The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society, while the right thinks bad government is responsible. I think we just need to understand that A. both sides of the bribe are wrong and B. big is bad.
I don't know the solution for this - absence of government just leads to less restrictions for corporations, and absence of corporations will mean that worse corporations will be tolerated by the market.
> The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society, while the right thinks bad government is responsible.
This is both a strawman and entirely irrelevant. What's more informative is what both sides do once in power.
The Democrats are quite happy to cut taxes, subsidize all kinds of corporate incentives (see Amazon in NY), and have not actively taken an antitrust stance since the 90s. Meanwhile, the Republicans are quite happy to have a HUGE government, as long as most of those expenditures are in the military and not in social programs. Neither party is particularly anti-corporate. The Democrats are certainly more willing to reign in corporate power, but this is purely in the marginal sense. Consider that copyright extensions over the last 50 years have enjoyed broad, bi-partisan support. As have pro-corporate trade deals like the TPP.
The most stark policy differences between the left and the right in the United States are in the realm of social and cultural issues: abortion, LGBTQ rights, guns. There is no mainstream party that has a substantially adversarial relationship with corporate power.
Among the highlights are minimum wage increases, OSHA enforcement, transparency requirements for government contractors and a whole lot more.
Appointments to the Labour Board, as well as to the courts, could have rather significant impact on precedent. As but one issue that will be central in the near future is the treatment of Uber drivers and similar, and their classification as contractors/employees. A two-seats swing on the Supreme Court is almost guaranteed to have changed the outcome of that trial when it eventually reaches the court.
As to the "social issues" mentioned by OP, it makes me a bit uneasy to see them commonly referred to as separate from labor law. Workplace anti-discrimination law is obviously labor law as well. It may not affect you or me. But neither does the minimum wage. When the latter is considered "labor law" and the former isn't, I wonder what the reason for this sort of "othering" can be.
Yes. The core cause of many of our problems is how capitalism is broken. Between removing individual contribution limits [0], unlimited monetary influence from Super PACs [1], and our weakening Antitrust laws (that somehow allowed AT&T and Time Warner to merge!), it's no wonder we're having the economic problems we have today.
But of course no politician talks about these things. Capitalism has not failed us; our politicians have failed us. We need to fix capitalism. Block giant mergers, break apart monopolies, ease the burden on small business, etc. More competition is better for everyone (except big corporations of course).
Not at all. European socialist parties have been migrating to a, as a previous commenter put it, "cultural" agenda: feminism, LGTB, eco... some of the issues are favorable or neutral to workers, but some others, like inmigration policies are actually harming, or at least perceived as such. The result is that these parties are sinking and their votes going to both extremes of the political spectrum.
> The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society,
No, we don't.
> while the right thinks bad government is responsible.
More “libertarians” than “the right”; they overlap but not are not equivalent. (In fact, libertarians also overlap with the left.)
> absence of government just leads to less restrictions for corporations
No, because corporations are creatures of government. Absence of government (or just absence of government chartering corporations) means no corporations, not unregulated corporations.
Even if they aren't a corporation in name, capitalism naturally concentrates power with the richest groups of people. Without some external factor draining wealth from the wealthiest they will eventually soak up the entire monetary system and crash it. Capitalism is a positive feedback loop, like an open mic next to an amplified speaker, and we're pushing the mic closer and closer each year.
Thus far nobody has found a better institution that can act as a check on excessive concentration of wealth.
There's no evidence of that ever happening, or even close to it.
Consider the Hunt bros who attempted to corner the silver market. They paid higher and higher prices for it, then were left holding the bag when the market price for silver crashed.
There is an argument that portions of the middle ages had exactly this problem, as the monarchies soaked up all of the wealth and the peasantry was unable make much headway economically.
The so called Guilded Age in the US was also arguably heading in this direction, and was only broken up by massive wars and extremely tax happy federal governments.
The middle ages didn't have much of a banking system, nor did they have a fiat money system. There wasn't a system to crash. Besides, feudalism isn't capitalism.
The Guilded Age saw an enormous growth in the middle class.
And also enormous amounts of abject poverty and outright wage slavery. That's the point. The system was becoming seriously unbalanced and it took government action (and a couple of wars) to bring us to the boom times of the 50s and 60s.
If you mean "limited" as in at any point of time there is a fixed amount of wealth, then sure. But wealth is being created constantly. Recessions can put a short term dent in this progress but overall the progress over time is pretty impressive.
Absence of government chartering corporations was a thing not that long ago. It doesn't mean no big businesses, it just means a return to partnerships and personal liabilities as the primary entity. Some businesses today still operate on these older principals, notably law firms. They seem to do their evil well enough despite not being corporations. So I doubt that much would change.
My memory is telling me there's a writeup on Goldman Sachs risk taking since becoming publicly traded, versus when it was a partnership. And the increase in risk taking becoming a corporation is a real effect.
> Absence of government chartering corporations was a thing not that long ago.
