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In the 1800's, economic power slowly shifted from the states to the corporations, creating a new class of super-wealthy Robber Barons. The bailout madness reveals how wealth is still being siphoned from the pocket of the American worker into the coffers of the financial elite. : politics

In the early 21st century the shift was completed.

The US and most of the "developed" countries have been moving towards a plutocracy for a long time.

And this gradually created a plutocratic kleptocracy, in which corporations act as feudal lords and reduce the country to petty kingdoms in which we are all serfs, with no more rights than the common man had in 1400.

A what now? Did you just need an excuse to say that?

Most of the 20th century, and all of the 21st, is my excuse for saying that.

You use the word created, implying we are indeed living with no more rights than the common man had in 1400.

Thats beyond silly.

We certainly have more rights, but the comparison isn't without merit. Under feudalism, a King or one of his subordinates owned the land.

The serf worked the land, extracting value from it.

The King owned all that value the serf created, and in turn gave the serf what he needed to survive - food and shelter and not much else.

It was a sucky situation for the serf - if he complained that it was unfair, he'd get kicked off the land and starve. The modern corporation has essentially re-invented this relationship.

The people on the factory floor, or at their desks, doing that actual work are the ones creating all the company's value.

Yet that value is entirely owned by shareholders, not the people who created it. It's a bit of hyperbole to claim that we have no more rights than serfs.

These days we do at least have the option to change jobs, or (ostensibly at least) go into business for ourselves.

But we're still mostly dependent on the ownership class to put food on our table such that we might survive, even though it's just a fraction of the value we create for them. I've always found it curious that the world has more or less come around to the idea that democratic republicanism is the way to go for political government, but when it comes to corporate governance we still stick to the feudalism model.

Well how would a democratic republican model of corporate governance go? as it stands right now, we only know one way to increase standard of living by keeping the economy productive and growing.

Thats the current capitalist arrangement.

There are many, many justified critiques of this arrangement, but there are no alternative solutions.

Constrain the movement of capital too much, especially in the interest of equitable distribution, and you no longer provide any incentive to create more production...and thus more jobs...and thus more food on the table for the american worker.

Well how would a democratic republican model of corporate governance go? Worker owned co-ops is one way.

There's a few different models for how they might look and be governed, but the critical feature is that the workers and shareholders are the same people. Edited for clarity.

Is that viable on a national or global scale though?

There's only one way to find out.

Good question. Offhand, I can't think of any reason that it wouldn't be viable.

Most of the features of our economy wouldn't change. The main difference is that capital gains and dividend payments would go out to the employees, rather than an external group of shareholders.

Workers would get the same sort of company control and voting rights as current shareholders;

They could vote to hire/fire a CEO and on his compensation package, for example. I think that there's a lot to be gained by aligning the interests of workers and shareholders.

Whereas a pure shareholder simply wants to maximize profit, worker owners would want to strike a balance between the company's profits and base wages, which is good for the workers.

And because every worker is "invested" in the company, there'd be greater incentive on the part of the workforce towards the success of the company. I also find the (imperfect) analogy to nation-states compelling.

One of the reasons democracies beat out dicatorships is that the Democracies have better feedback loops.

The crowd has enough wisdom to say "something's wrong!" and vote in different leadership who will change course.

Similarly, I would suspect that the guys on the assembly line floor at GM have a better collective idea of how well the company is being run than Wall Street traders.

The workers might have opted for a different management/strategy long ago, given the chance. That said, I don't think there's ever been an employee owned fortune 500 company.

And I'm sure there's many other complexities and details to consider, and I have no idea how we might get from here to there in terms of transferring ownership of existing corporations even if we decided this is the way to go.

How we might get there?

I think in many of the more successful companies, where they have realized workplace culture and morale is key to sustainable success, have a strategy that could be considered the first step towards what you are talking about: including comprehensive, ever-growing company share benefits in contracts with employees, and flexible profit-sharing.

