What is corporatism?
Simply put, corporatism is welfare for the plutocrats.
What Big Business and Big Government prefer you believe, however, is that in America today, we simply have a "mixed economy." One that preserves the private ownership of property and its management, but also delivers all of the government-guaranteed promises of socialism. The best of both worlds!
The following article gives a brief, but very interesting history of the rise of corporatism in America (and ultimately Progressivism). Highly recommended!
The Rise of Big Business and the Growth of Government by Robert Higgs
Most people learn about the relation between the rise of big business and the growth of government in the form of what amounts to a morality play. In the most widely disseminated version, presented in nearly every American history textbook, the emergence of big business (playing the role of the devil) is said to have given rise to a variety of evils and abuses–monopoly power, pollution, exploitation of workers, and so forth. Matthew Josephson tells this story in rousing (if not scrupulously factual) style in his 1934 classic, The Robber Barons. The masses are said to have cried out for relief and to have pressed their political representatives to enact protective legislation. Thus emerged, most markedly during the Progressive, New Deal, and Great Society periods, a profusion of government programs, regulatory agencies, and direct government participation in economic life (divine intervention, as it were), which served to shield the public from the otherwise crushing weight of brutal laissez-faire capitalism.
A competing tale, popular among many libertarians and some left-radicals, presents the rise of big business as leading directly to satanic endeavors. This version maintains that the big businessmen, however virtuous they might have been at the outset, ran into trouble because of rampant competition among the emergent big firms. To suppress this irksome, profit-sapping market phenomenon, they used their wealth diabolically to influence or bribe lawmakers to create government programs, regulatory agencies, and so forth that, in effect, allowed them to wield the government’s coercive power in the service of propping up their cartels, suppressing competition, and maintaining excessive profits. The classic exposition of this interpretation is Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism (1963).
Unfortunately, although these morality tales contains grains, or even big chunks, of truth, each leaves out a great deal of important, relevant evidence. In short, reality was much messier than either interpretation suggests. Continue reading The Rise of Big Business and the Growth of Government »»
