A Brief Explanation Of Corporatism & Why Its Bad News For Individual Liberty
From Fr33 Agents
Throughout a great deal of my blog postings, you’ll likely read an awful lot of pretty fierce criticism of corporatism, often referred to on this blog as ‘the corporatist interest’ or the ‘Military Industrial Complex’, but obviously not everybody is enlightened as to what corporatism happens to be and so here is an attempt to give a brief explanation. As well as this being a brief explanation of what corporatism happens to be, this is also an explanation as to why it is I campaign hard against corporatism.
Corporatism is basically fascism. To quote Benito Mussolini that man who pioneered fascism: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” With that quote Mussolini clearly explained that fascism in the strictest of definitions is corporatism. But though corporatism is pretty much fascism, the problem with the contemporary political zeitgeist is that fascism has taken on different connotations and therefore it’s preferable to say the system of political governance we live under is corporatism. However, it wouldn’t be melodramatic to say we live in a fascist state.
For those who deny that we live in either a fascist or corporatist state I’d remind them of Mussolini’s quote. Doesn’t the merger of state and corporate power sound awfully familiar to the system of governance that we currently have, particularly in Europe, Japan and of course the US.
We all know that that the corporatist interest gets favours from governments, and if the corporatist interest doesn’t it will bribe or bully until it does. Many of us have woken up to the reality that in many ways government is pretty much just a front for corporate power. Whatever the corporatist interest wants then governments will merely doing their bidding, whether its screwing up the environment or waging war.
Afghanistan, Iraq, the war on terrorism, the rise of fundamentalism, the dumbing down of the mass media, the loss of liberty, all of which in can be attributed to corporatist greed to a lesser or greater degree. This is neither the opinion of a conspiracy nut an anti-capitalist lefty militant.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to work out this stuff out nor do you have to be some anti-capitalist lefty to be a critic of the corporate interest.
Libertarians and anarcho-capitalists have often been accused of either supporting corporatism kind of by default because they vigorously support free market capitalism.
Writing as somebody who could be described as libertarian I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, libertarians support free markets but they support there being a free market unfettered by government, and in the case of anarcho-capitalists without there being government at all!
Libertarians support a free market where everybody has far greater freedom of opportunity to sell their goods and services. If there is a free market unfettered from government intervention, then corporations wouldn’t get protection and favours from government, therefore businesses as in corporations wouldn’t be as monolithic, which would free up the free market for more businesses to offer goods and services, which would benefit the consumer as there would be more competing in the free market then the free market would be more competitive thus benefiting the consumer.
Libertarians do not support the present phoney capitalistic system we have at the moment which is in fact fascistic. Libertarians definitely don’t support the present system where the corporatist interest has the apparatus of government to manipulate the market in their favour, keeping the little man down. This is why libertarians absolutely oppose corporate welfare which government dishes out because it perpetrates the fascistic state and the loss of liberty.
Whereas libertarians staunchly oppose corporate welfare, both the mainstream left and right support some form of corporate welfare, whether it be subsidies, tax breaks, legislative favouritism or diverting justice. Whether Labour or Conservative or Democrat or Republican they support corporate welfare and therefore the fascistic state because they are more or less owned by the corporatist interest. If elected representatives ever did represent the little man, they certainly no longer do; they only represent whoever bribes them the most and therefore owns them the interests of corporate power.
Corporatism is a threat individual liberty and a threat to individual sovereignty, as when there are governmental executives, legislative bodies and judiciaries under the heavy influence of corporate power. The ability for an individual to say no to being controlled and enslaved is seriously under threat from the corporate power and corporate greed; for the corporatist interest doesn’t want you to be an individualist capable of free choice but an obedient automaton. The corporatists want you to be an obedient worker automaton as well as an obedient consumer automaton. The corporatists want to enslave you, and if you don’t see it then you’re already being enslaved.
I see the enslavement coming from the corporatist interest and that’s why I will fight corporatism: because I want to be a free individual able to choose for myself. I fight it because I want a society based on free minds and free markets; because I want a world where humanist endeavour profits and the individualist free spirit flourishes.
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@Mr. King
I believe our system has the seeds of it’s own destruction built into it. Watch my friends video presentation on “The Solution.”
http://www.reboottherepublic.com/blog/liberty/video-the-solution-and-the-future-of-liberty-by-schaeffer-cox/
How do we stop corporatism? Should we start asking questions that lead to restoring power to the people. Questions like these…
Do we need a Referendum For A New Democracy?
Are you concerned about the future of democracy? Do you feel democracy is under attack by extreme greed in countries around the world? Are you sick and tired of: living in fear, corporate greed, growing police state, government for the rich, working more but having less?
Can we use both elections and random selection (in the way we select government officials) to rid democracy of undue influence by extreme wealth and wealth-dominated mass media campaigns?
The world’s first democracy (Athenian democracy, 600 B.C.) used both elections and random selection. Even Aristotle (the cofounder of Western thought) promoted the use random selection as the best way to protect democracy. The idea of randomly selecting (after screening) juries remains from Athenian democracy, but not randomly selecting (after screening) government officials. Why is it used only for individual justice and not also for social justice? Who wins from that? …the extremely wealthy?
What is the best way to combine elections and random selection to protect democracy in today’s world? Can we use elections as the way to screen candidates, and random selection as the way to do the final selection? Who wins from that? …the people?