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Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald wrote about "What the Supreme Court got right" in their recent ruling that it's unconstitutional on free speech grounds to restrict corporations and other organizations from using their big bucks from their big treasuries for electioneering.
Early on, Greenwald makes this observation:
"I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture."
It's tough to imagine that many libertarians would agree with this sentiment, seeing that it's premised on the idea that "our political culture" is somehow the paramount concern.
To libertarians, individual freedom and responsibility, "our freedom culture," is primary, and "our political culture" exists solely to service our freedom culture.
So Greenwald's conception is backwards to libertarians, who would state it this way:
"I believe that government influence over our exercise of freedom is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our culture of freedom."
Everyone gets it backwards. Corporations don't threaten our freedoms; government threatens our freedoms.
Government has the power, not corporations. Government has the guns. Government has the police, the prosecutors, the jailers, the military. They have the physical ability to exert as much or as little "influence" over all of society, corporations included, as they care to exert.
Corporations have none of that. They can exercise influence over political culture only to the extent that politicians deign to allow them to exercise it. Political culture, not corporate culture, is dominant.
Corporations, after all, did not invent government. On the contrary, government invented corporations. It was politicians that created the "corporate person" and endowed it with whatever advantages they chose to endow it with.
So does Greenwald really want to eliminate corporate influence from our political culture? Conceptually, it's easy. Nearly 90 percent of everything government does today is unconstitutional. Strip it all away and make government wield only the limited powers that the Constitution granted it.
Suddenly, with no favors or subsidies or sweetheart legislation to hand out, all the lobbyists, special interests, PACs, Industry wheeler-dealers, and other corporate prostitutes will disappear overnight.
Meanwhile, libertarians want the opposite, to eliminate political influence from corporate culture. Strip away the politically contrived fiction of "personhood" from corporations and you transform corporatism into laissez-faire capitalism, a system in which free people freely trade in a free society.
Funny how the total separation of government and business will satisfy both sides.
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Comments
There is NO "we." There are millions of individuals, each with their own needs, wants, philosophy and values.
The "political culture" is all about trying to hammer these individuals into lumps to make a homogeneous "we" possible. And that can only be done by deception or force.
MamaLiberty, I appreciate your individualist view of "we" but there certainly is a libertarian, and an individualist, "we." That "we" is a concept (not an entity) that consists of any 2 or more individuals who choose to voluntarily associate with one another in any kind of group – family, friends, co-workers, garden club, business enterprise, you name it. The "we" that you describe and rightfully reject is the "we" of coercion, whether from the state or any other criminal. The libertarian "we" is voluntary, consensual, non-coercive, not-extortionist, non fraudulent.
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