Governments chartering corporations as a widespread practice is older than (and arguably key to) completing the transition to a generally capitalist economic system.
> Some businesses today still operate on these older principals, notably law firms.
Law firms are often professional corporations, and those that aren't are often LLCs or LLPs, which are also creatures of government newer than, and deriving in design (in part) from corporations.
The mainstream liberal opinion is that corporations should a) be regulated by a sufficiently funded independent government agency, b) pay taxes, and c) be required to limit contributions or at least disclose campaign expenditures
The only people advocating the destruction of corporations are actual anarchists and anarcho-communists.
A large chunk of the right believes in the wholesale destruction of government agencies- they don't think EPA should even exist. But the equivalent opinion on the left has no political power at all. The leftiest member of Congress is not calling for a Worker's Revolution.
Lest anyone think that last paragraph is hyperbole, note that the current head of the Department of Energy had previously stated that he wanted to abolish it. This was, of course, before he found out what it did (!), which occurred after he took the job (!!).
(In case anyone doesn't realize how ridiculous this is, the DoE is responsible for, among other things, the production and maintenance of the US's nuclear arsenal.)
The Department of Energy was only created in 1977. Eliminating the department isn't the same thing as discarding its functions en masse.
The more interesting discussion would be about the particular motivations for the creation and proposed dissolution of the department, rather than a cursory dismissal of the idea.
There's only two possibilities: either a given function is discarded, or it's reassigned.
Which did Rick Perry want to do? Well, given that he didn't know what those functions were, I don't see how he possibly could have had any actual plan for reassigning them.
Wanting to abolish the DoE could be sensible if done with thought. But wanting to abolish it while also not having a clue about what it does is just crazypants.
“In fact, after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination.” - Actual quote by the current head of the DoE.
I should have been more clear that I was responding to the statement that the idea itself was "ridiculous" and not to Rick Perry's inability to speak coherently about the idea.
The statement was that “this” was ridiculous, where “this” was Perry wanting to abolish a really important agency without having a clue about what it actually does.
And the Secretary of Education has spent her entire career advocating for spending government money on privately run charter schools. And there's no small number of people on the right who believe that the Department of Education should be disbanded entirely, since they don't believe in any federal involvement in public schooling at all; they barely want state involvement (see: charter schools).
The equivalent opinion of "disband one agency" is not a "Worker's Revolution", it's "disband one corporation/industry", and there are plenty of those opinions on the left (tech monopolies, oil/gas, defense contractors, etc.)
The equivalent argument to a Worker's Revolution on the right would be the disbanding of the Federal government or a reduction to independence-day levels. That opinion does not exist in Congress either.
Saying corporations should be broken up is not the same as saying there should be no corporations. The former is just old-fashioned antitrust and yeah, definitely has some sway on the left.
A split-up Google just makes bunch of corporations; abolishing tech corporations entirely and taking them over as a public utility or worker's cooperative is what I'm getting at. "This particular corporation is too big" is a mainstream-but-lefty opinion; "this corporation should be expropriated and owned by the public" is not a mainstream opinion.
Steve Bannon is on record as wanting to dismantle the "administrative state", he held the ear of the President for a while. The head of the CFPB doesn't think the CFPB should exist. Paul Ryan wants to privatise Social Security. "Shrink government enough to drown it in a bathtub" is a Grover Norquist quote. They may not want to roll back the entire government to Independence Day but they do want to take it back to the 19th century if it means they can cut taxes. They don't just want less regulation; they want the feds to get out of the business of regulating industry at all.
I'm not sure if we're speaking past each other, but it seems we're both making the same point.
The right is not advocating for the complete destruction of the Government. The left is not advocating for the removal of corporations as a legal entity.
Those two positions are equivalent and neither side has cachet at the moment.
The destruction of certain government agencies is closer to the breakup of certain corporations or industries than it is to the right-equivalent of a Worker's Revolution.
I guess I'm equating "oil corporations should not exist" with "oil corporations should not be regulated by the feds". The latter seems to have some sway with the current administration, see:
This guy does not seem worried that he might look a bit cozy with the industry he is supposedly regulating; he's practically asking the industry to ask him for leniency.
There are countries with state oil companies and nobody is advocating for that; but there seems to be people advocating for the total abdication of regulation of oil companies. If there's a continuum between "state run" and "fully unregulated", the "fully unregulated" side seems to have a certain amount of sway whereas the other end doesn't.
That "corporation/industry" combination is bizarre. Those are very different things. Disbanding a corporation means others will fill in. Disbanding an entire industry is basically unheard of and would be incredibly disruptive.
Consider the current call on the left to abolish ICE. The right paints this as meaning "abolish the border patrol" but that's not what it actually means. The call is to either pass the responsibilities to other agencies, or create a new agency. That would be like disbanding a corporation.
Now consider the calls on the right to abolish the EPA. The intent is not that the EPA's responsibilities get picked up by other agencies or passed to a new agency. The intent is that those responsibilities cease.
