J.B.: I would say there are differences between the US and Canada, but it's hard to define them in global terms. We don't have a health industry in Canada so that takes out a large segment of industry and of sort of corporate problems- HMOs, and all of that. We don't have that because it's all run by the government. In the province I live, we don't have private car insurance. That's all run by the government and brought in by the NDP when they formed the government.
So there is a lot more in Canada I think that's taken out of the realm of industry and corporations because it's run by the state. So that makes it different. In terms of our regulatory environment, depending on the issue, we have some sort of a stronger presence of government and industry on labor issues, for example, and collective bargaining and things like that. But in other areas, like environmental protection in the Alberta oil sense, we've got the same kind of deregulatory thrust that is characteristic in the United States.
So it depends on the issue. Overall Canada is probably driven by ideologies that see government as a friendly force in terms of economic intervention. More so than in the United States and so we don't have the same issue of privatization of schools. Universities are primarily publicly funded as are schools.
So many of those issues you have around health, education, those are pretty solidly embedded in the public sector here and so we don't get industry involvement as much.
R.K.: Okay. Do you believe that capitalism can exist without psychopathic corporations and if so, what would it look like?
J.B.: Well, it would look a lot like what Adam Smith originally conceived capitalism to be and to look like because he was rabidly against corporations, because he believed they were anti-capitalist. He believed they were state-run monopolies, which they are. I mean, corporations are created by the state. They're created to be monopolies. They're collectivist institutions and they're given certain privileges, like limited liability and so on, that individuals don't have.
So he saw that for what it is, namely a massive intrusion of the state in creating collectivist monopolies which is really what corporations are. And so he said he couldn't think of anything that was more anti-capitalist than that. And so his capitalism involved the sort of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker as he famously talked about and so, yes, you can have capitalism without corporations and you can have corporations without capitalism.
The corporations existed in previous communist countries. They just weren't for-profit corporations, but they were collectivist entities, whether farms or industries, that had their own charters and did what they did. They were effectively corporations. In Canada, we have Crown corporations that are government run and in the United States you have the postal service, a corporation that is not a for-profit corporation.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