However, I can see some potential issues with cooperatives: it necessitates a fuzzification of specialties, where it becomes important that every worker understands the company structure and business processes to make informed decisions.

Also, in a world with only these forms of companies, it would become more difficult to free up the necessary capital for investment and growth in new companies, which weakens the economy.

I do think that it is necessary to shift our cultural mindset away from the reverence of financial industries and unsustainable "perpetual economic growth" though.

This, I think, is the ultimate solution, since under the current system shareholders (who do no work) usurp the rights of workers, who do all the work.

We only know one way to increase standard of living by keeping the economy productive and growing. The funny thing is, that while "we've" been doing this steadily, with ever-increasing productivity, "our" standard of living and real-wages have been declining for close to half a century now. "We're" doing it wrong.

GASP SOCIALIST!!!

Technology has that tendency.

Its exponential growth and the subsequent jump in productivity have much more to do with that statistic than the actual labor.

However, it is a valid point, and one that is not being addressed.

How we go about dealing with that development is surely up for debate, however.

Is it the realm of policy makers, corporate boards, who?

And how?

Technology has that tendency.

Its exponential growth and the subsequent jump in productivity have much more to do with that statistic than the actual labor. The benefit gained over time due to production efficiencies occurs through many means, technology being one of them.

The problem we face today though is that inflation is overpowering the natural deflationary benefits of increased efficiencies.

Therefore we see the rising price of iPods, whereas we should be expecting to see dramatic decreases over time.

Well how would a democratic republican model of corporate governance go? Free markets without monopoly granting government regulations.

Perhaps this is an unrealistic ideal, but it is still a model that can be strived toward.

Clearly you lived in the 1400s, and so know exactly what you are talking about.

Do you not see the irony in you having made as assertive a comment on the state of the common man in the 1400's as i did?

Punk.

Your words - i don't think you know what they mean. Stop reading Tolkien and going to Ren-fairs, lose some weight and get a job where you don't hone your skills of ignorance.

I initially upmodded you because I thought you were being sarcastic, and then I realised you were serious, so I downmodded you instead. The key difference between shareholders and feudal lords is that feudal lords are predatory destroyers of value: they confiscate what people work to create, instead of creating or adding value themselves.

Shareholders contribute value by giving companies capital they can invest in expanding their businesses. Your model of the world would be accurate if the only thing which can create value is labour, but technology creates value too.

And to use technology, you need capital.

Feudal lords generally did not contribute capital.

Shareholders do. Now, this is a slight simplification -- in real life, only the original shareholder contributes value, by investing his or her money in an initial public offering (or directly investing in the company before it goes public).

This original shareholder is now entitled to a say in how the company is run, and to a share of the company's profits (the dividend is nothing more than the equivalent of wages for capital).

But this shareholder always has the right to sell these entitlements to someone else, and this is often what happens. All this does not change the fact that those who own and contribute capital have an important role to play in the creation of value.

Your analogy comparing shareholders to feudal lords overlooks the importance of capital.

Technology is generated through labor.

Let's say I start a carpentry workshop.

How am I going to get the saws and nails and glue I need to make furniture?

How am I going to buy the raw materials I need?

I don't have all the labour in the world -- I can't go out to mine the iron and chop down the trees I need (I could, but it'd be a waste of my time).

I could hire people to do the mining and logging for me, but that's just about as inefficient, considering my specialty is carpentry, not mining or logging. So, I need to accumulate capital to buy these things from people who specialise in making/obtaining them.

This capital has to be acquired by the sweat of someone's brow, usually my own if I'm anything like the typical entrepreneur.

But once I have some working capital, I can buy the tools and raw resources I need to start working. Now, let's say I expand my workshop and hire some labourers.

Should I be entitled to only claim a salary for the work I put in, or should I also be entitled to claim some dividends for setting up the business and putting my capital into acquiring the original tools and raw materials we needed to get started? Corporations are just this story writ large.

