there will be government
A new economic order creates a new social reality for the people of the nation. Contrary to libertarian free market utopianism, no complex society in history has arisen or maintained itself without government. And contrary to the implication of universal sufferage -- that watching talking heads on TV shout slogans at each other, and occasionally marking an X on a ballot, constitutes "self-government" by the "informed" democratic masses -- societies are governed by their leaders. Within a society there are leaders and there are the led. Where the people are led is entirely the decision of the people's leaders, who construct, maintain and evolve the worldview that their culture believes in.
Shepherds lead the people to green pastures and still waters. Wolves march the flock to the fleecing floors and the slaughterhouses. Shepherds seek to serve the needs of the people. Wolves seek to serve the appetites of the wolves.
A government that fails to respond to changing socioeconomic realities renders itself obsolete and will eventually be replaced by more temporally attuned leaders. China's leaders read de Tocqueville's Ancien Regime to learn how NOT to govern a nation. Now the leaders are reading Confucius for some positive advice on how to provide good government. There are lessons for us in the perspectives Chinese leaders are gaining by their studies.
evolution from feudalism to capitalism
Over the past 500 years, capitalism has replaced feudalism as the Western world's form of government. Yes, capitalism is a form of government. No, capitalism is not "the free market" in which tinkers, tailors and candlestick makers struggle under the oppressive taxation and regulation of a governing regime. Corporate capitalists are the financial, commercial and industrial rulers who dominate political government by their monopoly stranglehold on the monetary nervous system and physical economic life of the nation.
Free market competition eliminates monopoly profit, which is the fount of capital accumulation, which is the single-minded ambition of capitalists. Adam Smith presented his vision of a free market as an alternative to the state-sponsored corporate capitalism that was practiced in the 18th century, and which has been practiced continuously into our own day. Observers like RF Pettigrew (Triumphant Plutocracy, 1922), FL Allen (The Lords of Creation, 1935), C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956), John K Galbraith (The Affluent Society, 1958; and The New Industrial State, 1967, 1972) and his son James K Galbraith (The Predator State, 2008), chronicle the history of American capitalists' consolidation and entrenchment of their monopoly powers over the past 150 years.
The Galbraiths describe corporate capitalist government as "the planning system", a highly centralized and exquisitely coordinated system of economic management.
"The actual world therefore cannot be what a conservative means by a "free market system". In the actual world, the "freedom to choose" among a menu of items set out for sale -- however vast -- does not give to the consumer an equal weight in the decision over what is produced. Instead it merely reproduces, in conditions of comparative but far from complete disorder, the phenomena of planning, rationing, queuing, indoctrination, and control that characterize unfree systems. Advertising is propaganda. Research and development is planning. ...So who is "market freedom" for? It is the freedom of what my father called "The Planning System". It is a real, practical, secure, and highly valued form of freedom. But it is a freedom for business alone, and even less than that: it is a freedom for stable large corporations with substantial political power, for only such businesses can muster the power to exercise the freedom in the fullest: from disposition of the resources and command over labor, to the design of its products, to the pricing and the distribution and the planned obsolescence, and to the management of all the consequences, including environmental and political ones. The freedom to shop, for the rest of us, is an incident to this freedom. ...What is amazing, of course, is that the meaning of freedom in every normal sense -- of speech, association, faith, assembly, and the press -- should be replaced in the conservative view by "market freedom". ...Amazing that such nonsense could go so deep, and last so long." (The Predator State, pp.23-24).
"Can one seriously claim that government -- a tangible decision-making process that actually exists -- does a better job than the market, a hypothetical entity that for many practical purposes and problems does not exist at all? No. You cannot do that; it would be unthinkable. To profess skepticism or disbelief [in the omnibenevolent power of the invisible hand of the free market] is to disqualify oneself on the face of it. Thus we see the grip of "free-market economics" on the public stage: to be taken seriously, one must be able to profess a belief in magic with a straight face. What, then, is a reality-based person to do?" (ibid, p.21)
What indeed.
the free market vs reality
Corporate capitalism is a planning system, a form of economic government. Rather than elected political representatives debating in Congress over the direction the nation should take, corporate capitalists make these decisions in their private sector boardrooms. The democratic masses enjoy the freedom to shop -- as long as they have money or credit to spend. Without money in their pockets to buy the corporate-produced baubles, the masses are useless eaters. Is it any wonder that the masters of the planning system are wondering how to rid themselves of the world's unemployed and debt-ceilinged useless eaters? There are no more "empty" continents to ship them to. What, then, shall be done? I hesitate to imagine, given Western capitalism's less than stellar history of humanitarianism.
Capitalism, like feudalism before it, is rule by ownership of the nations' economic lifeblood. Money (and controlling financial ownership of corporate stock in the industrial and commercial infrastructure) has replaced land as the primary form of "property" whose ownership is monopolized by the ruling class. Untitled plutocrats have replaced hereditary kings and aristocracies. The rulers go by different names under feudalism and under capitalism: Billionaires are the new Crown Princes and Lords of the Western world. But both feudalism and capitalism are forms of oligarchic rule by oligopoly ownership, regardless what the oligarchs call themselves.
Capitalism rules behind a brainwashed veil of free market democracy. Unlike feudalism whose rulers were highly visible and known to the ruled, capitalism is an occult form of government. Indeed, a focal point of the free market delusion is the "invisible" hand that guides the marketplace to green pastures and still waters. From a perspective outside the delusion, it is clear that the visible hand of capitalist rulers is leading the flock onto the fleecing floors and into the slaughterhouses. But the rulers spin their illusory worldview, and the people believe in it (as do, in a truly terrifying turn of delusion trumping reality, most of the rulers themselves), so they cannot see themselves being marched to their destruction.
Capitalists gain and maintain their hegemony by exploiting the weaknesses of human nature, rather than by building on human virtues.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
