In my work I often come across people writing something like:
There’s a category of people, often found mollycoddled inside government institutions such as universities, for whom “more government” is the answer to absolutely every problem.
This annoys me.
For one, in my entire and pretty lengthy life, I have never met anyone who thinks the answer to anything is “more government”. Never. It is a completely false accusation.
There are, however, a large number of people who object to giving all governmental power to the corporate sector (as is the usual results of actions by those who supposedly support ‘small government’), and there are those who think that ‘the people’ should be able to participate in their own government and challenge corporate dominance.
As you might expect both positions are easily misrepresented by people who work for the dominant powers who heavily fund think tanks and now permeate the university system. We might even say, by those cosseted by capitalism, for thinking ‘righteously’. They can pretend that wanting to be able to challenge corporate dominance, is a call for more government, knowing that hardly anyone will protest in favour of more government, once it is framed that way. This is also fundamentally dishonest.
The real questions are: do you want input into the government, do you want to participate in government, or do you want to leave it to the corporately sponsored and paid for elites? Do you want to keep wondering why government decisions always seem to benefit that class, or do you want to do something about it?
Capitalism appears to inherently intertwine itself into the State, resulting in more liberty for corporations, and more oppressive government for everyone else, unless it is challenged. At least I do not know of a historical circumstance in which this is not true. The fact that other systems can be even worse, does not disprove this.
We need to challenge these glib pro-corporate memes which try and construct corporate interests and peoples interests as always the same and always coinciding only with corporate interests, and replace them with ones that reflect reality.
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