The Government, Corporations, and the People
Yet another balance of power that must be maintained
Most people are aware (or should be) of the balance of power kept between our executive branch (the President), the legislative branch (the Senate and the House), and the judiciary (the Supreme Courts). If not, pick up the Constitution or the Federalist Papers today!
This is far from the only place where power needs to be balanced. The Founding Fathers thought carefully about how to balance power between the National Government and the States, between the Senate and the House of Representatives, and more. One can attribute much of our success as a country to the fact that power is so distributed by design here such that we haven’t suffered a dictator and have had less corruption than most parts of the world.
But these balances must be forever tweaked and maintained. Many observers have noted the growing power of the Presidency relative to other branches. This was first noted by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in 1973, but it has escalated recently with increasing numbers of executive actions taken starting with George W. Bush but being escalated by each President since then.
That is a lot of preamble, but we’re actually going to focus on a different balance of power: the balance between the Government, Corporations, and the People.
A healthy tension is necessary between these three. If any one gets too powerful or any two of these get too cozy with each other they will strangle the other. Let’s briefly consider each option.
The Government and the People
If the Government and the People get too cozy, you face a populist government that will inevitably blame corporations for all of society’s ills and will pass burdensome regulations that will slowly squeeze out industry. You often see this in Communist or Socialist takeovers of countries that almost always end in poverty and famine.
The People and the Corporations
If the People and Corporations get too cozy, you face a weak government that won’t have the ability to pass necessary regulations and a basic safety net. While I am a libertarian relative to the current governmental bloat, I can still recognize the value of a government in passing and enforcing some of these basic protections. This has been admittedly rare in the modern era, but is worth considering.
The Government and the Corporations
Last but certainly not least, we have places where the Government and Corporations get too cozy. This, in a word, is fascism: a merger of state and corporate power that inevitably degrades the rights and bargaining power of the people. Large companies can team up with the government with a shared wink between them to do the things that the government can’t.
As you might expect, this last one is the scenario I want to dig into more, as it is the one that we are closest to today. Is the U.S. a fascist country? No. But are we trending in that direction? Absolutely.
This has been happening for a while, but the Biden Administration has taken it up a notch and has been, unequivocally, the most fascist administration in American history.
Let’s corroborate that a bit. Without excusing the sins of previous administrations (of which there are plenty), Biden has taken American fascism to a new level in a few ways:
Vaccine mandates - when the Federal government realized it would have a hard time applying mandates directly, they leaned into companies: first by asking/telling them to do so (and many companies obliged) and then by a blatantly unconstitutional OSHA mandate on any company more than 100 people.
But note: most companies didn’t fight back at all. Many welcomed the offloading of a tough decision and gladly applied these mandates and coerced people to poison themselves or lose their job.Censorship - the evidence coming out of Twitter now that Elon is in charge is clear: Twitter acted as a subsidiary of the Federal Government, particularly the FBI, to systematically censor the American people. Google (which owns YouTube), Facebook, and others are absolutely involved in the same game. Together, they all colluded with democratic-leaning bureaucrats to unduely influence the 2020 election (and who knows how many prior). Don’t believe me? They even bragged about it!
Ukraine - I’ve heard all the talking points, but the evidence is clear: funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into Ukraine doesn’t do anything other than harm the American people by plummeting us further into debt. It does, however, do a lot for defense contractors, who have grubby little lobbyists floating all around D.C. with both parties. Together, they collude with the U.S. government to defraud the American people. They’ve done it in the past, they are doing it now, and they’ll do it again.
And I could go on. The fact is that the federal tentacles have been guiding companies for a while, and less and less regard is being taken as to whether or not those actions are aligned to the will and interest of the American people. Just take green regulations as another example. Do you want low-flow shower heads to save the planet? No? They don’t care. The government will control and corporations sense another opportunity to take advantage of their influence to guarantee regulatory capture.
We’ll be exploring this thread a bit more in coming weeks, so stay tuned for more!