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openspace4lifeAs I've noted before, political liberals tend to choose government as the best provider of services like education, healthcare, and poverty reduction*, while conservatives tend to prefer corporations. Thus a major goal for conservatives is smaller government and privatization, while for liberals it's expansion of some government programs, perhaps replacing entire segments of the private sector such as health insurance. Many of us would also like to shrink some corporations that have grown too big for their markets, usually by splitting up monopolies.
Consider: both big corporations and big governments tend to be bureaucratic, corrupt, and resistant to change. Corporations, of course, have no stated mission of helping people who need help; they're just in it to make bucks, which means vital services often get prohibitively expensive when privatized. It also means it can be very hard to convince corporations to spend extra money on things like avoiding environmental damage. Also, corporations generally have no enshrined democratic principles whereby either the customers or the employees can influence the major decisions of a corrupt few at the top.** Unions can impose this kind of check, but they are not always present or effective enough to have any real impact.
Conversely, if we assume that more power generally equals more corruption, we have to note that the biggest governments are still considerably more powerful than the biggest corporations. Governments also have far less incentive to avoid wasteful spending, which is the conservatives' main complaint, since they don't believe we taxpayers have nearly enough say in how that money is spent. And indeed, the bigger the government, the less democratic democracy gets: us little guys have no real say in who gets to run for high office***, and if your constituents are far away, it's significantly easier to cave to the demands of corporate lobbyists and otherwise act against those constituents' interests.
As I've said before, I lean toward governments as the lesser evil because they're more easily improvable than corporations. A single (admittedly difficult) reform--public financing of elections--would go a long way toward giving us representatives who truly represent us, the people (as opposed to folks who can raise enough money to fund a campaign, often out of their own pockets or from monied interests who expect a return of the favor in the form of legislation). Even reducing the maximum campaign contribution amounts per year for individuals and organizations would help (though that runs into sticky free-speech issues). Granted, if employee ownership can somehow be implemented on a mass scale, it could produce a similar effect in the corporate world. But with no real mechanism to push big companies in that direction, I'm keeping my money on governments for now.
* We liberals may find it hard to imagine that greedy capitalists would ever get into the poverty-reduction business, since it will inevitably lead to pressure for higher wages. But if we move the focus from sweatshop laborers to poor people who want to start small businesses, microcredit loans turn out to be an amazingly effective market-based approach to fighting poverty.
** Customers can "vote with their checkbooks" for certain products or boycott some companies, but that's not true democracy, which I define as "one person one vote." Poor people often have no choice but to shop at Wal-Mart, whatever they may think of the company's labor practices.
*** There are exceptions, of course. Small-time candidate Shirley Golub is challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the Democratic primaries on a platform whose major plank is impeachment, and since Pelosi's main constituents are San Franciscans, it's just barely possible that it might work.
Consider: both big corporations and big governments tend to be bureaucratic, corrupt, and resistant to change. Corporations, of course, have no stated mission of helping people who need help; they're just in it to make bucks, which means vital services often get prohibitively expensive when privatized. It also means it can be very hard to convince corporations to spend extra money on things like avoiding environmental damage. Also, corporations generally have no enshrined democratic principles whereby either the customers or the employees can influence the major decisions of a corrupt few at the top.** Unions can impose this kind of check, but they are not always present or effective enough to have any real impact.
Conversely, if we assume that more power generally equals more corruption, we have to note that the biggest governments are still considerably more powerful than the biggest corporations. Governments also have far less incentive to avoid wasteful spending, which is the conservatives' main complaint, since they don't believe we taxpayers have nearly enough say in how that money is spent. And indeed, the bigger the government, the less democratic democracy gets: us little guys have no real say in who gets to run for high office***, and if your constituents are far away, it's significantly easier to cave to the demands of corporate lobbyists and otherwise act against those constituents' interests.
As I've said before, I lean toward governments as the lesser evil because they're more easily improvable than corporations. A single (admittedly difficult) reform--public financing of elections--would go a long way toward giving us representatives who truly represent us, the people (as opposed to folks who can raise enough money to fund a campaign, often out of their own pockets or from monied interests who expect a return of the favor in the form of legislation). Even reducing the maximum campaign contribution amounts per year for individuals and organizations would help (though that runs into sticky free-speech issues). Granted, if employee ownership can somehow be implemented on a mass scale, it could produce a similar effect in the corporate world. But with no real mechanism to push big companies in that direction, I'm keeping my money on governments for now.
* We liberals may find it hard to imagine that greedy capitalists would ever get into the poverty-reduction business, since it will inevitably lead to pressure for higher wages. But if we move the focus from sweatshop laborers to poor people who want to start small businesses, microcredit loans turn out to be an amazingly effective market-based approach to fighting poverty.
** Customers can "vote with their checkbooks" for certain products or boycott some companies, but that's not true democracy, which I define as "one person one vote." Poor people often have no choice but to shop at Wal-Mart, whatever they may think of the company's labor practices.
*** There are exceptions, of course. Small-time candidate Shirley Golub is challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the Democratic primaries on a platform whose major plank is impeachment, and since Pelosi's main constituents are San Franciscans, it's just barely possible that it might work.
