Positive Liberty

Anthony Gregory, writing for the Future of Freedom Foundation, provides a good summation of the problem of Corporatism (an ill that has plagued both the Republican and the Democratic parties in America)…

Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism”… which is in fact a common adversary of the free marketer and the anti-corporate leftist…

Indeed, corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts — inflicts great harm on the modern American economy. Although [progressives] often misunderstand the fundamental problem plaguing the economy, they at least recognize its symptoms.

Conservatives and many libertarians, on the other hand, frequently dismiss many ills such as poverty as fabricated by the left-liberal imagination, when in fact it does a disservice to the cause of liberty and free markets to defend the current system and ignore very real and serious problems, which are often caused by government intervention in the economy. We should recognize that state corporatism is a [variant] of socialism, and it is nearly inevitable in a mixed economy that the introduction of more socialism [or corporatism] will cartelize industry and consolidate wealth in the hands of the few.

[Progressives] usually understand how wartime provides politically connected corporations with high profits and cushy contracts. What is more often neglected is that the history of the American domestic welfare and regulatory state also corresponds closely to the rise of corporatism. It is no coincidence.

…the Progressive Era was a time in which both corporatism and socialism received major steroid injections.

Corporate interests pushed through the most significant Progressive-Era government reforms in order to guarantee profits, which they had been losing to smaller businesses that had emerged in the relatively free market of the early 20th century. Gabriel Kolko’s groundbreaking book The Triumph of Conservatism best advances this thesis of how the government expanded to accommodate, rather than curb, the interests of big business. Though a New Leftist, Kolko shows how political capitalists in every industry — from meatpacking to coal, from railroads to insurance — embraced the expanding regulatory state for their own gain — to push competitors out of the market and give government legitimacy to their companies.
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In more recent years, corporate interests have often cheered on big government programs, often the same ones championed by those who consider themselves anti-corporate. In the late 1990s, the now-defunct Enron was one of the largest lobbying influences behind the international Kyoto Treaty, which would have forced the world to comply with a ghastly web of new regulations and would have meant large energy contracts for Enron, had the company not gone bankrupt…

Bush’s farm subsidies are direct welfare for the biggest agricultural corporations, and his protectionist trade policies are indirect welfare for politically favored businesses. His recent expansion of Medicare has been both the greatest augmentation of the American welfare state in decades and a giveaway to large pharmaceutical corporations. If universal health care ever comes to America, the corporations are likely to stay intact but will no longer have to satisfy customers, only the politicians.

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