wkmac
Well-Known Member
Then again, Maybe Not!
No, Libertarians Are Not Corporate Shills
I am often accused of supporting “Reaganomics” or “trickle-down economics” or being “a tool of the corporate elite,” or some other such thing. An implication is that my economic views are conservative, and basically amount to apologetics for the wealthy. Naturally, these ad hominem attacks always come from the “left.”
I think this perspective exists for a few reasons: lack of economic understanding, a conflation of modern capitalism with real free markets, and some psychological traits that would be the subject of another article.
People who view themselves as “progressive” or “left wing” believe that they are rebelling against corporate power and defending the little guy. I believe that most laypeople on the left truly are well-intentioned, and would like to improve the lives of the common man. Unfortunately, the policies that they advocate do precisely the opposite: concentrate wealth upwards.
In this post, I intend to argue that corporate power is just another arm of the state. There is nothing inherently wrong with corporations, but modern capitalism is largely a history of corporations behaving badly. Modern capitalism – NOT the free market – is a system where the power elite are able to extract wealth from the masses and concentrate it into the hands of the few. They do this, not through the extraction of Marx’s “surplus value”, but through creating artificial scarcities and rents through the power of the state.
No, Libertarians Are Not Corporate Shills