Here for now i will just mention the development of the legal canon entwined with capitalism. When i was barely a teen (1959) my father (the rocket scientist who tried his damnedest to turn his children into good little randian objectivists; he got 2 out of 3 but not me) said that if i learned nothing about economics, i needed to understand that for capitalism to survive (but not thrive) it required across the board growth of no less than 2%, and that wasn’t taking into account the growth of population.
He, with surprising patience unusual given his common demeanor, explained how each little chunk of a dollar was taken out by this or that strand of the system:
- ~this bit for public infrastructure that goes to private corporations;
- ~another bit for public education that goes 50/50 to people and corporations who are contracted to provide the materials, buildings, etc.;
- ~this bit over here goes to public safety services and the corporate contracts that facilitate those systems;
- ~a chunk goes to corporations for supplying the essential and basic needs of living~ food, water, sewage, trash removal, vehicles, energy, etc.;
- ~another chunk gets snipped off as savings accounts to increase the financial capabilities of corporations to further develop the system;
- ~and so forth and so on.
His point was quite simple, if you only have so much of the dollar, then none of these systems grow. If they don’t grow, they end up having to cannibalize one another in order to exert their need for their 2% to survive. What we have, he said, is a nationwide set of laws and codes that protect and facilitate a schema in which no one entity is freed from its pursuit to increase its profitability. Those corporations that service governments (and ultimately every single dollar of tax revenue makes its way to corporations either through contracts for services or from purchases by employees) pressure governments to grow; seen most dramatically in the desperation of state and local govenments to increase their property and sales tax populations. Those corporations that provide essential needs pressure governments to free up salaries and other funding (to those other corporations) so that more can be spent on the needs (and presently huge sums need be freed up for the senseless yet necessary waste of consumer discretionary spending). And so this goes on.
Should any one aspect of this schema start to fall behind (think your little corner market or other family-owned business) it must be removed as one would remove a cancer. It becomes a drain on the profits of others. Problems lie when large corporations discover that they have extended themselves well beyond needing that 2% (and for the BAT sake of it all, churches are financial corporations who have a desperate need for cash all the time–10% tithe my ass), and they then layoff employees or close up shop altogether. The waves of this shut down smash down first against the local infrastructure and companies; loss of tax revenues deflate the local economy which loses its carrying capacity to hold other jobs and services, and so forth. And i am not even going to mention (well this is a mention) the defrauding of people by large corporations. My dad’s overall point, to a 13 years old, was that i needed to look for a job that would be needed in the long run; one that would not experience wholesale cutbacks or layoffs. {My brother and sister always took his advice. Me, i preferred to study religion and philosophy.}
Governmental systems throughout the US are fighting against this loss of revenue. It matters because that revenue goes to corporations to keep them viable. If we cut this or that govenment service, especially employees and resource materials, we are removing funds from the community’s businesses and corporations. Citicorp announced a month ago that it was laying off up to 15000; today it announces it is buying a Taipei Bank?? Go figure how that impacts US communities. The other pressing issue can be summarized by Coke/Pepsi (never one to promote one against the other) and Levis. The US officially exports Coke and Levis (and thousands upon thousands of other products), but the US does not manufacture these products for export. In fact, the US imports much of the materials and resources for these products (we actual import Levis). No, we export ideas, licenses, copyrights, patents. How long can the exporting of intellectual property be supported by intellectual production (mining the minds of the children to the very end)??
