“I still say genetics are stronger than will, and blood is thicker than altruism.” – Andromeda
Should we rejoin Great Britain? It’s not like we mind taxation without representation anymore.
At the turn of the century, in 1900, that is, 25% of the people who worked had jobs for “larger” companies, think “something someone would say a robber baron owned”. These were things like railroads and steel mills and PEZ™ factories.
Most people worked for themselves or for smaller businesses. People farmed, which was a very big deal, taking up around 40% of the country’s labor force. The remainder worked for themselves or for small businesses, being a lawyer, working for the butcher, or delivering home-grown artisanal PEZ©.
The result was that the majority of the profits stayed local. The owner of the bank that loaned for the mortgage for Farmer McWilder didn’t ship the interest payments back to New York: those profits stayed in the community. People were more independent: the local optometrist didn’t work for Opti-Co™, a Ramtron© company, which is a division of GloboChunk®.
Introverts hate being optometrists. They have to make eye contacts.
When BigDrugStore® moved into Modern Mayberry, what did they do?
They bought the local pharmacies from the local pharmacists. They hired (then fired after a year or so) the local guys. Now, profits that used to go to funding the local little league team are funneled to investors in New York where they buy part of a bathroom renovation in the Hamptons.
Likewise, the local manufacturers have dried up, too. There used to be at least seven little widget factories that made various doo-dads and thingamajigs that now are produced either in People’s Liberation Army Factory #323 or in Whamco’s™ huge factory in Pakistan.
I guess that’s an everlasting jobstopper.
Big businesses have two impacts: they suck profits out of communities, and they make everyone less independent. There are several factors that have led to this:
- Allowing corporations to live forever and do anything.
- Having combined huge corporations making huge purchases so that the combined purchasing power of all of the (for instance) Wal-Marts® can be used to put the pressure on suppliers to lower every cost, including labor,
- Burden small companies with exactly the same regulations as large companies, giving large companies the incentive to seek out stronger regulation to keep competition down, and,
- Realizing that every dollar pulled out of the community is an extra dollar of New York profit for putting in that new pool house.
This did reduce prices, at least enough to put small businesses out of business, but it has hurt America by taking profits that were local and nationalizing them to the existing GloboLeftistElite. Yes, there were benefits, but each of these communities is now (over time) poorer for having these larger businesses in them.
DNA is like Taco Bell® – same four ingredients, nearly infinite results.
An aside: this process has funneled huge amounts of money to the GloboLeftistElite. Who are they? They’re the people who run and own the largest corporations, yet are Marxists. Don’t believe me? Look at all of the class struggle propaganda that shows up from their typical GloboLeftist company in a year. Trotsky would blush, I mean, if he hadn’t been killed with an icepick.
This has hurt rural America, which was built on individuals working and creating wealth locally. I look at small towns across the United States at their aspirational city halls and libraries, and think, “Could any of them afford to build those structures now?”
No, they couldn’t.
Why not?
Because the locally created wealth has been siphoned off.
In the end, what can be done? Here’s a modest proposal:
- Restrict corporations to a limited life span, at which time they have to divest.
- Restrict corporations to a specific line of business.
- Require corporations to be chartered as separate entities in each operating state.
- Require a percentage (greater than 50%?) of local (think, people living in the state) ownership in each corporation.
- Ease regulatory burdens on smaller companies, making it easier to form and grow them.
- Sharply restrict lending by out of state institutions.
- Tiered sales tax based on company size: the bigger, the higher, which reflects the value these companies are taking out of state.
I could probably think of more changes that would actually return more capitalism to the country. Yes, Apple™ isn’t fond of competition or capitalism or even the United States. GloboLeftBigCorp© companies that have done their best to concentrate capital and economic power while at the same time being overtly Leftist.
You should respect people like me who wear glasses. I paid money to see you.
Feel free to attack any individual points above, but the constant concentration and combination of economic power has to be stopped – inherently, it is anti-capitalist and anti-freedom, which leads to the failed ideology of group altruism. Besides, those were the result of five minutes of thinking and I avoided thinking about creative uses for lamp posts.
