Skip to main content

Comment rescue: Levers in a democracy and corporate statism

This statement of mine, in a post on health care, roused some interesting comments from readers:

...the truth is that we have, as citizens, far more levers to use against the government than we have to use against the corporations, at least with respect to this one issue [health care].


Bowly, a regular libertarian reader, responds:

That's a bold claim. And even if true, the corporations have access to the same levers. That's why I'm not sure that "something" is better than "nothing", on this issue or any other.

And Dana Garrett, from the progressive end of the spectrum weighs in:

I know you want to confine it to this one issue, but I think this insight applies in far more matters. It's good to have a healthy suspicion of government, but in a democracy it's smarter to be more suspicious about constellations of private power where there is no shred of democratic control (unlike a government).


Both good points, and each deserving an answer.

Dana first, because I have to address the relative unique nature of health care. Thanks to government regulation [which is in itself affected by industry lobbying] I have far fewer levers available to me to affect a CIGNA or an AETNA than I do to affect the behavior of, say General Motors or GEICO.

I can, in colloboration with other citizens, drive GM to the brink of bankruptcy simply by not patronizing the company's product.

I can, in colloboration with other citizens, threaten to boycott GEICO for advertising in support of media programs I might dislike [as Glenn Beck has found out recently].

Why can I do this? Because in both of those cases I have easy access to competitor's products, which is manifestly not the case with health insurance. There, at best, thanks to prohibitions on inter-State competition, I only have access to two, maybe three competitors, and artificially created markets in which one company holds well over 50-70% of market share. Not because it has the better product, but because it has the benefit of government regulation enforcing a near-monopoly situation.

So I think it is justifiable to claim that I have far fewer levers to use as a citizen against a health care corporation than in most other cases [there may be some comparable cases; I just cannot think of them right now, which suggests their rarity].

Now back to Bowly. Granting you that the original statement was poorly written [I should not have said at least in the case of health care, but should have specified in the case of health care], I think it is defensible.

In States where there is initiative and referendum I can band together with other citizens and actually do my own legislating.

I can actively campaign, not just to throw any particular bum out, but to ruin that bum's effectiveness in office by denying him public legitimacy through the use of the press, new media, etc.

I can work to pit different levels of the government against each other: local, State, and Federal.

I can monkeywrench the government in a variety of legal, quasi-legal, and even marginally illegal ways.

It is difficult to argue, on a national scale, that elections have not turned the country's political direction in dramatic fashion, far more dramatically that we can affect corporate operations:

From a conservative perspective, Reagan in 1980 and the 1994 GOP takeover represented citizens wrenching the course of government into another direction, as did the re-election of LBJ (empowering the voting rights, civil rights, and the Great Society) from a liberal perspective--not to mention the huge ideological reversal in the government's behavior with Obama's election.

Government, far more than corporations, tends to reflect the often-capricious will of the voters.

Unfortunately, the voters, individual American citizens whose liberties I would like to preserve, tend to have the foresight of gnats, the corruptability of tax collectors, and the consistency of patients in a dementia ward.

Final note for both of you: the rise of strong multi-national corporations with economic, political, and even military power to rival small nations has even more dramatically changed this equation. At the point where we have corporate entities with state-like concentrations of power, you can no longer build any argument based exclusively on conditions that pertain within the United States alone.

Comments

Bowly said…
I understand better the points you were trying to make. Still not sure I agree; I need to digest a bit. I will throw some counterpoints and/or random thoughts out there though, because I'm not sure when I'll be able to get back to this.

Why can I do this? Because in both of those cases I have easy access to competitor's products, which is manifestly not the case with health insurance. There, at best, thanks to prohibitions on inter-State competition, I only have access to two, maybe three competitors, and artificially created markets in which one company holds well over 50-70% of market share. Not because it has the better product, but because it has the benefit of government regulation enforcing a near-monopoly situation.

So I think it is justifiable to claim that I have far fewer levers to use as a citizen against a health care corporation than in most other cases [there may be some comparable cases; I just cannot think of them right now, which suggests their rarity].


You say that, but exactly how much good have those levers done you in reality? None. The lack of choice is still there, and was created by the government, not the corporations (by your own admission). That's my point. It should also be noted that the reason you can use the government to address your grievance is because the government created the grievance in the first place. I wouldn't blame MBNA if the stoplight outside their HQ was malfunctioning.

It is difficult to argue, on a national scale, that elections have not turned the country's political direction in dramatic fashion, far more dramatically that we can affect corporate operations...

Ahh, but that's not the claim you made the first time around. You said that you had access. Voters as a group might change things, but individual voters don't. If you want something changed, you have to hope 50 million other people feel the same way, and then hope they actually make the change in office. (What would really be different right now if Kennedy hadn't died, or if Goldwater had won, or if Carter had been re-elected? My guess is not much. The same changes would have occurred, just in a different year; long-term effects would have been the same. I'm sure that's cold comfort to a black man in Alabama in 1964, but my point is that long-term change was inevitable regardless of election results.)

...the rise of strong multi-national corporations with economic, political, and even military power to rival small nations has even more dramatically changed this equation.

1) Which corporations, and (especially) which small nations? I don't sit around at night and chew my nails worrying about Belgium or Vietnam. Hell, Vietnam was considered our enemy within my lifetime, and now I'm trying to get a job there. And I wouldn't consider North Korea to be militarily small.

2) It doesn't really matter, because as soon as these corporations contradict the interests of the US Government, they'll go the way of Saddam Hussein, apartheid, and one-party rule in Taiwan.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?