I don't see any movement to disband the industries you mention. The closest would be oil/gas, and even then the movement is not to disband them, but to regulate them so that they actually bear the costs of the damage they cause, and let the market take its natural course from there.
I'd disagree given "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." is the most famous Grover Norquist quote, and he spent a good portion of his life towards doing this very thing.
>The equivalent argument to a Worker's Revolution on the right would be the disbanding of the Federal government or a reduction to independence-day levels. That opinion does not exist in Congress either.
Well said. Re leftiest members of Congress - for one thing, they won't be very lefty as long as having a religion is a virtual requirement:
"The only open atheist in congressional history was California Democrat Pete Stark, who spent three decades in Congress before admitting to his lack of faith"
> for one thing, they won't be very lefty as long as being a christian is a virtual requirement
The idea that there aren't any very lefty Christians is...well, not entirely surprising given the logb-standing “left v religion” media narrative the US right spent so many decades fostering, but also not at all consistent with reality.
Yes, you're right. Or the radical priests of Latin America. MLK etc. Well, there doesn't seem much of that in the US these days. Jim Jones may have had an effect - he was a model left christian most of his career apparently.
Us liberal Christians outnumber the others, we're more concerned about the teachings of Christ (cite The Beatitudes) over accumulating power or fighting culture wars, we consider it distasteful to push our beliefs onto others, and we're not organized politically and never will be.
Hi there! (Ah sorry, I don't know what I'm talking about either.) Well, nice to meet/hear from you.
[Anecdata] Actually..I'm in rather atheist Australia, hardly met any christians here my whole life. But the last 10 years have made a lot of friends online - who are almost all christians - mostly catholic, but not all - in Latin America, the Philippines, Africa. At least, they live in very christian worlds, and are I suppose closer to what you describe than the right-wing uh....than the christianity mostly seen in the mainstream media. They're just lovely people. :-)
> Well, there doesn't seem much of that in the US these days.
There's plenty; see, e.g., Cornel West.
It's perhaps less visible than right-wing Christianity because left Christianity tends not to be theocratic in its political activism, which can make it easier to overlook the Christian part and see only the left part.
Maybe in the realm of pedantry but: Getting rid of corporations is more generally a socialist idea. Anarchists advocate getting rid of unjust hierarchy in general.
Although this is somewhat meaningless in this context since large scale worker cooperatives like the Mondragon Corporation are not (usually) considered to be "bad" organizations by socialists including anarchists.
I think you are more right than wrong, although it's obviously an intentional simplification.
There are two subtleties that I think are interesting to point out.
One is that the left tends to argue more for things that increase market competition, such as busting up monopolies. I see the right arguing more frequently that anti-competitive practices are justified because limiting them impinges on the freedom of the monopolies.
The other is that portions of the libertarian right are less against governments than they are against the ability of a democracy to limit the power of the wealthy. This is why some classic libertarians like Hayek and Friedman supported right-wing dictatorships in non-US countries. Now obviously, they would say they believe this for a reason (market efficiencies, etc), but I think this is a pretty clear conflict of interest that can lead to motivated reasoning.
> The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society, while the right thinks bad government is responsible.
Complete hogwash. Neither side thinks this.
The left certainly doesn't think that "bad corporations" are responsible for the "ills of society". "Bad corporations" are simply one of the "ills of society".
The right doesn't actually oppose "bad government" at all. They are perfectly fine with foisting bad government on everybody else as long as it comes from their "team".
I bet I can guess the same of you. So what? Imputing some set of values to someone doesn't make them wrong, and a failure to represent oneself as some sort of enlightened centrist, above the influence of bias, isn't in any way a mark against content.
There is no real difference between the left and right at the high levels of government. We live under crony capitalism, the worst mixture of bad government being run by bad corporations.
This is such simplistic and reductive thinking and I'm tired of seeing it. We're all circling a Fallacy of the Golden Mean drain and if I never saw another "both sides" non-argument again in my life it'd be too soon. At a minimum, it obscures the fact that in the US today we have basically one 'side'; by referring to our oligarchy's two mouthpieces as separate sides we're implicitly giving them a free pass. It probably also plays into the 'two and only two sides to every story/event' narrative that gives implicit platforms to anti-vaxers, holocaust deniers, and all sorts of unpleasantness.
As an edit, that came off as ranty because obviously I'm miffed but I stand by it for the most part.
The common HN user over 1000 points is happy to downvote you, but your dead on that both major US parties are bought and operated by the major companies, with social policies being the main differentiator.
Its really sad that there is no choice in American politics today outside a handful of socialist politicians at the local level.
Edit: Keep the downvotes coming! The lack of responses is telling :P
The difference is, nobody on the right is advocating to make corporations even bigger, while left in virtually any country works to make government bigger than it is.
I don't know the solution for this - absence of government just leads to less restrictions for corporations, and absence of corporations will mean that worse corporations will be tolerated by the market.