Why is group altruism bad? When .gov takes your money and gives it to another person it likes better than you, no one gets to feel the inherent power of helping people. Helping people is great on an individual level, because it reinforces the idea of humans helping humans. Helping people voluntarily is virtuous, especially if the help changes the path the person is on so in the future they don’t need the help. Those that help go from anonymous people who are tax farmed to people who have actual skin in the game in helping people succeed.
On the other hand, group altruism creates a situation those who are most in need become the most despised because they are seen as the irredeemable bit of society. Group (.gov) altruism doesn’t want to make people independent, because dependent people are dependable voters for more .gov and more regulations and money transfer, and .gov loves a divided people. Also, since people pay taxes, many of them feel no obligation whatsoever to help anyone. They’ve farmed out their virtue.
I read that a big company helped blind kids. But they meant the verb, not the adjective.
Want to know why Reparations for slavery from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves is popular? It’s the GloboLeftElite’s mechanism for creating a feeling of entitlement that will never go away. How much is enough Reparation? There is no answer, because the GloboLeftElite has said that there will never be enough Reparation. Never. That’s the result of group altruism.
Do I want people to not starve and also stay in Africa, or India, or (insert country name here)? I do. That doesn’t mean that individual organizations can’t help them, but to do so should be voluntary, and not the power of the government to take wealth and allocate it around the world or, through action or inaction, bring an unending supply of immigrants to our shore.
The solution in the future is to create a society where commerce is human scale, is focused on maintaining and encouraging the family (which is the atom of the nation) and is based on the nation, not on every person on the planet.
Anyone else ready to party like it’s 1899?
It’s funny, I was just thinking about this general concept this morning. I think your overall thesis is sound, though the proposed solutions would be hard on many small businesses. For example, the company I co-founded 5 years ago is now 7 people, who are located in 5 states. We do work in nearly two dozen states in a very niche market. While I love the idea of working local–as we grew, I arranged our company structure so I have to travel as little as possible–there generally isn’t enough work in any given state in our industry to keep us in business. I’m sure we are one of thousands across many markets.
I think the real issue is that free-market capitalism only works in a very homogeneous society with a shared and enforced set of Christian values, along with churches strong enough to enforce said values. Not everyone would have to be a Christian, but would at least have to abide by the principles of how to treat each other.
Absent that value set, you get robber barons, mega-corps and GloboHomo. Once any group gets pitted against any other group, the system devolves quickly. And when government gets into the mix, well, here we are. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Freedom, and free-market capitalism, really only works with a moral and religious people. Everything else quickly turns into some form of tyranny. Or tranny. Or both.
the absolute number one reform on corporations that needs to happen is not on the list though: this is removing the liability shield. The shareholders of a company must be liable for the actions done in their name, as well as for the debts of the company, and they must be actual people, not other corporations. the debts are easy to prorate over the outstanding shares. the liability for damages or criminal activity, however, must be shared by all shareholders. Corporation causes someone’s death? every single shareholder sees jail time as accessory for murder and the individuals directly involved see more serious sentences for the deed itself. Same as if someone hires a hit man.. the hit man is guilty of murder but the fellow who hired him is also guilty. No cut-out fall guys on the board, no one-way maxwells-demon mechanisms for profits to only go into their pockets and liabilities to just get shoveled off onto wherever they fall.
The shareholders and the share they hold must be recorded and up to date on the books of the company so that the liability is well-known, and shadow owners who hold shares for someone else by some private agreement, well, such a shadow owner has to carry all that risk on his own head and his handshake deal with someone else has very weak standing in court…
doing this would really put an end to the megacorporation while still leaving a machanism for honest businessmen to combine their capital for ventures larger than a single one or two of them might do singly or in a simple partnership.
give maybe a six month window for any corporation to comply with that rule or be dissolved with any assets, debts, liabilites etc be parcelled out over the outstanding shares.
combine this with the other limitation on his list and we’d be well on the way to actual honest capitalism again.
Well, it would. And you’d damn sure see that they’d comply with the laws!
