Dear right, corporatism is your fault.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Dear right, corporatism is your fault.

I’m not usually one for polemics. But sometimes polemics is called for. Here goes.

Dear member of the moderate and extreme right,

America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.

Some of the time, you acknowledge this, but most of the time you just ignore it while continuing to push for corporatist legislation.

Unlike we leftist people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.

We told you this would happen, but you wouldn’t listen. You complain, rightly, that regulatory agencies are controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to constrain. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create power—and you people love to create power—the unscrupulous seek to capture that power for their personal benefit. Time and time again, they succeed. We told you that would happen, and we gave you an accurate account of how it would happen. We’ve been criticizing capitalism for ages.

You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. Capitalism is inherently flawed, so you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules; these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

You spent the past fifty years empowering corporations and the most unscrupulous of the rich. You created rampant moral hazard in the financial sector. You created the system that spreads the risks among the people but privatizes profit. You created the system that creates a revolving door between government staff and Goldman Sachs. There’s a reason why Wall Street throws money at politicians. It’s because you, the right, are Wall Street’s biggest supporters.

You balk: We need less regulation, let the invisible hand do its work! Let’s be serious a moment. Capitalism is a bunch of bullshit. Its premises are faulty and we can observe its collapse in the world around us. You claim the market will stop large corporations and monopolies, but you fail to realize that your own ideology presupposes increasing economies of scale, which support large corporations. You claim wealth will trickle-down, when marginal propensity to save increases with income, and thus this money doesn’t go to small businesses. Instead, it goes to large banks. Marx predicted many of the problems with capitalism decades ago.

The corporatism you complain about is part of capitalism. We’ve seen it time and time again. Whenever there is capitalism, corporations and governments merge to form a corporatist net that ensnares the people.

Point your fingers at yourself. You did this.

- my modification of “Dear left, corporatism is your fault”