempt for both labor unions and the government
regulation of trade, indoctrinated into those opinions, I think, largely by
that Great American and Friend of Freedom Rupert Murdoch.
And here’s where I scratch my head. When I think about free market capitalism,
which I’ve spent a modest amount of time doing, I humbly submit, it seems to me
very akin to anarchy. In Wealth of Nations, that great anarchist Adam
Smith argues that it is simply the nature of competition that, in the end, the
people will vote with their pocketbooks and the businesses that best supply the
community’s needs will be the ones that prevail. As long as government keeps its dirty hands
out of it, that is. It’s an interesting
argument, and the Industrial Revolution has provided us with ample evidence for
exactly how often the unhampered wealthy have been forced by competition to act
in the best interests of the community.
(Only slightly less often than unhampered dictators have, which is to
say, almost never). And even more to the
point, when I hear people argue that free market capitalism will take care of
itself if the damned Big Government just quit regulating and let it do its
Thing, I usually ask this question: Do
you believe in Anarchy too? Do you
believe that, if there were no laws, people would eventually do the right thing
on their own? That the powerful would
never take advantage of the less powerful for their own gain? I don’t often get an affirmation of that
one. Ironically, most anarchists I know
are also dead opposed to free market capitalism. Go figure.
Here’s another thing that I find befuddling. A lot of zealots in the Church of Rupert Murdoch
these days have been singing rabid hymns against the labor unions. Again, maybe I’m just confused and don’t
really understand these relationships, but it seems to me that if government regulation
of trade is objectionable, that it places too much power and too many resources
in the hands of a government that the Common Folk don’t have a lot of control
over, then somebody needs to be
around to keep hounding the big corporations.
Somebody needs to be organized
enough to be investigating the board room decisions and clandestine behaviors
of the big businesses that have such an enormous impact on the world. If unions shouldn’t do this, and
government shouldn’t do this, then who?
The clever, well-informed and level-headed American consumer?
More and more I think of big business like government. In fact, I think that, in every real sense,
the massive multinational corporations that drive our debt-based, fractional-banking,
petroleum-dependent Cardhouse Economy hold most of the
political power in the world. As we saw
with the Bailout in 2008, expecting the government to regulate unethical
business practices is like expecting a standing army to keep an eye on the
weapons manufacturing business, in case it gets too extravagant. And if government regulation of business is akin
to a standing army, then I think labor unions are kind of akin to militia
groups.
Very few people these days really pay much attention to the
history of the conversations around standing armies in this country. In fact, very few people even know that the
U.S never had a standing army at all until after World War 2. President James Madison considered a standing
army one of the greatest threats to liberty.
“The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the
instruments of tyranny at home…The armies kept up under the pretext of
defending have enslaved the people.” And
so it was throughout much of the first 200 years of this country’s history that
the arguments against maintaining a standing army always prevailed. That is, of course, why the Second Amendment
was so important as well. A standing
army, argued the Framers, allowed a small number of people to command too much
brute force. Even through World War 1,
this argument was maintained, and when the nation’s leaders decided to go to
war, they drafted and trained troops then.
Hitler changed all of that, of course, that rascal. He and Mr. Hirohito and Il Duce all made having
an “ever-vigilant” standing army look like a good idea, which the weapons
manufacturers naturally encouraged. Standing
army plus private arms industry equals lots of sales on guns and tanks and
other fun toys. But even as Eisenhower,
on his way out of the White House door commented on the necessity of having a “defense establishment of vast proportions,” he also said famously, “we
must not fail to understand its grave implications.” Thus did he coin the term “Military Industrial
Complex,” and thus did big business and government start sleeping together with
a standing army as the bedsprings. Sure,
you could go back further than that to Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve
Act, or to J.P Morgan before that, but my point is, the squeaky bed of the
Military-Industrial Complex reveals a much deeper sort of affair
That is to say, if Big Business is in bed with Big
Government, then labor unions are one of the last protections that workers
have. Sure, we need to keep an eye on
the ways that Unions have become like big Businesses themselves. And sure, we need to be vigilant about those
unions, especially the public employee unions, having too much influence in
government spending. But the American
public needs to be vigilant about everything
right now, and this vacuous idea that somehow big business is more trustworthy
to keep the public’s best interests in mind than labor unions or elected
officials is pretty preposterous to me.
And finally, I want to know what the hell happened since the last McCarthy-era Red Scare that made capitalism synonymous with democracy, when the international business conglomerates that dominate trade are looking more like empires than ever. There seems to be a concerted effort to keep these kinds of questions out of our schools, out of our public debates, and even out of newspapers with any kind of circulation. Am I really missing something?
Maybe it's intelligent conversation...