Your business sounds like it is the opposite of that we want to excise, and it’s small, so the regulatory burden would likewise be small. I’ll likely respond to this in more depth next Wednesday – great comment.
Restricting corporations sounds great, but how could it be enforced? More .gov, more bureaucracy, more laws, more grift. Rather than strongarm huge national and international entities, think of ways to incentivize the local aspect. We don’t need any more .gov regulation mucking up our lives.
We tried that. It didn’t work.
corporations only exist because of government powers. they could not exist without the government enforcing their existence 24 hours a day. If the government were to simply no longer recognize corporations as legal entities, they would disintegrate in seconds. so changing the terms of that government support is not anything out of imagination.
We do have a need for corporations to do bigger things, but, like people, they have to die. More on this next Wednesday. Great comment.
I have a simpler solution (s). Abolish the Federal Reserve banking system and the provisions of the IRS incentivizing debt. I have owned our small business for 20-plus years. The number one problem small businesses have in competing with large corporations is risk. A small family business’ outlook is generational, and is certainly not in a position to gamble with the family livelihood. The CEO of a large corporation has no such problem, since bankruptcy is just a bump in the road, comparatively. Loans priced under the market value of money distort the system. In good years, anyone willing to borrow outside the realm of conservative business sense will make more money than financially conservative outfits, all other factors being equal. In bad years, the big outfits can just borrow more to cover. Actual market rates would help prevent this.
The death of family farms is a prime example. Without access to under-market value money, and IRS incentives to be head-over-heels in debt, coupled with a corporate mindset where there was far less penalty for failure than with private ownership, Corporate farms could not have rolled up the Ag market as it did.
While you are at it, you could also make it illegal for any .gov entity to treat any tax donkey differently — and end tax abatements which also play a huge roll in the ongoing murder of small businesses by the Walmarts of the world.
Last, abolish the legal fiction of corporations having liability, while actual human owners do not. Undo the idiocy of the “corporate veil” and corporations would have to abide by the same rules the rest of us do.
I am sure there is more along this line, but just these things were instituted/ended, small family businesses would have much better chance of competing.
Best, none of these would require more bureaucracy, which is a trap we keep falling into. We can’t legislate against human nature, but we can prevent the government from picking and choosing winners (a least a little bit).
I agree. I’ll answer this comment next week and show how changes can lower .gov regulations and increase freedoms.
The corporations MAKE the laws. Not ‘the people’ and certainly not that collection of dill does in D.C.
They are not gonna enforce laws against themselves. That’s why they make them.
Chain stores outcompete mom-and-pop stores. Customers prefer to buy from them. The Disney company town Celebration, Florida banned chain stores, and residents fought for years to get a normal grocery store with a normal selection. Why are you objecting to what customers have decided they want? It is not obvious that patronizing chain stores is contrary to customers’ interests.
Your policy prescription reads like the envy wishlist from local pharmacists who can’t compete on price and selection, and demand government ban their competition.
🙂
I assure you that I’m not a pharmacist, though I do take vitamin D.
There are three grocery stores around Modern Mayberry, and we can’t get everything we want at any one of them. But your comment is a serious one that deserves more than a single line, and I’ll answer in more detail next Wednesday.
1. Restrict corporations to a limited life span, at which time they have to divest.
This seems doable at the state level. Of course, the first state to implement this would have all corporations of all sizes vacate – feature, or bug?
2. Restrict corporations to a specific line of business.
Like banking charters? Again, doable at the state level – likely similar effects of the first.
3. Require corporations to be chartered as separate entities in each operating state.
And here we have the restriction that really silos the states from each other. I don’t know – CAN this be done at the state level, or would this require federal action?
4. Require a percentage (greater than 50%?) of local (think, people living in the state) ownership in each corporation.
If the preceding point can be done, so can this.
5. Ease regulatory burdens on smaller companies, making it easier to form and grow them.
Most of those regulations are federal in nature. But of course a state could reduce/eliminate what they can.