"Technology is generated through labor" is simply stating the truism that you need work to create value;

All the capital in the work can't create value if there's nobody to do any work with the things that capital provides.

But providing the capital which workers need to work effectively should be rewarded, just the same as workers need to be rewarded. It's absolutely true that there are problems with how we reward capital vis-a-vis labour in a modern capitalist economy, and even laissez-faire classical liberals like Milton Friedman took issue with this (Friedman thought it was extremely unjust to tax corporate and investment income at different rates and through different mechanisms from wage income).

But these problems are not close in scale to the theft and blackmail which constituted the economic activity of feudal lords.

Your vote means even less than your words.

Dividends are interest paid on investment.

Value is added by the workers who create the product or the technology.

Shareholders are capitalists who have more money than they need to survive, and who invest the excess capital with an eye to even more rewards (i.e., dividends).

Capitalism itself is destroying the planet.

Downvote me 100 times if you like;

I didn't come here to garner votes, but to make you capitalists see how sick your money-as-value (or money as the ONLY value) system really is (as demonstrated by the current state of the economy and the country).

Dividends are interest paid on investment.

Value is added by the workers who create the product or the technology. Value is also added by whoever buys the workers the tools they need to do work.

Should workers always be expected to provide their own tools, or should we expect someone to specialise in the provision of tools?

If we opt for the latter, a capitalist economy is necessary.

If we opt for the former, we get an inefficient economy where each individual must be completely self-sufficient -- we might as well not call it an economy. Shareholders are capitalists who have more money than they need to survive, and who invest the excess capital with an eye to even more rewards (i.e., dividends). Let's say everyone earned only just enough to survive.

What would we do with the excess?

How would we distribute it?

Should we distribute it entirely equally?

That would be ideal, if we knew everyone would gain an equal benefit from this division.

But people are fundamentally unique;

I like peaches more than I like bananas, and there's somebody out there who likes bananas more than she likes peaches.

Is it fair to either of us to divide the bananas and peaches equally between the two of us? Then also note that people likewise have different skill sets and abilities.

If someone can only lay twelve bricks an hour earns the same as someone who can lay twenty-four an hour, would the person who earns twenty-four an hour still lay as many bricks?

Maybe, but not likely. Different levels of income and the consumption of different goods and services simply reflect these two fundamental things which stem from the uniqueness of each individual: they reflect different skill sets and different preferences. And to return to my original point, assuming we distribute all the surplus (i.e.

All the things beyond what each human needs to survive) equally between every individual, then we will have an inefficient level of new work creation.

If you give every person one hammer, some people will not have any use for it, and some others will want to start building homes, because they have different preferences and different skill sets.

It is obviously inefficient to distribute hammers in this way. The importance of capital in the economy is that people who work hard to accumulate things beyond what they need to survive can create more forms of new work -- they can build more computers, write more novels, anything they like.

All they need is capital, which must be initially accumulated from labour.

But after it has been accumulated, capital combines with labour to create new work. Capitalism itself is destroying the planet. Unfettered capitalism is unquestionably harmful and undesirable.

The cycle of poverty is very real, and although it is desirable to apportion rewards in accordance with individual skill sets and preferences, this often results in unjust situations where a poor child cannot eat or a sick person can never recover to work again. The important principle, I think, is equality of opportunity.

If you have unfettered capitalism, you will reach a situation where some people have far more opportunities than others, and this is obviously inefficient -- Einstein could not exist if not for his being born into a family which could afford to put him through school.

But socialism, by attempting to create equality of results, creates an equally unjust situation whereby people are not rewarded in accordance with their abilities and preferences.

There needs to be a balance. I didn't come here to garner votes, but to make you capitalists see how sick your money-as-value (or money as the ONLY value) system really is (as demonstrated by the current state of the economy and the country). Would you rather we switched to a barter economy?

