I fear an oppresive government much more than I fear any corporation. Government can use force. It can literally send guys with guns out in the middle of the night and toss you in jail. It can seize all your assets, freeze you bank accounts, it can literally kill you.
Fearing one does not remove the fear of the other. Nor does fear of one negate the ability to curttail the actions of the other.
This is a line of argument that is used, and misused, often. It ignores the glaring fact that not all government restrictions are oppressive, will become oppressive or will hurt individual freedoms. That line of thinking is, more often than not, used to scare people into thinking that something precious will be denied them. Which is a load of shit.
Good government isn't about building walls that prevent good government from happening, Mad. There are ways, which exist (which actually used to exist in this nation) that allowed the government (an extension of us) to prevent extremely powerful organizations from harming individuals. This, and precisely THIS is the root purpose of government. By stripping our government of the ability to do its root job, we've empowered equally destructive forces to do harm to individual citizens.
Yeah, I get the "fear of big government" deal. I'm a libertarian. But even the competitive protections that would ensure mega corporations not exercise their "mega" powers have been removed. Good regulation, Mad, does not equate to tyranny and falling back on that line is. . . well it's either purposely deceptive or blatantly ignorant. Was it tyranny when the US ended slavery, child labor, or passed the anti-trust act? Was it tyranny when the US began regulating the food industry so that "shit" couldn't be canned and sold to people? Was it tyranny when the federal government forced the states to adopt health codes for public facilities that ended typhoid? No.
This, like leftist arguments, is an extremist one; bent on making people afraid of the very thing that can, and should, make their lives better. It's not a prescription for more welfare, universal health care or curtailing individual freedoms. It's about regulating those things which government aught to do because some things cannot be regulated totally by a free market, or by individual choices.
No body wants to acknowledge the elephant in the room: people are stupid. Human beings, as individuals make horrific choices. We succumb to temptation, sign away our futures to debtors, and destroy our lives on the newest marketing ploy. Good government is not about telling people what they can and cannot say. It's about telling powerful entities what they can and cannot say and do to people.
Tell me, do you really, HONESTLY think that Americans are going to begin getting thinner any time soon? No. You don't. People getting "fat" is not, in any way, caused by "government". It's caused by the absolute fact that we were evolved to hunt and eat. There was a time when food was so scarce that a whole segment of our brain evolved to ensure that we NEVER were far from food and that food was NEVER, EVER, EVER far from our waking thoughts. This mechanism, is so powerful, that MOST human beings cannot consciously fight it for more than a short time. Companies like McDonald's, Hostess and M&M/Mars know this. This weakness is being so exploited that a health epidemic is approaching, the likes of which will LITERALLY contribute to the collapse of our society. IF you doubt this, consider even the most conservative costs involved in dealing with adult obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, respiratory issues, lost wages, poor parental involvement in their children's lives. Now consider those costs 50 years from now when more than half of the population of the USA will be over 45 years old. The taxes and insurance costs to deal with THOSE factors alone will be more than anything a stable society will be able to bear.
But, FREE SPEECH WINS. For free speech's sake. And PERISH the thought that we exercise an ounce of prevention in order to prevent what will surely be many hundred's of pounds of cure. Simple: restrict the adverts of toxic foods; place a tax on those foods that is directed towards public health. Yes, I'm not stupid. I know that powerful governments use taxes for all sorts of nefarious things, but again, this is about a balancing act. The choice is: the collapse of society because of the stupidity of individuals in the face of corporate greed Vs. what? Big government? Big government is on it's way, NO MATTER WHAT, and possibly quicker if we do nothing. People vote with their stomachs, and when they start dying from all the diseases I mentioned, and nobody will cover their costs; big government WILL step in, no matter how much we fight it, and take over.
A small amount of "big government" now, will prevent many future whoas. In those future times, don't fool yourself into thinking that the government won't curtail individual rights to get its tax dollars to pay for all the dead and dying people caused by corporate greed now.
Now are mega international corporations worthy of some concern as well, of course. The worst situation of all is the union of government with mega-corporations. Where does the individual turn then?