6. Sharply restrict lending by out of state institutions.
Ok, I know there’s a federal law on this – the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking Act. Barring federal action to amend/remove that statute, this is a challenge, and there’s two approaches to implement it (both could be pursued) – a state-level version of the Community Reinvestment Act, and a preferential tax rate (0%?) for in-state chartered banks, while interstate branches must pay a tax (10%?) on all profits generated in state (of course audit this regularly – the process is the punishment).
7. Tiered sales tax based on company size: the bigger, the higher, which reflects the value these companies are taking out of state.
Let’s add income taxes in here too, and combine this with points 1-6 above, and create a new legal entity – the “Domestic Missouri Corporation” (for example), which must have 50%+1 local ownership, a 50 year limited life, collects no sales tax, is exempt from as many state regs as reasonable; and income derived from a DMC is taxed at an extremely low rate by the state (if at all), and liquidation distributions from a DMC (at the end of the 50 year life) are exempt from state taxes. DMCs can be banks, and are then exempt from most state-level banking regulations.
I’d love to hear a lawyer’s opinion on the program, but it might require federal action in the banking realm. It’s all ideas in the right direction, though.
Oh, this absolutely requires evisceration of many federal laws and dissolution of much federal power. This is a feature, not a bug.
Grew up in a small to midsize shipyard town in the Fifties. Most of the stores — shoes, food, hardware, sports items, etc. — were located ‘downtown’, and almost all were owned by local people and their families. A near full-employment ‘economy’ of dad-led families.
First, Thrifty Drug Store showed up . . . around 1960. That expanded into a mini-mall, something we’d never seen before. Soon there was K-Mart and all the rancid rest. To finish the place off, Sam(ael) Walton and his porcine dotters showed up and built their palaces of cheap Chinese crap. Dotters are now billionaires. And much fatter.
The local-owned downtown stores closed one-by-one, starting in the mid-Sixties. Now most of the men and boys don’t work, there are no families, but women have plenty of jobs.
The profits from businesses don’t go to Dave and Daniel’s family and town, but to international corporations and the U.S. State. Lately the corporations have owned-up to their non-stated policy of the past forty years of refusing to hire white males. All the corporate jobs go to women and other ‘minorities’. Who owns the preponderance of wealth in the U.S., who spends the preponderance of wealth in the U.S.?
Women. Girls and women. Recently, Daniel shot himself in the head in the hatchback car that is his home, about a mile from where his family once owned the town’s old bakery. Dave lives on Turk Street in San Francisco, where the hottest sewer-grates dwell.
Exactly – .gov tax farms, and NYC corps profit farm.
I am.
But they never had massive cannibalism back then.
So when Taco Bell moves into town, local mom and pop Mexican restaurant goes under along with profits staying in the community, but a really important thing, these chain restaurants also have an effect of raising property values which is a tax increase on everyone in town. But hey at least you have a Mcbell in town
Not so in Modern Mayberry. We do have a Bell, but our property values are quite low. You can buy a very nice lakefront 3,000SF house on 3 acres (not my place) for about $300,000.
Well sheeit! Lemme git muh wallit!
The big corporations collude with the government to use your tax dollars – stolen from you at gunpoint – to subsidize their costs. See:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/taxpayers-subsidize-poverty-wages-at-walmart-mcdonalds-other-large-corporations-gao-finds/
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/walmart-sales-and-profits-analysis-for-fy-2023-top-10-insights/
It’s all part of the Warren Buffett moat principle/creating barriers to entry – https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/this-is-how-warren-buffett-defines-a-great-business-and-how-you-should-too
We have a corporatism system, not capitalism
Anon
Yes. When I was a kid, the guy at the sporting goods store had a cabin in the forest and a house. Now the guy who runs the sporting good counter makes minimum.
You mean the woman at the sporting goods counter. White males need not apply. Diversity! Love Wins!
Yup.
In my experience, I’ve never found a large corporation willing to pay more than their share of taxes to operate. In fact, many get local communities give them a tax break to get them to build in their community. It’s two edged sword. The small communities don’t realize the entrepreneurs of their community will soon disappear, and competitions is quelled, but the immediate result is better than admitting the use of the community is gone, except when the large corporation allows it. If the big business closes, the town dries up quickly and disappears.