Would that make you feel better, if we stopped placing numerical values on things?

I'm not being facetious or rhetorical -- these are serious questions. Economists are well aware that money is not a real form of value;

It is a representation of value that can only come close at some points to sort of describing the actual value we place on things.

You might be surprised by this, but it is standard economic orthodoxy that government intervention in the economy is necessary.

Most economists would agree that there should be a tax on pollution, and that some form of welfare is necessary.

Even many libertarian economists think the government should pick up at least some of the costs of healthcare, albeit through vouchers instead of directly controlling the healthcare system.

Pure capitalism and socialism are all-or-nothing propositions, but only fools think either of them constitute perfect ideals of virtue which we must aspire to in the real world.

The importance of capital in the economy is that people who work hard to accumulate things beyond what they need to survive can create more forms of new work - equal pay for equal work would be nice, but I work twice as hard as a stockbroker and make 1/10 the income because his "trade" is deemed more important, more valuable or more difficult (NOT, I work in stocks). A barter economy would make your stockbroker worth less than my farmer, which seems to me a more fair system of evaluation.

You can't eat stocks, and food is a necessity.

It would also distribute hammers only to those who need, and can use them. The bonuses at AIG and elsewhere have clarified the problem in a way you never can: these people are NOT worth the obscene amounts of money they are getting.

They never have been.

The CEO mystique has been engendered by people who believe knowledge is power only when it is held by a few individuals.

The rest of us know knowledge is power only when SHARED for the common good. No sense arguing.

You are a capitalist;

I am a socialist, and never the twain shall meet.

The importance of capital in the economy is that people who work hard to accumulate things beyond what they need to survive can create more forms of new work - equal pay for equal work would be nice, but I work twice as hard as a stockbroker and make 1/10 the income because his "trade" is deemed more important, more valuable or more difficult (NOT, I work in stocks). The first part is spot on, and I'm not sure what your problem is with that.

As for the second part, that's assuming all forms of work are created equal.

Maybe in your subjective judgement that is true, but for most people, it's quite clear that because of different preferences and skill sets, not everything will have quite the same value.

Some people are innately more talented at doing important things than others.

Being able to crumple paper into a perfectly spherical shape is a fantastic talent, but is it the same kind of work as heart surgery?

Maybe in your universe it is, but from my point of view, one kind of work is clearly better than the other. If you really do work in stocks and can't see why barter economies are almost invariably inefficient compared to monetised economies, I'm not surprised that the financial crisis happened -- the kind of people financial companies hire are even dumber than I thought they were.

The trouble with bartering is that it requires coincidence of wants and needs;

If I make hammers and you make nails, then I will trade you a hammer for a nail.

But what if the hammer is useless to you -- what if you don't know or want to know how to use a hammer, and don't know anyone else who does?

Then you won't take my hammers, and will trade nails with someone else.

How now, brown cow? In a monetised economy, the trade occurs anyway, because we use an abstraction which can take on many different concrete values as our medium of exchange.

I give you a rock or a coin for your nails, and I can get the same currency from someone else who actually needs hammers. Your idea that a barter economy would distribute hammers only to those who need and can use them is silly, because a barter economy is by definition limited to the number of people you personally know.

If you don't know anyone who needs hammers, why would you ever make them?

And yet, in a faraway village, they may need a lot of hammers to build furniture, but they don't know anyone who can trade them hammers.

Money makes this kind of trade possible because it allows such goods to pass through many hands before finding their final owner who can actually use them. You can argue that in a barter economy merchants would arise anyway, accepting all kinds of goods and trading all kinds of goods.

But then how is this different in any meaningful way from a capitalist economy? You also seem completely ignorant of the role that financial workers play in matching suppliers of capital to consumers of capital.

When I deposit my money in a bank, the bank invests my money to earn interest for me.

I'm happy, and so is the enterprise which can borrow my money to hire more workers or buy more machinery.

