Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Corptocracy or Democratic Socialism, either way it's all the same.

In thinking about the rise in popularity of Bernie Sanders, I will have to say that I do share in their concern about the power of the corptocracy. Big business has used its money (shareholder money) to influence government even to the tune of trillions of dollars in bailouts and other more abstract forms of corporate welfare.

This does irritate me and my sense of justice can envision legitimate policy by which restitution is demanded for the wealth that was taken from the public treasury and put directly into the pockets of those with power and influence. I wouldn't mind seeing this money taken back, and if it was used to pay for schools and roads and healthcare or to bail individuals out of their own mortgage crises then so be it.

What I don't understand about the Sanders craze is the accepted forgone conclusion that taxation on the individual will have to increase as well. That is when this flippant idea being tossed around called "Democratic Socialism" begins to scare me.

How about we tax the corporations, particularly those we've bailed out and provided welfare, and leave the individual alone?

I know some will say "Any expense you put on the corporation will eventually be passed on to the consumer via higher prices or to the worker via lower wages anyway." While this might be true the fact of the matter is that the consumer and the employee have a much better position to negotiate prices and wages directly with the corporation they are dealing with than they do with a government extracting their wealth directly via forced taxation.

That is a pragmatic reality that should provide a secondary support to the moral premise that government does not have the legitimate authority to tax the wealth of the individual, which it did not create, whereas it does have the legitimate authority to tax and regulate the corporations that it does create (so long as individuals are free to operate outside the corporate structure). Good policy should be that which encourages business while providing the appropriate revenue for a limited government, and that which leaves the individual to their own choices.

It's frustrating that the political spectrum is polarized in such a way that you must choose between crony capitalism and democratic socialism, which are essentially two sides to the same coin. It is particularly frustrating considering that each side of the dichotomy holds the complementary pieces of a workable solution, but each side also holds diametrically opposed positions that keep these pieces from ever coming together.

The fiscally conservative coupled with the socially liberal policies that enable a vibrant and free society can only currently be found in the Libertarian philosophy, which is of course, derided and bedeviled for different reasons by each side of the mainstream political duopoly.

As long as the margins between the opposing sides remains split around 50/50, I think things will continue relatively unchanged. The encouraging thing is that the Libertarian philosophy is uniquely poised at this time to be able to leverage the margins and bridge those gaps; possibly facilitating some reasonable and effective change.