Every community has the power to prevent a large corporation from building, but like voting, apathy reigns supreme and ignorance prevents wise decisions. No law can guarantee integrity, or instill a sense of community. We have enough laws. New ones only add loopholes, rich attorneys, and broke small business owners that can’t afford the regulations.
Maybe paying taxes, no, but lots of corporations make contributions to local interests. WalMart posts these inside their store. In my neck of the woods, Family Express does lots of community support (in one recent case, they donated 25,000 individually packaged donuts to a local church’s “Revival in the Park” event). On a national level, Thrivent does all kinds of stuff. All you need to do is ask. They approve even marginal stuff, though I know of no cases of them funding LBGTOMFG crap.
And, hell, we should all be in favor of as little money going to Washington DC as possibe.
Welllllll, on a proportional level, it’s not even close. Our town is just too small for several national big boxes to have ever set up, and the local versions are the most generous businesses in town. The owners keep the profits and live in nice houses, but also pay taxes here and donate in the tens of thousands to local causes. I’ll address this next Wednesday, too.
Large corps negotiate with suppliers, but also with communities, so not only to they profit farm, they also tax farm the rest of the citizens.
I don’t disagree with any particular point, however, no set of laws will ultimately protect you from a group who A) is reasonably intelligent, B) is entirely unscrupulous and C) instinctively works together against outsiders. The only thing to do with a group like that is not deal with them and exclude them if at all possible.
Effectively, we are currently ruled by such a group. Until we are rid of them, these laws would grant temporary protection at best.
zaklog.wordpress.com
As an entrepreneur myself, I think all you really need is #1:
Restrict corporations to a limited life span, at which time they have to divest.
When I die, anything over the ceiling will be taxed at 40% by the Feds, 7% by the state, 1% by the county, 0.345% by the township, and probably more by the “special taxing district.”
If corporations faced this kind of confiscation every 40-ish years, they would keep themselves below the cap. Would it be a problem for industries with massive capitalization? Sure, but they could and would price this into the goods they sell.
Alternatively, you could completely eliminate the tax and other benefits granted to corporations, but, golly gee willickers, how likely is that?
Just make them play by the same damn tax rules. That’s probably sufficient.
Oh, we have to stop the regulatory creep, too.
Your great ape brain firmware wants to blame the competing outside tribe instead of traitors who look like you, but that group is called “middle class WASP voters”. That group has such a large percentage of the votes that no other group can force any policy onto them. Why then are there so many policies made against their interests? Are middle class voters mostly a bunch of non-player-characters whose minds are programed by the mainstream media? If so then voting can never work.
Removing their ability to control via a strong federal government is a start. That is an interesting question, and I think I’ll bring this up next Wednesday in a longer answer.
I would love for that to work, John. I just do not know that any of it would – because ultimately, the deciding factor is customers and what they will support. Big chains can roll in, but if the customer base is not there they will eventually roll out. The cost of that is often higher prices and conscious purchasing, something which I try to do but can be difficult.
In New Home 2.0, our grocery choices are all essentially chains now, or a more local chain that competes on the Trader Joe level, not the Walmart level. It makes it a bit difficult.
I will say that communities becoming dependent on the corporations is a problem as well. Again, example here in New Home: We have two very large corporations in town and one just down the road that are likely substantial employers for this entire region. If they go, it will have a huge impact.
I’ll address this in more detail next Wednesday, but one note is that there is an overoptimization effect with a time lag.
Yes. But who will “bell the corporation”?
@Anon @07:48
THANK you for not hyphenating the “Christian” part. (Spoken, completely NOT sarcastically, as a die-hard agnostic.)
@Zaklog “a group who A) is reasonably intelligent, B) is entirely unscrupulous and C) instinctively works together against outsiders”
That describes the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. It might describe another group elsewhere, but I’m sure I can’t think of what that group might be.
Gypsies?