Financial workers -- and stockbrokers are no exception -- are just fundamentally doing this.

Their specialty is finding the right enterprises to invest in, just as my specialty might be directing chick flicks or teaching kindergarteners. Yes, there's no question that in a bubble economy, stupid shit goes down -- but the only difference now is that instead of people investing in tulips or harebrained schemes to colonise faraway lands, they invest in paper assets.

Bubbles arise in the stock market not because the stock market is inherently unworkable, but because people in markets are on some level fundamentally irrational.

There could be a bubble in bread or shelving if the right circumstances came together, and people began to believe bread or shelves are worth far more than they really are.

And I don't see how switching to a barter economy would solve this problem of irrationality either. The bonuses at AIG and elsewhere have clarified the problem in a way you never can: these people are NOT worth the obscene amounts of money they are getting.

They never have been.

The CEO mystique has been engendered by people who believe knowledge is power only when it is held by a few individuals.

The rest of us know knowledge is power only when SHARED for the common good. You can say the exact same thing about 17th century tulipmania.

That doesn't mean tulips are worth nothing.

Something might be overvalued, but that does not mean its true and correct value is zero. This ridiculous notion that every bubble somehow disproves the ability of capitalism to function (in spite of the fact that capitalist economies have recovered from each supposedly disastrous bubble) is really tantamount to some idiot saying that Cuba or North Korea constitute proof that all socialist ideas are bunk.

Value can be added by a sales pitch.

No, value is intrinsic.

That is, something is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.

Sales pitches (i.e., marketing) are a perversion of social theory, using psychology to sell worthless things to people who don't really need them (http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:EF1tyWZorBMJ:gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/7/143438/225+Gristmill+Salad+Shooters&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a).

Good decisions create as much value as anything else and they should be rewarded.

The trick is balancing the rewards for decisions that are good for both the community and the individual instead of just one or the other.

Successful feudal lords employed all the tools corporations use today, including capital.

Money was king even then.

I'd urge you to read a bit on how feudal lords raised money to fight neighbouring territories… How come Machiavelli is on the reading list of most MBAs?

Successful feudal lords employed all the tools corporations use today, including capital.

Money was king even then.

I'd urge you to read a bit on how feudal lords raised money to fight neighbouring territories… That's quite possibly one of the most silly analogies I've ever seen.

It's like saying cannibals and omnivores are essentially the same because they both eat, or that carpenters and brutal murderers are the same because they both use the same tools to hack up dead organisms. Feudal lords "earned" their keep by offering "protection" to their serfs.

They didn't do anything of real economic value;

They were no different than monopolist robber barons of the 19th century, or modern mafiosi. Capitalists earn their keep by saving up capital from earlier work they perform as labourers (capital does not come from nowhere).

They invest this capital in firms which can now provide better tools for their workers.

Capital and labour thus combine to create better work, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Both labour and capital are in turn rewarded for their contributions.

How is this at all similar to feudalism, beyond the superficial use of money as a store and measure of value? It's absolutely true that unchecked capitalism can and often does turn into feudalism.

But to say that capitalism is definitionally equivalent to feudalism is to completely overlook the distinctions and differences in how they operate.

Like you I have a dim view of the feudal system.

That doesn't mean however that the feudal system was totally wrong and all feudal lords were bad.

We see feudalism with the perspective of history.

Reading a bit about the Medici and their banking and proselytising with powerful lords and popes is not much different to what corporations and big business does today… Very large companies lose their perspective and everybody except the top becomes expendable fodder.

When these companies should be creating value for their customers and providing an empowering environment for their staff.

Except the Medici weren't primarily feudal lords.

It's true they eventually branched out into feudal activities, but the main source of their initial wealth was good banking and their innovative use of double-entry bookkeeping -- two ways of creating value. You're absolutely right that large corporations do become like the Medicis -- they branch out from capitalism into feudalism.

But this isn't an indictment of capitalism in general -- only pure and unfettered capitalism.

