Economies of Deception

Two books I have recently read, Treasure Islandsand Merchants of Doubt, have each highlighted, in their different ways, how deeply rooted deception is in our current economic order.  Banks hide behind many layers of secrecy, shuttling funds around shady offshore jurisdictions, in order to get by with transactions that would never pass public scrutiny, and to hide profits from taxation.  Manufacturers have turned to the business of manufacturing doubt about the environmental impacts of their activity, systematically engaging in smear campaigns against scientists and whistle-blowers who reveal these impacts and costs, and funding "studies" to convince that everything from CO2 to acid rain to DDT to cigarettes are clean, safe, and sustainable.  

A slew of recent high-profile scandals have illustrated the same tendency.  The world's largest company by market cap, Apple, Inc., was sued by the US Department of Justice for secretly colluding to fix prices on e-books.  More recently, damning allegations have come to light that the world's largest company by revenue, Wal-mart, engaged in systematic bribery to gain a major foothold in Mexico, and, most seriously, that the bribery was then carefully covered up by senior Wal-mart executives.  A couple months further back, US meat-lovers were scandalized to learn that supermarkets and fast-food chains had been selling them beef padded with ammonia-sprayed "pink slime," prompting a massive public backlash and the virtual shutdown of the pink slime industry, may it rest in peace.

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If Corporations are People...

After a spell of travel-induced inactivity, I return with some more half-baked musings loosely inspired by Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Islands.

If corporations are people, then shouldn't they pay the same taxes as everyone else?  Why should corporate tax rates generally be lower than personal income tax (the US is an exception here, though exemptions and loopholes mean that many companies pay far less than the 35% rate)?  If corporations are people, then why can they relocate from one jurisdiction with relative ease, without having to go through immigration and naturalization?  Why, for that matter, can they split themselves into pieces and be in several countries at once?  I certainly can't do that.  If corporations are people, then why can they live forever?  And why shouldn't they be beholden to those who brought them into being (viz., the government—"The state is the only institution in the world that can bring a corporation to life.  It alone grants corporations their essential rights, such as legal personhood and limited liability....Without the state, the corporation is nothing.  Literally nothing."—Joel Bakan, The Corporation)?  My parents had enormous authority over me through my first eighteen years, but corporations, we are told, should be free from regulation by the legal regime that brought them into being.  

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Leviathan or Puppet?

One of the favorite rhetorical weapons of the Right is to point to the sheer page count of federal legislation, particularly the Federal Tax Code.  They are especially fond of pointing out that the tax code is longer than the Bible, though there seems to be considerable haziness on the precise margin.  This is often presented as damning evidence of the overgrown power of the federal government, a sprawling, all-consuming monster that has its tentacles in everything.  Of course, no one would deny that there is a lot of truth to this picture.

But reading Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, it occurred to me that another interpretation is possible.  Perhaps the sheer length of US tax regulations is more a sign of impotence than omnipotence.  Think about it.  

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Consumed: A Book Review

It took me more than a year to finish this book--sometimes, that should tell you something about me, but in this case, that should tell you something about this book.  While Barber's overall thesis is compelling and important, his presentation of it seemed calculated to alienate any possible allies.  Pompous and blustering, he writes most of the book's 339 small-font pages in a breathless, melodramatic tone of fervent moral passion and outrage (I suppose the subtitle should've warned me adequately: "How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole").  Now, this would understandable as an occasional device.  The subject is one that calls for moral passion and outrage, and I, for one, am sympathetic to the desire to indulge in rhetorically-charged passages chock-full of unusual polysyllabic words.  But intense rhetoric is only effective as an occasional device, as a departure from the benchmark of more restrained rhetoric.  Unfortunately, for Barber, the bombastic was the benchmark, from which he almost never departed.  And as you can imagine, that begins to grate on one. 

As part of his tirade against consumer culture, he seeks to include pretty much every example and phenomenon he can think of, regardless of whether it's relevant or compelling.  Instead of a focused account of some of the most alarming trends and damning evidence, Barber is determined to offer a comprehensive account of everything that is wrong with the world today under his heading of "infantilization."  Couple that with the fact that he seems to have been too pompous to have accepted any advice from his editor, and one has to endure many pages of irrelevant or laughably overblown laundry lists of complaints.

And yet, I did the book the honor of reading till the end, because I believe his overall thesis is compelling and very important.

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The Problem in a Nutshell

The contents of this post are probably nothing new if you've this blog for awhile, but as people back home sometimes get baffled and think I'm a left-wing loony, I've been thinking of a way to encapsulate where I'm coming from politico-economically in a nice, neat (though none too eloquent) nutshell.  So here's a try:

I'm for a free market, or more importantly, a free society, which includes a free market.  Freedom requires the removal of oppressive constraints.  But oppressive constraints are precisely what are put in place by large and powerful entities determined to retain and advance their power.  We live in a world full of massive, extremely wealthy and powerful entities.  Our government is one, to be sure.  But when there's ten bullies on the block jockeying for position, you don't get freedom just by taking out the current top bully--rather, by doing this you invite the nine others to come in and take his place, and woe to you if they turn out to be less benign than the first.  If we're going to live in an age of massive, centralized multinational corporations, then unfortunately we're going to need massive, centralized governments to keep them in line (though unfortunately, these will often collude with the corporations, rather than restraining them).  You focus just on removing the governments and you don't get freedom, you just get regime change--indeed, from a constitutional regime to an unrestricted one.  Conservatives talk as if freedom will be attained simply by removing one bully from the equation--the government--and leaving all the others untouched.  But if they get their wish, they may find that the government was, for all its foibles, the only thing maintaining some semblance of freedom from all the other bullies on the block.  So if we're going to talk about freedom, let's start talking about how to shrink all the bullies down to size, something that will require laws and constraints--things which, believe it or not, can be aids to freedom, rather than chains.

Now, I realize now that that's really only half of what needs to be said, so I suppose I'll try to work up a Pt. 2: The Solution in a Nutshell.  Heh, that should be fun...