Reply #40: The marriage of corporations and government is slavery

[MikeNY]

Often times the talking heads want you to argue over gay marriage - but the real marriage that is killing our country is the one that takes place every day between government officials and big business. So much tax payer money is lost in micro-transactions through crony capitalism, that many House members from across the aisle feel that the Senate is completely under the control of corporate lobbyists. There is nothing wrong with a free market - but its pointless to start a chicken and egg argument. What is more important are the facts on the ground. Politicians love contracts. They love awarding contracts to their business people friends. And they are in it to win it. When you elected your representatives into office, they swore an oath to protect your rights, not the rights of a non-existent being called a corporation. A free market doesn't involve slavery because the market would realize that freed men are more productive - this happened in the industrialized northern states before the Civil War. Agrarian culture and pre-industrial society is slave based, because the slave owners own all the means of production on their farms/plantations. You can argue this same principle happens in a communist dictatorship.

The reality is, free market capitalism has created the greatest innovation the world has. Einstein wasn't ordered by the U.S. government to create his theory of relativity. Alternating and direct current electricity weren't pioneered by Tesla, Westinghouse, and Edison while they worked at the Department of Energy. Let's be real here. Our economic system allows you, the author of this thread, to put your mind into something great, and make something of it.

Now, what has gone on over the last few decades is something completely different - and that is the consolidation of a whole bunch of mega corporations entering different industries due to the marriage between government and business. It is the reason banks were able to act as insurance companies, violating New Deal provisions, and it is the same reason provisions barring interactions of derivatives were stripped from New Deal legislation in the 90s. It is the reason everyone was forced to switch to digital TV - to prevent someone from running a pirate TV station on an analog channel. Now youd need to put a satellite into orbit if you wanted to compete with Time Warner. Do you see where the collusion leads? A lot of it, admittedly, is under the guise of "regulation" when it is anything but.