They were bank-rolling the Sforzas' military conquests, killing off all the competition in Florence, aiming for the papacy, conniving with the kings of Naples, creating a fiefdom out of a merchant city.

A city that was run like a corporation, with the top families enjoying their merchant and banking wealth, yet Lorenzo wanted everything for himself. They were the model of today's worst 'elite' families, who are willing to break society as long as they are on top.

The only difference is that the church doesn't get 10% anymore.

Pfff. the former was a fascist/capitalist hybrid, today is just socialism.

Today is just socialism. Socialism refers to state ownership and a society characterized by equality for all individuals, with a fair or egalitarian method of compensation. Until my salary rises to $700,000 a year like the CEO of AIG;

I wouldn't call it socialism.

You changed your comment. The definition of Socialism is the abolition of private property.

It makes no specification about who is taken from and who receives.

The number of people I have to explain this to is amazing.

I guess the definition of socialism differs as much as to how you apply it.

At the end of the day, the distinction between fascism, socialism, or any economic system that is centrally planned, is purely semantics.

The result is the same.

What we need is to use the terms socialism and socialistic properly.

The US does not have a system of socialism, but we do have some socialistic elements to our system of capitalism.

The U.S. is a mixed market economy.

That means, it is a mixture of private and government owned endeavors.

I would argue that it is still a form of capitalism, others would argue that it is a form of socialism. Appanouki is correct is saying that socialism does not necessarily mean government ownership.

In a socialist system you could have "private" businesses that are "owned" and ran by the employees or unions.

This could be done without any government interference, barring the necessary enforcement of laws that keep businesses from falling into the hands of non-employees or small groups of "owners".

I have no problem with private citizens voluntarily forming a socialist sub-society.

I just have a problem with socialism enacted by coercion.

Right, we should wait around for the ultrarich to decide to give up their power out of the goodness of their dear hearts.

Problem is, as we have seen throughout history, is the privileged few will always utilized their monopoly crush anything that challenges their control.

Thus, small pockets that defy this will never be successful for any significant amount of time.

If you have proof of a crime, then use the courts to recover damages, but don't think you are justified to arbitrarily rob every rich person of their property because you don't think it is fair.

In a society that respects property rights and exchange is voluntary, people only get rich by providing goods/services that the economy values - by definition.

People only exchange voluntarily because they subjectively value the property of the other above their own, thus all voluntary exchanges necessarily increase the wealth of society, and conversely all forced exchanges do not.

A good measure of how socialist a country is is the ratio of GDP to government spending. America is definitely near the top of socialist countries.

Beware the wikipedia ranking only includes federal spending.

Which is far worse than the pure version of either.

The definition of Socialism is the abolition of private property. Quick you better go tell this to the people of these countries , so they can turn all of their privately held property over to the state.

There is such a thing as Democratic Socialism .

Two things: 1) Direct taxation essentially grants people their own property.

Since the decision about what part of their property they are allowed to keep is not theirs, many people argue that this is basically a nullification of their property rights.

So any country with an income, capital gains, etc tax should technically be considered socialist. 2) The method of delegation in socialism is pretty much unimportant.

At the end of the day, centrally planned economies do not fail because of bad leadership, or a lack of democracy, they fail because they attempt to replace the price mechanism with, well anything you want really - it will always be deficient.

Centrally planned economies fail because they are planned centrally.

The managers and workers at the actual site have no incentive to improve things. This has nothing to do with socialism or communism as such.

I guess you can find large corporations still chugging along that are as bad, if not worst than the centrally planned economies of the old USSR…

No, centrally planned economies fail because there is no economic calculation. Without private property being exchanged voluntarily, there are no prices representing the subjective values of economic actors in the economy, which means there is no profit and loss feedback mechanism for managers of resources and thus no economic calculation. That's why all communist countries are littered with abandoned capital.

They built the wrong stuff.

