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Government Of, By, and For the Corporations?

Somewhere along the line, many denizens of Washington, D.C. completely lost sight of the fact that our republic was intended to be government of, by, and for the people—not the corporations. 

Yet it really is starting to feel like a government of, by, and for the corporations. Our laws seem designed to benefit them, not the American people per se. It is a government where, for example, private companies get to decide free speech standards for the American public. A government that is in lock step with advancing corporations’ priorities—the American small business owners, workers, and taxpayers be damned. 

So perhaps, just maybe we should ask ourselves: what is the point of a government formed from the consent of the governed if it doesn’t actually promote, protect, and advance the interests of the people as a whole? Because it really does feel like we’ve devolved into a mere economy rather than a government. And we are little worker bees serving as ATMs to fund a system run by the ruling class and their corporate cronies rather than citizens of a free republic.

There’s a lot of “Hurr durr, we can’t interfere with private corporations because muh free market” mumbo jumbo from the Right, especially from Conservatism, Inc. It’s hard to comprehend such stupidity. It might, in fact, be pure stupidity. Or it might be think tanks on the Right taking corporate monies and obediently trumpeting pro-corporate language. 

Time was, conservatives distrusted concentration of power in every aspect. Big government, big tech, and big corporations are problems because concentrated power blended with imperfect human nature almost always inevitably leads to abuse. But today most often you hear D.C. types saying: “Big government bad. But big corporations and big tech? This is fine.” Such thinking is incoherent and irrational.

We’ve allowed corporations to become so powerful because we’ve ignored one of the very basic tenets of a true free market: antitrust, monopoly busting. You cannot have a true free market with monopolies. Those monopolies destroy competition, innovation, and eventually they think they’re the ones ordained to decide, well, everything. Theodore Roosevelt understood that. So did Ronald Reagan. 

We need to remember a basic fact: Legislation created corporations. Therefore, legislation can rein in corporations. Maybe it is time to end the fiction that corporations are “people” rather than state-sanctioned and structured actors. At least on some level, if America’s corporate “community” is so crucial to America’s economic security, then it follows that U.S. policymakers should treat corporations as the national security-critical institutions that they are. 

Why? Just look at what Great Britain is dealing with today: thousands of Communist Chinese loyalists—who have taken an oath to serve their ChiComm masters above all others—are embedded and working in virtually every critical U.K. government office and in British corporate offices around the globe. Here in the United States the numbers of potential Chinese spies must be larger, given our lax (up until the Trump Administration) visa education and employment programs. 

If the U.S. government is going to create these monoliths of corporatist statism, the least they can do is actually impose appropriate controls due to their “crucial national security role.” 

Seriously: the corporatists need to understand the deal with the devil. Facebook, Twitter, and Google now represent a national security threat to our nation. They should be run effectively as a national utility in the same way that telecommunications and power companies operate.

It feels like we’re making the same mistake we made at the turn of the 20th century when the robber barons rigged the system to serve their own interests. Out of that mistake we got out-of-control Progressivism, but we have to remember that it was in reaction to crony capitalism and a system that seemed to serve only the powerful and connected. Ignoring the problem then only empowered Progressives to fundamentally restructure our republic into an administrative state.

These lockdowns have benefitted the corporations over the small businesses in incredible ways: Amazon’s revenue is up 100 percent. Walmart and Target’s 80 percent. Google, Facebook, and Apple, to name just a few, have reached record highs with their stocks. 

But the small businesses? More than 20 percent have closed permanently this year. Those that have survived have endured a 30 percent reduction in revenue on average. These small businesses employ nearly half the American workforce in the private sector and are far more America First in their outlooks than any multinational global corporation. They are being destroyed in front of our eyes and most of us are just shrugging as we hurtle towards a country run by and for the benefit of corporations that, frankly, don’t give a damn about the American Republic.

Little by little our freedoms are being taken away by all the “bigs”a little sliced off here, more there. At some point, if we’re not careful, whatever freedoms might remain will be completely eradicated. My fear is that people will think that this bastardized form of capitalism is what it’s all about. And then they will reject it. But what will be our overreaction to our situation this time? I can guarantee it will be much worse than Progressivism. 

We can laugh at the moronic nature of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the squad.” They’re not bright, which is obvious. But after generations of young people passing through our indoctrination centers, bastions of leftist and socialist thought, if you don’t think that a jack-booted form of socialism could be a reaction to mounting abuse, you’re fooling yourself.

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About Ned Ryun

Ned Ryun is a former presidential writer for George W. Bush and the founder and CEO of American Majority. You can find him on Twitter @nedryun.

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