The Grand Failure of Government to Limit Concentration of Power

[Crewleader]

by charles hugh smith


The Grand Failure of Government to Limit Concentration of Power
(November 30, 2009)


News flash: My interview with Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds is now available for viewing. (And yes, I know I look old...give a 55-year old a break!)

From Dubai to the U.S. healthcare "reform" debate, a key context is the State's Grand Failure to limit the concentrations of power which then twist all State policies to meet the demands of self-serving Elites.

While much is made of the "balance of powers" in the U.S. and other democracies--the power of the executive branch being offset by the legislative and judicial branches--this "balance" completely failed to hinder the credit/housing bubble and the structural fraud and embezzlement at its heart. No branch of the "balanced powers of the State" saw any reason to interfere with the systemic looting and debauchery of credit and currency.

We should also note that in previous periods of extreme concentrations of wealth and high inequality, the "balanced powers" of the U.S. government did not reverse or even seriously challenge these long periods of high inequality. In this sense we should be careful not to overestimate the State's control over wealth concentration and rising inequality.

Despite the supposedly "leveling influence" of income taxes, wealth has become ever more concentrated in the past 40 years, paralleling the high inequality between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Neither the "trust-busting" actions of the Federal government in the early 1900s nor the rise of industrial unions reversed or disrupted the 1860-1930 period of high wealth concentration/high inequality.

http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov09/balance-of-powers11-09.html

[IrateCitizen]

1. This is nothing new.

Juergen Habermas laid this out quite clearly in 1961 when he published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Ever since the advent of capitalism from the Renaissance onward, those with capital have used their influence and connections to gain advantage. Likewise, the government bureaucracy has grown in order to both promote its own interests AND to better attend to the desires of business elites.

[kerrywins]

2. This is why so many governments end in revolution/seccession

[IrateCitizen]

3. Ummmm... no.

Habermas does not suggest anything remotely approaching revolution as a natural consequence of these happenings. Rather, his book was an attempt to explain why the bourgeoisie rose up as the dominant power in the Western world, at the expense of hereditary monarchs. He also described the way in which the bourgeoisie, once firmly entrenched in power, then began to take on many of the trappings of the world of the monarchs, and how this led to the deterioration of the public sphere and its concepts of meritocracy and free exchange and debate of ideas -- the very things that the bourgeoisie had used to challenge the monarchy in the first place.