Free Market Capitalism Inevitably Leads to Corruption

Rebuttles: 1. While a Corporation is not strictly a business, corporations have historically not sprung up at the behest of government, only as an option. No business *has* to incorporate, yet most choose to because of the advantageous footing this has come to put them on in terms of legal protection. In a well-regulated market, in which the end goal is not corporate protection, corporate status means little in terms of power, it's only a logical extension of recognizing an entity that is bigger than an individual. In the most reasonable ways (to say nothing of recent SCOTUS decisions mind you,) incorporating is not unlike marriage. There isn't really an explicit reason that government need be involved in either, but it's just easier from a legal standpoint to have SOME recognition of union, whether it be the many shareholders of a business or a pair of spouses. It is my contention that absent incorporation, government would have no way to recognize OR limit corporate power. In the absense of such regulation, an individual business (not a corporation) would have literally no check or balance on its ability to control a given resource, or, ultimately, all the given resources. Let us take the example of water rights in Venezuela. While it is true that the Venezuealan government is absolutely complicit in granting CAF all water rights so that they can sell it to the populace at horrifically inflated rates, there isn't really anything keeping a company of sufficient size from simply "claiming" legal rights over water. In the case of CAF, their legal rights to the water are largely enforced by their own militia, not government thugs. Without government, the potential for actual military deterence to the corporation wouldn't exist. Without corporation, there wouldn't even be any legal basis with which to challenge CAF for holding all the water, just a void of reasonable standards in which whoever controls the most guns to hold what they want has the right to parcel that control out however they choose. 2. I don't feel you really back up exactly why corproations wouldn't become "too big to fail". A large failing corporation may drag down an economy, but I'm far more concerned about corporations for whom failure is not the issue. What is to keep corproations of great success only becoming more succesful, even if they use unscrupilous tactics and manipulations to make it happen? Without legal recourse, and what little regulation exists, companies like Enron would run rampant. At no poitn were they "bailed out" or deemed "too big to fail" they simply fleeced the public allowing their most prominent CEO's to either flee the country or die before legal precedings had even begun to be sorted out. None of that was propped up by government, and what little good came out of it in terms of redressing the victims or surviving criminals came from what little power government had to regulate. What prevents an Enron? What prevents a new Standard Oil or Carnagie Steel from being born and running roughshod over people? These monopolies did not form in times of heavy government regulation, and so far you have given no evidence what would prevent them from happening again in a less regulated market. 3. If find the "F-you Gramma" portion of your argument to be fascinating. By your logic, if businesses toy with and manipulate stocks, just as they did before the crash of '29, that's just fine because Grandma should have been paying attention and KNOWN somehow that they were in fact cheating the system. That's absurd. How could we expect consumer/investor knowledge to extend to shady background deals made between individuals who control vast percentages of the whole market? The reality is, whether the attitude is "F-You Grandma!" or "Oh well, Grandma should have payed better attention" the result, a dead grandma, is the same. I would argue that only through strong government involvement is there any hope for grandma, or else we simply leave her to the wolves of the free market to cull like any other weak member of the herd. 4. Lastly, as my time is more limited than I'd like, I'm just going to touch briefly on two things you've said that i think far more to make my point than I have. A.) There is a balance of power between the public and private sector. Yup. I agree with that. By that logic, it would seem the optimal system would be one evenly balanced between the two so that they can hold the other in check. By my reckoning, if we have to favor one, I say favor government because in a system NOT totally bought and paid for by unchecked private enterprise at least we all get a vote, and "voting with your dollars" as the free-hand types love to say is limited to those who HAVE dollars and are somehow well-informed. As stated above, I don't think we can rely on a market regulated by information consumers may have no access to. B.) You state the pros of government to be stability, consistency, and that it is SLOWER TO CORRUPT. In an argument on whether or not the unregulated free-market is more likely to lead to corruption, I think this says it all. Government is at least somewhat less inclined towards corruption, that is exactly my point. The speed, cost, and need for occasional reform is hardly a good tradeoff for a system that is both unstable and easilly corrupted. Ball's in your court.