Corporate power
This came from an anonymous post to GrokLaw – being published under the Creative Commons licence means that I’m free to reproduce it here.
It makes me sad to see people defend monopolies. It is as if we are returning to 100 years ago and the unbounded corporate power of those times. Corporations are not natural but deliberately created by government authority. They are quite the briliant invention aggregating large amounts of economic power by the simple device of making shares safe to own and trade. Bringing together so much capital enables valuable things which are by their nature big. Things like wiring the nation together for the telephone and the internet.
But it should be no great surprise that concentrating power also brings dangers.
This is an interesting thought, it seems to me. I often read, especially when debating certain legal cases floating around at the moment, that governments ought to leave business alone, that business shouldn’t be “shackled” by legislation. Instead, they say, the “free market” will sort everything out. And, of course, the trouble is that “big business” isn’t a natural thing. It exists only because governments created laws to allow it to be. And so governments ought surely to create laws that also restrict the power that such big businesses can wield. Especially in a democracy – whatever the faults of our Government, at least we get to vote for them. I never had a say in who runs IBM, Microsoft, Time-Warner, Exxon/Esso etc.
pax et bonum
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