Guest Post by John Wilder
“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?