Feudalism

Too bad siphoning wealth to the american worker from the financial elite just does not end well.

After the American civil war, an amendment to free all the slaves was introduced and passed.

It said that no restriction on liberty could be applied, so corporate lawyers argued at the US supreme court that the business they were representing should be turned from companies to persons, legal entities.

Once it was done, corporation would be granted the same act of freedom that was made for the slaves.

Freedom without responsibility.

The perfect crime. A fictional person that can make/take money, but can never be imprisoned for wrongdoing, never be drafted, never be put on a witness stand... I wonder if there's a way to exploit that...

Unequal Protection

If you think this is true then please join us over at the socialism reddit.

We'd love to have you. http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/

If you think that's true, your comments would be much better targeted to the "Willing-Serf" subreddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/Willing-Serf subreddit. We'd love to have you.

Oh, and megadittos.

Look at how clever you think you are.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics didn't turn out too well. Neither did the National Socialist German Workers' Party. True Socialism is a fraud, because it's just used as propaganda to energize the masses into yet another screwjob.

The German socialist party was only that in name.

Just like The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is only democratic in name.

It was a Fascist party in reality.

There is a difference. The Soviet union was a failure in many ways and its end effect was essentially a state monopoly over its citizens.

This is true and I will not deny it. However, just because socialism failed once before under a certain set of conditions at a certain point in time does not necessarily mean that socialism is a complete failure.

Capitalism has failed in many places as well.

Pointing that out only means that I can cherry pick my data well and it doesn't prove anything. Capitalism is a fraud, because it tricks the masses into believing it benefits them all directly when it clearly only really benefits the few.

"The German socialist party was only that in name.

" Most things are.That's kind of my point. Socialism requires handing over power to a central authority, and that's a recipe for disaster. "Capitalism is a fraud, because it tricks the masses into believing it benefits them all directly when it clearly only really benefits the few." You're confusing capitalism with our monopolistic financial system.

The communists in the USSR, when Paranoid Stalin ousted the Trotskyists became a command and control society with the resultant stifling of entrepreneurship, innovation and self-improvement for personal gain. Socialism had nothing to do with it.

The real damage is done because of a merger of business and government.

It's not because corporations are inherently evil or that there is some nefarious plot whereby the rich force upon the poor and middle classes some sort of unfair working arrangement. Think about this - it was a merger of business and government that initially tried to financially punish black people (instituting mandatory minimum cab fees and refusing to insure cars used in carpooling) for boycotting the buses after the Rosa Parks incident. Today it's used to grant monopolies, no bid contracts, keep ailing businesses afloat, and eliminate entire industries.

It reduces competition by creating "high barriers for entry" on jobs that would otherwise be easy to compete.

During this "housing bubble", the people supposed to be watching Wall Street were lining their pockets. The risk isn't "Robber Barons," the risk is a new class of political elites who have extensive ties to business.

I'm glad someone gets it.

Well said.

Yes thank you for telling the truth.

The problem is the coercive nature of government, not the profit seeking behaviour of corporations.

You tickled my sarcus bone

No, during the "progressive" era, political power was QUCKLY amassed by corporations, creating a new class of super-wealthy robber barons.

Your public school "history" of corporate America is a lie.

Read A New History of Leviathan and see how it's a matter of PUBLIC RECORD that the progressive movement was a movement toward cartelization via regulation.

To blame Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR for the rise of the corporation is ludicrous.

The seeds were sewn long before the 20th century began.

By the time the progressive movement was in full swing, it was already too late.

It didn't matter whether the progressives favored or fought against corporate power.

Corporate power was going to win, because America was falling in love with consumerism and the pursuit of wealth through investment. Please tell me you're not part of the revisionist movement that is trying to blame liberals and Democrats for the economic mess we're in now.

All humans are consumerist because all humans are rational actors who, by definition, seek ends via means.

The means by which we directly achieve our ends are called "consumption goods".

