11 comments

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  eee_eff

  5 months ago

  In fact, I’ve yet to understand what “corporate power” is, because once you de-link a corporation from access to government power, the corporation is just a legal construct, an entity that anyone (who’s not lazy) can walk away from and suffer no repercussion (risk-transfer aside).
  
  2 Comments:
  
  1. That 'de-linking' part is easier said than done Jim. In particular note the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, where very many on-trade related items are made part of Treaties, Treaties which are ultimately backed up by the US military. The book 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins details the way that the US military is called in whenever the assest of a corporation are threatened by democratic government. Recall what happened to Mosaddeq:
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Mosaddeq
  
  2. Even Delinked corporations re-assert their power, witness, for example, the spying program of Hewlett-Packard.
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  Patrick Vessey

  5 months ago

  Jim -- you've now got my email. Do you mind if I cross post your comment back to the original post, and reply there?
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  eee_eff

  5 months ago

  Hugo Chavez won two elections, which is two more than GWB won.
  
  http://www.gregpalast.com/madhouse/
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  Jim Harper

  5 months ago

  Sure, Patrick. Nice to reach you/hear from you. (I was a little exasperated with blogger.com . . . .)
  
  1. I agree, e_f, that disentangling corporations (and anyone or anything else for that matter) from the use of government power is difficult. 2. What I know of l'affaire H-P does not involve the use of government power - just frauds, contractual violations, etc. among legal equals - board members, executives, and the corporation itself. If the corporation made some use of government coercion to advantage itself against others, of course I think that's wrongful behavior as well.
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  eee_eff

  5 months ago

  2. What I know of l’affaire H-P does not involve the use of government power
  
  Jim that's my whole point--corporations don't always need the help of government to basically become fascist instrumentalities. The idea that only a government can do wrong, implicit in much of libertarian thought,is a pernicious denail of reality.
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  eee_eff

  5 months ago

  just frauds, contractual violations, etc. among legal equals - board members, executives, and the corporation itself.
  
  No, there were also journalists, not a party to any contract or other relation to H-P who were spied on.
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  Jim Harper

  5 months ago

  Spying on journalists is also ordinary wrongdoing among legal equals, not use of government power, and it has nothing to do with facism.
  
  Perhaps you were careless in your phrasing, but there’s no premise in libetrarianism that only government can do wrong. It’s a basic premise of libertarianism that they can do wrong, and the government exists to prevent or punish that. (Perhaps this point gets lost because it’s so basic - we don’t sit around discussing it because there’s nothing interesting about it.) When government goes beyond defending against violations of individuals’ rights, including by corporations, libertarians object to that, particularly because government uses its legal monopoly on coercion for tasks beyond its proper role.
  
  That’s all from me on this thread, e_f.
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  Patrick Vessey

  5 months ago

  Thanks, Jim. I'm going to respond to the two areas of contention separately. I've just posted about the Friedman Prize here:
  http://lpuk.blogspot.com/2008/05/car-crash-cato...
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  eee_eff

  5 months ago

  Spying on journalists is also ordinary wrongdoing among legal equals, not use of government power, and it has nothing to do with fascism.
  
  I don't see how, in the contemporary legal environment of 2008 USA, you can consider a corporation like H-P, with its army of private investigators, lawyers, 'pretexters' to be the equal of a private individual. Maybe in some abstract de jure sense, yes, but in the real world, that assertion doesn't make sense. The journalist couldn't 'walk away' from those spying on them. What's next, corporate bounty hunters?
  
  I don't restrict my definition of fascism to oppression done by governmental agencies alone; taken to its extreme, an implication of your line of reasoning would be that, if Nazi Germany was incorporated, it would not have been a fascist entity. I don't think you would agree with that, would you?
  
  The film the Corporation paints a pretty convincing picture of the modern corporation as an "unregulated private tyranny" as Noam Chomsky described it, and I have seen some corporations that are like that. I will say that not nearly all of them are.
  
  Now, the Libertarian Party, is a *capitalist* party. It's in favor of what *I* would regard a *particular form* of authoritarian control. Namely, the kind that comes through private ownership and control, which is an *extremely* rigid system of domination -- people have to... people can survive, by renting themselves to it, and basically in no other way... I do disagree with them *very* sharply, and I think that they are not..understanding the *fundamental* doctrine, that you should be free from domination and control, including the control of the manager and the owner.
  
  Chomsky's remarks are on the same line of reason as Amartya Sen, who distinguished 'procedural freedoms' (like due process, or freedom of speech) from substantive freedoms (like freedom from involuntary starvation) Sen takes libertarians to task for make the basic informational exclusion of not considering the value of substantive freedoms, and I think he is right.
  
  The bottom line for is that someone who has a fundamentally freedom oriented approach should beware the concentration of power in corporations.
  
  The the setting of the book Oryx and Crake paints a fairly credible picture of what the world could look like if corporate power goes unchecked.
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  Jim Harper

  5 months ago

  Did I bail out at the right time or what? WooHOO!
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  Jim Harper

  5 months ago

  OK, even though I’m not commenting on this thread any more, here’s an article about the punishments meted out to various parties in the H-P spying scandal - parties subject to law, not in league with the law-giver. That’s a very important distinction that careful thinkers don’t gloss over.
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