Reply #64: We've moved increasingly toward corporate socialism in the US...

[IrateCitizen]

Just look at the amount of direct corporate welfare that is handed out directly to large corporations and industries. For instance, the airlines would never be viable without public expenditures on airports. Car companies would never be viable without public expenditures on roads. Computer companies would never be nearly as successful without government investment in technology. Big Pharma would never be quite so big without government investment in research.

Then, you get to issues like oil company subsidies, which go further than just direct tax breaks and such. When oil companies get drilling rights, they get it for pennies per acre on public lands. Then, public expenditures are used to build the roads necessary to even get to the drilling areas. Ditto for the pipelines to move the oil out.

In all instances, it is increasingly becoming a system of public investment and private profit. That's socialism for corporations and their biggest shareholders, and capitalism for everyone else.

Personally, I think a lot of these problems could be solved through massive decentralization. The manner in which large corporations display no loyalty to workers or communities highlights this issue perhaps better than any other. It is localized businesses that are compelled to co-exist in a mutually-beneficial relationship with the communities in which they operate. Same principle goes for small farmers vs. agribusiness. The biggest problem right now is that the playing field is so massively tilted in favor of these huge corporations, aided by their patrons in government, that such a seismic shift has little or no chance of currently succeeding.

I could go into specifics, but it would take far too much time right now. I'll just say that decentralization should be a cornerstone of any true economic reform, and a great deal of that has to do with actively busting up these hyperextended and grossly inefficient large corporations.