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Money and power : Comments
By Josh Fear, published 18/8/2010It is time to wrest back some of the power that corporations have acquired at our expense.
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One of the reasons corporations are so powerful is because it is an effect of the democratic process. People vote for politicians that they think will give them benefits. The ethical dimension is disregarded. The system naturally selects for the most unprincipled politicians, whose only watchword is expedience, the best liars, the least concerned about other's property rights.
The effect of government confiscating 40 to 50 percent of everything the people produce, and spending it on bureaucracies whose sole function is to restrict everyone else's freedom and make forced redistributions, is to add costs onto all productive activity - all for 'the greater good', of course. The effect of these added costs is to drive smaller businesses to the wall, or stop them from getting started in the first place. The result is to favour the larger corporations, whose economies of scale can handle the tax burden which disproportionately suffocates their smaller competition. Many of them also have occupational licenses - privileges handout out by government to their mates.
Then the interventionists, uncomprehending, see the results of their handiwork and declare that the problem is not enough government regulation. Presumably the prospect of a better society lies in a government bigger than the big government we've got now, which everyrone seems in favour of, and totalitarian government, which everyone disowns.
There's only one problem: no-one has ever shown, or can ever show how the economic interventions of government are able to produce a total net benefit for society in the first place.
Since full socialism is impossible, the drive towards it always ends up in fascism: the kind of ugly amalgam of big government and their pet big businesses that we've got now.