It turns to the extension of the individual: good government. IT can be achieved through good, honest investment in good honest government. A few handy constitutional amendments would help. Will there still be corrupt government? Yes, but we've never even
tried, Mad. Never. The smallest possibility gets lost in the battle between "right" and "left" and for once I'm inclinde to agree (in only a small way) with the left: government is, sometimes, the answer. The Right has set up a self fulfilling prophesy: All Government Is Bad!!! Allow the Congress to create a body to help regulate something that needs regulating, then never fund it and allow cronies to be appointed to it (thus allowing Bernie Madoff scandals; Bush appointee: WIN!) and then when it fails, hold it out as an example of how big government always fails. Not really honest, is it? Then, when someone tries to actually make government work for the people, they are labeled as "big government proponents", examples of all the times government failed to do something right are trumpeted, and the idiotic fool's race continues. Funding a government oversight agency to its minimal needs and actually appointing reasonably talented people to those posts actually makes good government work. That is, I know, a tall order, and one that is worth fighting and NOT giving up on. But we are doing the exact opposite. Not only are we weakening those agencies which act on our behalf to defend us from those who would do us harm; we are actually enshrining freedoms and powers for those would-be harm-doers on a regular basis. It's like we WANT to be harmed. IT's like we want chaos!
As to freedom of speech, I think we need more, not less. Look at what two 20 year old kids did to the giant corporation, one with extensive ties to government no less, known as Acorn. They kicked it in the balls and caused congress to cut off its funding and the census to cut off all ties. How was that possible? Freedom of speech.
Mad. You know I'm
not talking about that. I'll chalk this up to either my poor communication or an oversight on your part. I just said, curtailing individual freedoms is NOT any way to build a good society. In fact, it is because of individuals that this society continues. I'm talking about curtailing the actions of organizations, like ACORN (amongst a host of thousands of others who do much worse, like P&G who get a pass to dump tonnes of junk in the Ohio river each year, like Burger King for marketing toxic foods to children [seeding the "fatassed-ness" of this nation] or corporate farms who are allowed to re-feed dead cattle to living cattle to help "fatten" them up). Furthermore, it is possible to acheive this goal while not harming individual freedoms, much to the contrary of people who think that limiting corporate power somehow means limiting individual power. A simple, law (or constitutional amendment as I would prefer) that states plainly: "Non government organizations of any variety, for profit or not, containing more than 100 individuals, employees, advisers or associates, or which has an annual revenue of more than 100 times the per-capita income of the USA (as determined the year before by such government agency as the Congress may, from time to time, deem to create) is not guaranteed the same freedoms as individual citizens. The Congress and the several states shall have congruent power in enforcing this amendment."
But we both know what intelligent people already know, but of which few of us speak: our society is doomed. It's going to end within fifty years. Humans may well survive, but we are fast approaching a point where individual organizations will have more power than governments. Where the proliferation of knowledge and power will be so great that each of them may have the ability to decide the fate of all of humanity, each as individual organizations. We don't want to admit this because it's too gloomy. People who risk talking too much about it are shunned, even ostracized, but it's coming and there's little any of us can do about it except, empower our government to do what it was actually created to do.
Now imagine some campaign finance regulator decided that politically motivated sting operations like that are polical contributions and must register with the FEC and comply with a million different federal regulations or be thrown in jail. What would the result of that be? To shut them down and protect those same giant corporations that you are concerned with.
Well, that starts with good regulation. I'm for throwing out our constitution as it is and re-writing it. I think that individual agencies should be headed by an executive and an executive committee to which any organization can appeal if the findings of the agency is deemed malicious. Not perfect, but a good start. Our needs and abilities as a society and individuals has far outstirpped our constitution's ability to deal with them. It doesn't have to be wordier, but our government framework is out dated. The only reason we keep it now is out of nostalgia, which is utterly ridiculous because it's like the old junker that dad keeps around because it was his first car. It's inefficient, pollutes, and just doesn't run right, but we keep driving in it because dad loves it so much.
We need more freedom, not less.
Nobody is, thus far, has voted for limiting individual freedoms. In fact, I think they should be extended. But that's another discussion for another time.
We are 300 million watchdogs learning how to keep both the government and big corporations in line. Freedom is the greatest protection the individual ever had or will ever had.
Which is why the 300 million watchdogs should be given more power to deal with corrupt organizations. Also more reason why we should have the power to say as a society, "Nope. Sorry X-Corporation, you can't do that." But, for some reason, companies have the same rights as you and I do.
~String