Americans like drugs.
Just ask Mexico. That country is the biggest middleman on the entire planet between growers and consumers of drugs, which has put the 1970's French Connection to shame. Moral arguments about drug use aside for a moment, this whole affair is destroying the state of Mexico. It has spent billions of dollars, hundreds of lives, and decades of time to shut down the drug Cartels, so many resources, that the State is losing the battle, and may implode on itself soon.
The question is, why? Why would the state put it's very existence on the line to prevent another organization from having power over a particular facet of the country?
Take the corporation, for example. A corporation is a hierarchical power structure that handles resources and products for the betterment of people's lives (if they never made anyone's life better, then who would ever buy their product or service?). Oddly enough, this sets up an interesting Venn diagram with what the United States government is supposed to do.
Compare the mission statement of the preamble of the Constitition to what a corporation would want. It is definitely in the best interest of a corporation to ensure domestic tranquility as consumer confidence tanks in a crisis. No one wants to spend money when they're afraid, which is why investors tend to shy away from places around the world without tranquility, and why corporations lobby governments for this very thing in disturbed markets around the world. For this same reason, corporations are interested in the common defense. Note the massive and extensive use of the Blackwater corporation in Iraq. Given that promotion of general welfare is the reason we give them money, corporations have this interest at heart as well.
In the end, corporations and the federal government have a lot of the same mission statement, which, in the end, makes them competitors. At least in the US, the government tries to mostly step out of the way of corporations, and leech money off of them to pursue the state's own ends, rather than trying to shut them down. A part of this, perhaps, comes from the fact that corporations are able to do some things better than the government itself (for example, almost all of my material possessions, except for some postage stamps and my driver's license came from a corporation, not the government).
But sometimes these large, powerful, money-soaked organizations go afoul of the state, and the state decides to crush it no matter the cost. For example, the US put a vast amount of resources to break up the mob in the 1920's, and it applied basically all of its resources to blowing up several southern governments during the Civil War. Why is it that sometimes states can live in harmony with states within states, but sometimes they can't?
Other than some machismo confrontation of pride, it seems to me that the conflict occurs when an average group of citizens (people living within a certain territorial, geographic boundary) doesn't need to follow the regulations imposed upon them by the state. For example, making money isn't against the laws of the state, but giving people drugs is. If an organization makes it possible to use drugs, then it is in conflict with an organization, the state, that demands that its laws are always followed within its physical jurisdiction.
This is an affront to old ideas of nationalism. When states started hitting the scene a few hundred years ago, one of the things that they got was sovereignty: they could not be held to account by any other organization. As a part of this, they had complete sovereignty over anything in their realm, that is, they could judge anything below them while being immune from judgment on the top. While sovereignty has been eroding from the top from things like international law, it seems that states are still hell-bent on being able to control things underneath them.
Of course, I must once again ask, why? Why does the state need to preserve a philosophical standpoint in which all organizations from the individual up to the state have to look like a jawbreaker, where every level is inside of every other level? Why can't it look more like a sandwich with the state as a layer on top, rather than an all-encompassing layer around?
It seems that as nationalism is fading, the state will have to accept its diminishing role in the world as higher and lower level organizations flex more and more of their muscle. Otherwise, we will continue to see things like Mexico's desperate gambit that threaten to destroy the state itself if it loses.
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There's no bill of rights for corporations. Since the goal of the corporation is only ever to make money, it will do so by whatever means necessary. Since the government's job is to provide for its people, and that requires money, there is an inevitable conflict. Corporations try all they can to avoid paying taxes, while the government is left trying to figure out why their budget isn't balancing. During the corporation busting of Roosevelt, the highest tax bracket was 97%, this during a very decadent era in American culture. Nowadays, it's only 30%. Is it a wonder there is a deficit?
ReplyDeleteYes, but the only way that corporations can make money is through ways that ultimately improve the standard of living of people who use their products or services. Thus, while it's not explicit, like in the case of the constitution, corporations have an implicit desire to promote general welfare and ensure domestic security etc. so that they can make money.
ReplyDeleteAs such, providing for people needn't be a costly endeavor, as corporations do it all the time and MAKE money in the meanwhile. The fact that one set of large organizations does the same job better than another doesn't necessarily mean that they need to put everything on the line to destroy each other.
As for defecits, it's a simple matter of deciding to spend money, even if you don't have it. Yes, you can always work to get more money, but that doesn't change the fact that you need to choose spend beyond your means in order to have a deficit.