A very thought provoking article and a topic I’ve pondered a lot over recent years. Just my 2 cents, but I would first follow a couple of suggestions put forth by Karl Denninger. These are more indirect, but would change attitiudes….
One was to eliminate the ability for large investment firms like Blackrock and Vanguard to vote proxy shares on the mutual funds of their customers. This gives them ginormous power to influence the country which is why we have DEI (among other things). With this power it becomes easier to vote themselves even more control. To stop this, the actual owner of the stock (even via a mutual fund) should be the one who votes the shares or else the votes are forfeit. That would deflate their power tremendously. I would go a few steps further though, and limit their ability to invest in certain areas (real estate for example).
The second was to start prosecuting corporate board members and executives under existing law. They literally get away with murder and theft because they can shield their activities under the guise of “the corporation”. There is no real basis for that shield and if more were perp walked to prison, we’d see a lot of companies start cleaning up their act.
I’ll add these points next week. Karl is wonderful, but doesn’t go far enough.
1) Undertake to lay your finger on that clause in the Constitution which gives government that authority and power. Forfeit 200 points for using the “interstate commerce” regulation clause, a source of more extra-constitutional mischief and black-robed jackassery than the word “privacy”, which also appears zero times in that document.
2) Compare and contrast the idea of government picking winners and losers with communism.
I’ll be over at the bar while you work that out.
If anyone sought to do what you suggest, they should be shot, hung, drawn and quartered, then burned at the stake. If they were very lucky, in that order.
And then we should go after their families. Just to be sure.
3) Corporations get too big, and live too long?
Google Sears & Roebuck.
Kodak.
Pan Am.
Enron.
Texaco.
Polaroid.
Blockbuster.
Bear Stearns.
Tower Records.
Toys R Us.
Borders.
Radio Shack.
All your points are absolutely true.
Just like F-15s taking off on afterburner, that’s the sound of freedom.
You want to regulate foreign companies from looting America?
Or tax, at confiscatory rates, companies which export American capital abroad?
Go ahead on.
BTW, how did Smoot-Hawley do at saving American jobs?
Penalize companies for outsourcing jobs overseas, and you might be onto something.
But don’t subsequently bitch when American cars and medicines cost 20x what the same products cost overseas, where they’re made in sweatshops, and are uncompetitive in the rest of the world for the same reason.
You’re trying to get up a hill by getting in a bucket and trying to lift yourself to the top.
TANSTAAFL
The “Constitution” doesn’t shit. It has not been the law of the land for at least 20 years.
At this point rumble is required for justice
Agree on the outsourcing…….Manufacturing left the US to escape the high cost of labor and various fees and taxes that get piled on for OSHA compliance, EPA, etc. Jobs are not coming back as long as we maintain those high costs. To level the playing field, simply add these costs back to any imported product as a tariff. For example, in countries that don’t have environmental restrictions equal or higher to ours, there is a regulatory tariff. If the minimum wage is lower than here, then there is a “labor cost tariff”. Once companies had to pay an equal cost, then the move to offshore would stop.
Aesop, a lot of those closed companies were destroyed by venture capital parasites via asset stripping or mergers and acquisitions not by customers choosing a different store.
How they fail isn’t the point BCCL; that they fail is.
Aesop, a wonderful smorgasbord of points! When I read this, I realized a few lines wouldn’t do, and this deserves a far larger discussion. The game is afoot! Next Wednesday!
I’ve been thinking a lot on this lately. Do communities really benefit from cheaper prices at stores like Walmart or DollarStore if all they are is conduits sucking money out of local communities? Or, banking at MegaBank Corp when the local bank is owned by shareholders in the community?
This past weekend I visited a lovely southern town. Sadly it is experiencing the influx that has ruined many small communities not located in blue states. In the 3 years that I have been visiting there I have noticed many chain businesses open at the edge of town. As we walked the streets of downtown I noticed more empty storefronts than ever.
What is often missed by locals and transplants is that every meal eaten at Olive Garden is a meal not eaten at Dominick’s, a 3rd generation local restaurant started by legal immigrants. An ice cream bought at Dairy Queen is another not bought at Flander’s, a shop opened in the 1960’s by a local family.
