The U.S. Cannot Be Run Like a Business [Archive.org URL]

A healthy society balances the power of respected governments in the public sector with both responsible businesses in the private sector and robust communities in what I call the plural sector — the clubs, religions, community hospitals, foundations, NGOs, and cooperatives with which so many of us engage. The plural sector, although the least recognized of the three, is large and diverse. Many of us may work in businesses and most of us may vote for governments, but all of us live much of our lives in the community associations of the plural sector. (The United States has more cooperative memberships than people.) This is the sector that can offset the destructive effects of the pendulum politics that keep so many countries swinging back and forth between public government controls and private market forces.

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The most democratic nations in the world get closest to balancing themselves across these three sectors — for example, Canada, Germany, and the countries of Scandinavia. During the decades following World War II, the U.S. was closer to that balance. Recall the era’s prosperity and development, social as well as economic, despite high taxes and generous welfare programs.

Then the Berlin Wall fell. Arguably, it landed on the democracies of the West. That is because we misunderstood what brought it down. Western pundits, reflecting the bias that is now so prominent, claimed that capitalism had triumphed. Not at all. Balance had triumphed. While the communist states of Eastern Europe were utterly out of balance, in favor of their public sectors, the successful countries of the West retained a certain balance across all three sectors.

With this misunderstanding, a narrow form of capitalism has been triumphing ever since, throwing America, along with many other countries, out of balance the other way, in favor of private-sector interests. Seen this way, Trump himself is not the problem so much as an extreme manifestation of the larger problem: imbalance in favor of private interests, with too much business involvement in government.

In the United States, this problem has been developing for a long time. The Republic was barely a quarter-century old when Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that “we shall…crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength.” In the last century, trustbuster Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the “real and grave evils” of too-powerful corporations, arguing that “it should be as much the aim of those who seek for social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.” A few decades later, Dwight Eisenhower warned that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

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The relationship between business and government, a separation of powers no less vital than that within government itself, has become so confounded that it threatens American democracy itself. When free enterprise in an economy becomes the freedom of enterprises-as-people in a society, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, government of the real people, by the real people, and for the real people shall perish from the Earth.