Are You More Afraid of the Government or the Super-Capitalists?, Part II

Defining our political views as simply conservative or liberal is often difficult, but I think one important piece in the puzzle is identifying who we are more afraid of: the government, or the super-capitalists. I laid out some very basic reasons last week why we might be (and should be) afraid of the government, but for the next weeks I want to argue that we should be more afraid of the super-capitalists.

Capitalism is simply when the means of production are owned privately. My adjective ‘super’ is supposed to identify those private companies whose production methods have an effect on the lives a large number of common citizens. So for example, BP would be a super-capitalist corporation on my definition because they control a huge portion of energy supply. But while it is true that I use their products, that is not why I call them ‘super;’ what is important for my purposes is that the way they produce energy has an effect on my life. So a regular capitalist would be like a small-time farmer. He is a capitalist because he owns the means to produce food (the land, the seeds, the tractor), but he is not a super-capitalist because how he produces his goods has little or no effect on me (at least if I am not consuming his products).

Before I proceed with my argument, I want to propose an analogy. This analogy first occurred to me a couple of years ago, and since then, it has proven to be remarkably accurate and predictive of events. As a result, my economic and thus political opinions have generally been guided by it. Here it is:

I think that the free market is like a fire. One thing we know about fires is that they can seem like miracles to those who need them. You don’t have to go very far back in history to a time when an open fire was the only way to cook, the only source of light, and the only way to avoid freezing to death. Can you imagine how valuable a fire must have been to our ancestors? Similarly, the free market can seem like a miracle because it actually has the power to create wealth – just like that, out of thin air. I still don’t understand how this works, but it does. The free market can make the wealthy even wealthier it can make a middle-class family rich, and it can make a poor family middle-class. Importantly, it does this without necessarily ruining someone else’s economic prospects. There is no way for the government to create wealth; at best, they can print money, but this doesn’t actually produce wealth because of the immediate problems with inflation, etc.

But of course, we know something else about fires, namely, their destructive capabilities. Just like that, an untended fire that was providing light and heat to those who were cold and in the dark suddenly turns on its former beneficiaries, consuming them, its surroundings, and eventually itself. The clear lesson is that fires must be tended. I will defend the accuracy of this analogy in the next weeks.

Should We Be More Afraid of the Government or the Super-capitalists?

Most people, myself included, would call the government a ‘necessary evil.’ Anyone would love to be in a world where nations generally got along, where citizens and corporations behaved responsibly, and where basic public needs were easily met by our neighbors and religious communities. But of course, that is not the world we live in. As a result, we hand over a portion of our freedom to this entity called the ‘government,’ which is frequently corrupt and sometimes incompetent; but given the choice between subjection to this imperfect institution and a society without supervision, we choose the government. The difference between conservatives and liberals concerns the level of control that we are willing to hand over.

So while the government is necessary, we also recognize that it can be corrupted and thus should evoke fear. It is a fact that almost all of the major tragedies in human history have occurred because of bad government. So shouldn’t we all be political conservatives? Isn’t is just common sense that we should want our government to provide basic protections such as the police and basic services such as roads and then get out of our lives?

My answer is ‘no.’ Although I think that we always need to be vigilant and afraid of our government, there is an entity out there far more dangerous than the government; I’m speaking of the super-capitalists. My term ‘super-capitalist’ does not have a rigorous definition, but I am trying to pick out those in the private sector who control a disproportionate percentage of the means of production. There are lots of small and mid-size private businesses out there, but in modern capitalism, just a few dozen people own almost everything. Over the next few weeks, I want to argue that we should be more afraid of these folks than the government. As a result, we need a government large enough to control them.