Like Mr Wilder stated, the profits from those meals went to NY instead of staying in the local community. Same with grocery stores or any other corporate entity. They are just strip mining dollars and when there is no profit they close and become a journal entry. But, not until first killing every locally owned business first.
Which gun did those eeeeeevil corporations hold to the citizenry’s heads to force them to spend their dollars in their establishments?
I’m guessing (hoping) this discussion is really just JW’s way of pointing out the dearth of anyone having read Adam Smith’s Wealth Of Nations, which came out the same year as the Declaration Of Independence, and therefore being wholly ignorant of how liberty works in a country not controlled by the state, cannot come up with one reason (out of any five hundred) why government control of any markets is asinine and stupid in the extreme.
You’ll piss, bitch, and moan about Government Motors, but would happily let the government tell you at which restaurants you may or may not eat? Recockulous, ironic, and probably moronic, simultaneously.
For the slow learners, please tell the class how delicious and savory the meals were at the government school’s cafeteria, compared to those served at any chain restaurant. Then discuss MRE’s and military chow halls, and the excellent cuisine served in prisons.That’s what you’re agitating for. See if you can figure out how beyond retarded this all sounds, on your own, without having your noses rubbed in it any harder.
Now, show your work.
Start with your primary thesis: “It’s better for everyone when the government saves people from making those pesky free choices.” The Cliff Notes for that were published by Oliver J. Lickspittle. [For Common Core grads, that was a major clue.]
As before, I’ll be over at the bar while you work that one out.
Bonus points: When the government also decrees that the national minimum wage should be $20/hr, how many of you will venture to local restaurants to buy dinner out?
Oh, wait, when you let government run the marketplace, there aren’t any local restaurants left, in about 6 months. (How many people need me to post the 87 links demonstrating that, from just the last 6 months?)
Huzzah.
Well-played.
TL;DR:Government is fire. A dangerous servant, and a cruel master. If you’re still enamored of government doing much of anything not within the enumerated powers, pluck a burning log out of the fireplace, and give it a long, lingering open-mouth tongue kiss at the smoldering end. Report back to the class on how the experiment of suckling at government’s teat turns out for you.
We’ll skip over the lessons on why this trip never should have been necessary under the heading of “not kicking retarded kids”.
Great comments, and the lovely southern town probably looks a lot like Modern Mayberry, but without the influx. We’re stable to shrinking.
Marx and Antonio Gramsci disciples all.
Behold the Frankfurt School’s and long march through the institution’s fruit.
Government, finance, denominational religions, and all tapped into those, have been centralized and socialized (except profits, of course).
And those profits from the long march are being used to make the US more Marxist.
The idea of corporations being an immortal legal entity has to go. LLP (limited liability partnership) rather than LLC (limited liability corporation).
We keep the ability to invest where only our money is at risk, but we retain the idea that whoever is in charge is liable for the consequences of their decisions.
So you’re okay with a government corporate entity living forever, but the idea that private citizens could have the same ability and right to incorporate scares hell out of you?
And when, exactly, are the masters of that government held liable for the consequences of their actions?
Because you’re in favor of limited government and property rights.
Uh…okay, right. Sure thing.
Show your work on that, please.
This should be good.
I think that’s certainly part of the solution . . .
The admittedly Catholic term I use in my books for the surviving societies is subsidiarity; decision making is pushed down to the most local level possible, even if just a small town. Don’t want MegaCorp in your village? No MegaCorp. It does imply a measure of noblesse oblige, which is why most of my post-Change societies are feudal, but I think we are now in a place where we can look around and say that the so-called Enlightenment in general and “democracy” in particular is a failed experiment.
Monarchy and aristocracy are natural to the human condition. You look to the next generations, not the next quarterly statement or election.
Exactly – there is a scale that needs to be considered that’s beyond an election cycle.
And we need to prohibit the export of technology with punishing import duties for products that benefit from the exported technology, and the loss of legal protections for the exported technology (whether it be patents, copyrights or trade secrets).
Now that’s an idea I love.