Climate, technology and chaos Blog

This is a continuation of the previous post on ‘Praxeology’. But its self-sufficient, you don’t have to read the other post.

This post is just a series of questions about markets to those who believe in the possible existence of ‘free markets’ and the virtues of corporate ‘free markets’. The indented parts are usually comments on the questions.

Questions

Does wealth give power? Does this power increase with increasing inequalities of wealth?

• If people have less wealth it could seem they have less power and less ability to influence others, or buy the services of others.
• Great wealth is one of the things that gives States power.

Does capitalism magnify differences in wealth? Does it lead to accumulation of differences in wealth? [Perhaps due to inheritance laws?]

• Are there systems which act to prevent accumulating differences in wealth?

Do wealthy people and businesses normally team up to get even more co-ordinated power and market control?

• As far as I can see, the corporation has its origin in this capacity of people to team up to support individual and collective interests. If people were just ‘isolated individuals’ then we would not have corporations, or families, etc.
• States could likewise originate in both team ups and fractures.

Do some corporations currently have assets and resources greater than some countries?

• Are corporations are as big and powerful as some States?

Do corporations and wealthy people get priority access to politicians and government, to put their views on how governments should behave?

• Is there a form of ‘government’ in which other people might get priority of access?

Does wealth buy lobbyists, whose job is to influence government policies?

• and who sometimes end up running government departments?

Does wealth enable the wealthy to buy politicians through donations of money and labour to the campaigns of those politicians, or by promising well paid easy jobs to them after they retire from politics?

Does wealth allow people to fund the semblance of political activity, and give a false impression of what is popular?

• Astro-turfing, push polling, bought trolling and votes etc.

Do Big business and government naturally ally? Who is likely to be dominant and under what circumstances?

Does wealth buy positive ‘information’ through the funding of think tanks, or university research centres, which primarily exist to justify ideology and research which supports the interests of wealth?

• A think tank is never surprising. It is run on the market principle of giving the backers what they want, to continue to get being paid.

Do corporate lobbyists make use of this think tank information to influence the ways that people and politicians see and understand the world?

• Hypothesis. Information whether true, false, or partial, influences the way people seek to act in the world. If you control the information a person accepts then you have some control over how they act, and what they will support. Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, is not a minor consideration in social life. It is nearly always present in communication.
• States also frequently try to control the means of information and the content of information.

Have corporations acted as major sponsors of ‘free market’ thinking since the 1930s, and can we hypothesise that one reason is because they find it useful to help maintain their power?

Do wealthy people and corporations own and control media (large and small), and hence control the information that the media circulates, does not circulate?

• Does this create what passes for common sense and ethical behaviour?

Does wealth buy the law? Not just which laws that get passed by the government, but the actual legal process itself and the lawyers to execute it, making taking on a corporation way too expensive for most ordinary people?

• It seems hard to challenge a corporation in law. It could be even harder to imagine how you would challenge a corporation without law and a State to enforce it.
• Obviously States can also try to own and control the law for their own convenience.

Do corporations often have mobility which enables them to set up wherever the conditions are best for them, and thus have States bidding for their presence, by lowering demands or regulations on those corporations?

• This seems well demonstrated to me.
• States are rarely that motile. Most people who can leave a State’s area of land, will be left alone by that State, but not always.

Do small States, imply that people can probably make less resistance against corporate power, by attempting to take control of the State?

How do people control a corporation without being able to purchase heaps of shares? ie do wealthy people and organisations end up being the only ones who can have impactful input into a corporation?

Does wealth allow people to buy violence, organised or otherwise?

• People can make money from being mercenaries. We can also think of the East India Company, the Opium war, and the dispossession of indigenous people by business, which seems to imply violence could become a normal part of trade, or of setting up points of trade.
• States also usually try to gain the power of organised violence.

Do jobs (which are the mainstream way of surviving in capitalism) usually involve submission to the employer, and therefore not encourage liberty in daily life?

Who constrains your daily life more, your boss or your government?

Are jobs a cost, so that it is in the apparent interest of any particular corporation to lower that cost, or dispose of jobs, to increase profit?

Does death or sickness from pollution tend to be distributed to poorer areas of the country or the world?

Is this distribution of pollution affected by the corporate advocacy for laws, and buying of laws, which enable them to pollute or suffer no consequences from making pollution and poisoning people and environments?

Is not polluting and not destroying those environments subject to extraction a cost, so that it is logically in the interest of any particular corporation to lower that cost and increase pollution and destruction?

Does liberty for the wealthy ever impinge on the liberty of the less wealthy, because of inequalities of power and resources?

Given the inequalities of wealth, power and survival is it possible that all exchange in a capitalist market is inevitably voluntary and equally satisfying for all participants?

Do corporations and the wealthy try and engineer the existence of governments that will allow them to structure the market to help them survive and prosper?

Do corporations aim to get taxpayer subsidies, if they are doing badly for some reason?

Is all trade the same as corporate capitalism?

• If not, in what ways do they differ?

Is corporate monopoly bad? If not why not?

• Does free market theory end up supporting monopoly and more corporate power?

Is corporate planning bad?

• If corporate planning is not bad, then why is government planning bad?

Do corporations not care about ordinary people, or the so called ‘90%’?

• Should anything make them care?

Does capitalism need a State to enforce property rights, hierarchies, wealth inequalities, contract, law, favourable order, labour and so on?

• If so, then corporate capitalism will never not have a State which exists to support it, help it, and be taken over by the wealthy.

Is it likely that hyper-wealthy people will team up to set up states, to protect their perceived interests?

Do corporations, themselves, involve government over participants, power differentials, formal organisation, planning, internal economic transactions and so on?

• It seems that businesses can resemble States, without a necessary basis in a country.

Can you tell me any basis of Government power which is not also possessed by the corporate sector as a whole, or by a corporation?

• It seems to me, that if you object to governments then you should object to corporations, or at least to corporations over a certain size.
• Corporations may fail, but so may governments. It does not necessarily change the system, or bring liberty.

Conclusion

If people continue to support free markets, which is their right of course, I would just ask them to consider the high probability that free markets are not free, and are never going to remain free, while we have vast inequalities of wealth, and while we have corporate forms of organisation and planning.

It seems plausible, that when we have these forms of organisation being dominant, then we have the possibility of a growing tyranny of wealth or plutocracy. Under those circumstances, the demand for free markets seems to be largely a demand to get out of the way of corporate and wealth power and action, and to be subject to that power and action.

If anyone really wants free markets then we probably have to start from scratch, not only destroying the State, but destroying the power of the mini-State, which makes up the corporation, and the plutocracy which makes States. If we don’t do that then it seems probable that we will just get increasing power of the wealth elites, and their liberty will remove your own.

No neoliberal is ever going to suggest that corporations are as deadly to liberty as States, because the whole function of their argument is an attempt to increase corporate power and plutocracy.

Tags: economics, free markets, neoliberalism

This entry was posted on December 15, 2020 at 2:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.