Democrats, Socialists, Progressives, Leftists, basically Statists of all types are irrational beings. The Obama mantra and strategy of capitalist big business being evil and government being good doesn’t pass any rational application of logic or thinking. No rational person can deny that the evils of the 20th Century, arguably the bloodiest in history, were caused by big governments and not businesses. Around 30 million citizens of the USSR died in the Gulag Archipelago. Considering that there were no private businesses in the USSR nobody can argue that businesses were the cause of that evil. The 75million Chinese people deliberately starved to death were not starved by the actions of Archer Daniels Midland but by the Chinese government. What business killed five million Ukrainians? Why business murdered 25% of the entire Cambodian population? It wasn’t Fokker, Mercedes Benz, or other German company that instituted the Holocaust, it was the Nazi State.
Conoco Phillips, British Petroleum, Marathon, Shell, Exxon, have small security forces but they have no ability to arrest you, they can’t tax you, they can’t confiscate your bank account, they can’t jail you, they can’t send a drone to kill you. Corporations don’t have police powers. Nobody from Coca-Cola is going to arrest you, take you from your home, interrogate you, and hold you. Today it is the government not any company has declared that they have the right to detain you without trial for as long as they want by merely claiming that you support terrorism with no evidence.
You are free to grow your own food, purchase it at Wall-Mart, Kroger, Fred’s, Winn-Dixie, or the corner produce stand. No business is using force or threat of force to make you purchase their product or service. It is only the government that uses force and the threat of force to compel you purchasing their service whether you want it, use it, or need it.
Yes it can be argued that government does good, and no anarchy is not better than government. But like parts of government the vast majority of businesses, private citizens, churches, and other voluntary associations do good. There is no private enterprise of any type that has done the vast amount of monstrous evil that governments have. Our forefathers understood that power corrupts so instituted a form of government that was limited, putting in harsh restrictions on the government not the people. From Matchless to the Hudson car company to Pan-Am to a zillion forgotten dot com’s those businesses that failed to protect and provide for their customers no longer exist. Businesses only prosper and do well by providing for the needs of their customers (unless government interferes with subsidies, mandates, licensing schemes, etc. to protected some businesses over others or protect businesses from bad business decisions).
Yes business is greedy for money; that is after all why they exist, to generate profit for the owner(s). As the above video by Walter Williams notes, it is in the best interests of business to protect and help its customers because they must compete for their business. Government has no such interest, and its driving force is its own propagation. It’s ability to use force to further its goals makes government far more dangerous. Tthe greed for power is far more frightening and dangerous to the people than mere greed for money. Statists throughout the last century were not greedy for money; they knew that with power the need for money was irrelevant. Consider Obama, his actual wage as president is not relevant, few if any have more of their needs provided with no personal costs than he and his family. He is set for life. None of the 20th Centuries infamous mass murderers, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao showed preoccupation with monetary greed. Their lust for power was legendary. This is why statists, whether they call themselves, progressives, leftists, socialists, democrats or republicans are far scarier than the libertarian or even conservative aspects of the political spectrum. Statists of all stripes lust for power.
How can one rationally look at the horrors inflicted upon people by their own governments over the last century and claim that businesses and capitalism are the cause of peoples ills, especially when they then ask the people to give the government more power, and control more of everybody’s lives. Only the insane could accept this reasoning.
Economist Dr. Walter Williams notes that greed not government was a driving force in eliminating racial discrimination.
Think about greed and racial discrimination. In 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers hired Jackie Robinson, why did racial discrimination by major league teams begin to drop like a hot potato? It wasn't feelings of guilt by white owners, affirmative action or anti-discrimination laws. It turned out that there was a huge pool of black baseball talent in the Negro leagues. It became too costly for teams to allow the Dodgers to gain a monopoly on this talent. Black players won the National League's Most Valuable Player award for seven consecutive seasons. Had other teams not stepped in to hire black players, allowing the Dodgers to hire them, it might have given the Dodgers a virtual monopoly on world championships.
Dr. Williams is right “greed is good.”
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