I’m also a liberal, in the sense that I’m
not averse to a role for government in society. Yet
history has convinced me that representative government
can’t adequately protect the interests of ordinary
citizens. Even less can it protect the interests of
future generations, ecosystems, and nonhuman species. The
reason is that most — though not all — of the
time, government puts the interests of private
corporations first. This is a systemic problem of a
capitalist democracy, not just a matter of electing new
leaders.
If you identify with the preceding sentiments, then
you might be confused and demoralized, as I have been
lately. If capitalism as we know it is deeply flawed, and
government is no savior, where lies hope? This strikes me
as one of the great dilemmas of our time. For years the
Right has been saying — nay, shouting — that
government is flawed and that only privatization,
deregulation, and tax cuts can save us. For just as long,
the Left has been insisting that markets are flawed and
that only government can save us. The trouble is that
both sides are half-right and half-wrong. They’re
both right that markets and state are flawed, and both
wrong that salvation lies in either sphere. But if
that’s the case, what are we to do? Is there,
perhaps, a missing set of institutions that can help us?
...
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The notion that government should protect the commons
goes back a long way. Sometimes this duty is considered
so basic it’s taken for granted. At other times,
it’s given a name: the public trust. Several states
actually put this duty in writing. Pennsylvania’s
constitution, for example, declares:
“Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are
the common property of all the people, including
generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources,
the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the
benefit of all the people.” Note that in this
constitutional dictum, serving as trustee of natural
resources isn’t an option for the state, it’s
an affirmative duty.
Yet here as elsewhere, rhetoric and reality differ.
Political institutions don’t function in a vacuum;
they function in a world in which power is linked to
property. This was true when fifty-five white male
property owners wrote our Constitution, and it’s no
less true today.
America has been engaged in two experiments
simultaneously: one is called democracy, the other,
capitalism. It would be nice if these experiments ran
separately, but they don’t. They go on in the same
bottle, and each affects the other. After two hundred
years, we can draw some conclusions about how they
interact. One is that capitalism distorts democracy more
than the other way around.
The reason capitalism distorts democracy is simple.
Democracy is an open system, and economic power can
easily infect it. By contrast, capitalism is a gated
system; its bastions aren’t easily accessed by the
masses. Capital’s primacy thus isn’t an
accident, nor the fault of George W. Bush. It’s
what happens when capitalism inhabits democracy.
This isn’t to say the United States government
can’t, at times, restrain corporations. It has a
number of tools at its disposal, and has used them in the
past with some success. But the measures it can take are
woefully inadequate to the task of safeguarding the
planet for our children. Let’s see why. ....
Three points are worth making here.
- First, ownership isn’t the same thing as
trusteeship. Owners of property — even
government owners — have wide latitude to do
whatever they want with it; a trustee does not.
Trustees are bound by the terms of their trust and by
centuries-old principles of trusteeship, foremost
among which is “undivided loyalty” to
beneficiaries.
- Second, in a capitalist democracy, the state is a
dispenser of many valuable prizes. Whoever amasses
the most political power wins the most valuable
prizes. The rewards include property rights, friendly
regulators, subsidies, tax breaks, and free or cheap
use of the commons. The notion that the state
promotes “the common good” is sadly
naive.
- Third, while free marketers are fond of saying
that capitalism is a precondition for democracy, what
they neglect to add is that capitalism also distorts
democracy. Like gravity, its tug is constant. The
bigger the concentrations of capital, the stronger
the tug.
We face a disheartening quandary here.
Profit-maximizing corporations dominate our economy.
Their programming makes them enclose and diminish common
wealth. The only obvious counterweight is government, yet
government is dominated by these same corporations.
One possible way out of this dilemma is to reprogram
corporations — that is, to make them driven by
something other than profit. This, however, is like
asking elephants to dance — they’re just not
built to do it. Corporations are built to make money, and
the truth is, as a society we want them to make money.
We’ll look at this further in the next chapter.
Another possible way out is to liberate government
from corporations, not just momentarily, but
long-lastingly. This is easier said than done.
Corporations have decimated their old adversary,
organized labor, and turned the media into their
mouthpiece. Occasionally a breakthrough is made in
campaign financing — for example, corporations are
now barred from giving so-called soft money to political
parties — but corporate money soon finds other
channels to flow through. The return on such investments
is simply too high to stop them.
Does this mean there’s no hope? I don’t
think so. The window of opportunity is small, but not
nonexistent. Throughout American history, anticorporate
forces have come to power once or twice per century. In
the nineteenth century, we had the eras of Jackson and
Lincoln; in the twentieth century, those of Theodore and
Franklin Roosevelt. Twenty-first century equivalents
will, I’m sure, arise. It may take a calamity of
some sort — another war, a depression, or an
ecological disaster — to trigger the next
anticorporate ascendancy, but sooner or later it will
come. Our job is to be ready when it comes. ...
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