Why America feels more socialist than capitalist
Claire Wolfe -- Loompanics Unlimited
You go to work and you're choked by PC speech codes, obnoxious nannying of your personal behavior, total surveillance, and pee-in-a-bottle drug-war tactics. You go shopping and stores and credit-card companies gather astonishing amounts of private information about you and sell it to the FBI or the Pentagon among others. Stagger into the emergency room, sick and desperate, and the hospital forces you to sign an “agreement” giving them permission to rape your privacy -- under the federal government's rules and for the government's benefit.
You go into a “private” bank or a “private” mailbox service and they demand a raft of government requirements from you. When you don't like the way one megacorporation treats you, you take your business elsewhere -- only to discover that every other company in the increasingly heavily regulated field treats you identically.
And then they tell you this is what it's like to be a part of the greatest economic system ever devised by the human race. This is capitalism. This is the economic system of the free.
Horsefeathers.
If this is “capitalism,” then the Patriot Act and the Real ID driver's license are “freedom.”
This isn't capitalism or even a close relative of it. Some call it “corporatism” which writer Robert Locke defines as socialism for the bourgeoisie. Some prefer the term “economic fascism.” Whatever you call it, it's a system in which mega-government and mega-business are locked together more tightly than a pair of humping dogs. Large corporations get the profits; governments gain both control and powerful partners; true entrepreneurial businesses and individuals get the shaft.
Whatever you call it, it's a system in which mega-government and mega-business are locked together more tightly than a pair of humping dogs.
Because you and I expect capitalism or a reasonable facsimile thereof, we're often buffaloed by the reality we smack into. People tell us (or often we tell ourselves), “Well, if you don't like the way one vendor treats you, take your business elsewhere.” Or, “Your employer has a right to impose arbitrary rules because, after all, a business is private property. If you don't like your workplace, find a better one.”
In a genuinely capitalist system -- where businesses stand or fall on their own merits that would be true. By “voting with our feet” we'd have the power to force high-handed businesses to treat us with more respect.
With megacorps and highly regulated businesses, though, the old rules of capitalist economics don't apply. But the old rules of authoritarian regimes do.
The humping-dog factor in the workplace
more