To cease to seek consumption would be to cease to seek ends which would be to cease to be human.

You probably have a problem with CERTAIN ends and CERTAIN consumption goods.

If so, you should state which those are. Regarding investment: A has an idea for satisfying the needs of population B, but not the resources for delivering the product.

C invests in A's enterprise in exchange for some of the profits.

If C listened to justjim73 and did not pursue wealth through investment, A, B, and C would all be poorer. Please tell me you're not part of the revisionist movement that is trying to blame liberals and Democrats for the economic mess we're in now. The mess we're in now is the fault of both liberals and conservatives, and both Democrats and Republicans.

Almost everyone alive today has a backwards understanding of economics.

You must be an economic troll, because anyone with half a brain would have known that I was not saying we should never consume and never invest.

But we can get too involved to the personal pursuit of each of these things to the detriment of the community. And I agree with your last point.

Resources are only well allocated by people making decisions using their own pocketbooks and responding to prices and profit/loss signals.

And the welfare of the community is wholly dependent on resources being well allocated. But we can get too involved to the personal pursuit of each of these things to the detriment of the community. We are too involved with regulating the community (for the sake of (a) benefitting the government and corporate elites and (b) assuaging the anti-business feelings of economically illiterate communitarians) to the detriment of each one of us figuring out how to most effectively allocate resources and thereby improve all of our lives.

"To blame Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR for the rise of the corporation is ludicrous." I most certainly blame FDR for Wickard v.

Filburn, and so would anyone else who knows what they're talking about. "Please tell me you're not part of the revisionist movement that is trying to blame liberals and Democrats for the economic mess we're in now." Please tell me that you're not part of the Democratic revisionist movement seeking to make Democrats look innocent for the last 40 years.

No, I place equal blame on both parties for the rise of the corporate-capitalist state, a process which involved a long series of business-friendly presidents, business-friendly court decisions, and business-friendly legislation. The trouble is, Democrats and Republicans are so busy warring with each other, they think that all views which don't match their own must be from the other major party.

There is a whole world of ideas and possibilities for our economy that lies beyond the tyranny of the 2-party system.

To blame Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR for the rise of the corporation is ludicrous. No, its not.

These guys were right in the middle of it.

Of course, let's not leave Hoover out.

Really though, WW gets a large chunk of the blame. In the late 19th century, the robber barons did acquire massive amounts of power (the subsidy on national banking helped assist this with basically guaranteed returns).

But it was in the early 20th century that protecting this centralized wealth & power became a matter of federal law and "national security." There's a big difference between a large corporation with lots of assets, and a big corporation that controls armies, tax collectors, and prisons.

And yes, it was done under the guise of a "progressive" movement, the people wouldn't have agreed to this if they weren't focused on the other side of the deal: working safety conditions, women's suffrage, etc...

Since the 14th amendment gave corporations the right to own property and equal protection under the law, does that mean we can blame the blacks for the current corporate plutocracy? Anyone see the movie The Corporation ?

I abhor the 14th amendment, but I don't blame blacks for this.

They were the 9/11 cause that lead to the Patriot Act 14th Amendment.

Therefore I don't blame 9/11 for the Patriot Act, nor can I blame blacks for the 14th.

The submitted title is almost as long as the content the original author typed into his text box.

The rest were Quote: s by someone else. Give me a break.

I got stuck on the word "beared" in the first sentence.

This is why I don't understand the hatred towards Socialism or Communism.

If your going to be controlled by someone, it might as well be someone who you can elect. It was once thought that Communism was an idealistic belief;

We as democracies have constant recessions with intermittent depressions, and plenty of corrupt "elected" executives. In a country with such a large population, a capitalistic democracy is what is the idealistic belief.

Let us make the final leap, let us not be controlled by greedy business men, but a leader who has everyone's best interest at heart! Long Live Mothbeast!

Http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=the%20corporation&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#




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