Truth is the first victim of the Company
Store’s dominance.
My view of the Status Quo as a neocolonial,
neofeudal arrangement is succinctly captured by correspondent D.C.’s
description of state-corporate capitalism: the Company Store. In
the plantation model (i.e. any economic setting dominated by a
primary corporate employer and/or the state), almost everyone works
for the company, and is beholden to the company for their livelihood
and security.
In exchange for this neofeudal (often described
as paternal) security, employees must shop at the company store,
which maintains a near-monopoly (i.e. competition is limited because
the company owns the land and/or colludes with local government) as a
means of extracting monopoly prices.
The company store extends credit to employees
(in the modern version, student loans take the place of employee
credit), and since prices are kept artificially high and wages are
kept stagnant, the employees never manage to pay off their debts at
the company store.
This describes the core dynamic in our
state-corporate system. The state-corporate Status Quo
suppresses competition (few other stores are allowed in town),
usually by indirect means: high land leases, high fees for doing
business in town, mountains of absurd regulations no small businesses
can afford to meet, etc.
In state-corporate capitalism, small
business thus poses a threat to the monopolistic partnership of the
government and dominant corporations. Small businesses that
try to meet all the regulations and pay all the fees and taxes are
either marginalized or driven out of business by the high overhead.
But those that live in the nooks and crannies
between the major players pose a threat to the guaranteed profits of
the state-corporate Status Quo. As a result, despite the propaganda
about how the state supports small business, the real agenda is to
marginalize small business in every way possible so the
small-business sector can never gain enough political weight to
challenge the corporate interests and their partners, the state
fiefdoms.
Here is D.C.’s gloves-off, truth-to-power
commentary:
The decline of small businesses serves the same purpose as continuous, compound monetary inflation: Both keep everyone on “company property” buying at the “company store.”
Inflation means that people can’t save in a
medium that is not ready-to-be-seized (by the IRS, any Federal court,
any creditor like a hospital, i.e. by any minion of the central state
Corporation). If people could save honest money “under the
mattress” without continuous erosion, then some of their wealth
might remain fully private.
We can’t have fully private wealth. The
Company must always be able to take what the Company deems its fair
share, or take whatever payments the Company Store levies (since
people are largely compelled to purchase their medical services, for
instance, from the CS and prices are not marked on the shelf…only
assessed in arrears).
The same is true of employment. If
people are able to earn a living apart from the Company, they become
less subject to the Company’s innumerable rules (including,
especially, the requirement to buy everything at…you guessed it…the
Company Store).
Small businesses are messy little vermin much
more difficult to regulate (and corral, and milk) than what otherwise
amount to subsidiaries of the Company Store. All significant
corporations in the USA today are clearly such subsidiaries. What
else do their legal departments do but finagle “deals” and
navigate “hyper-compliance” with the larger Company? The
corporations for which I have worked behave like subordinates in a
branch of the military: “Sir, YES Sir!” A larger phylum of
invertebrates will never be discovered.
Small businessmen, however, comply only under
overt duress and are apt to seek end-arounds at every opportunity due
to self-interest and lack of bureaucratic organizational incentives.
Seeking alternate paths to exercise greater liberty and keep a larger
share of their product puts them on the side of nascent informal
networks to which you refer.
Your conception of private or informal
networks side-stepping the Company is both (in my opinion) the future
and an existential adversary of the central state Corporation. This
means to me that we will see an increasingly hot war emerge as the
early adopters pursue their fledgling networks while the minions of
the Corporate State ever-more-openly chase and harass them.
My belief is that people only abandon a failing
paradigm when the cost of duplicating the “service” privately is
lower than the combined cost of the old paradigm plus the cost of its
failures. For example, people will abandon the tax-paid,
centrally-planned education paradigm only as they perceive the cost
of duplicating it privately (home schooling, unschooling, foregone
income, etc.) is lower than the “cost” of uneducated,
mis-educated, unsafe kids.
Early adopters must be willing to pay twice
(private duplication plus tax extortion) so their formula for the
decision is Private+Tax < tax-produced output.
(By the way, I consider current “private”
schools to largely be the same as tax-paid. Until a market fully
emerges, finding a true alternative to the tax-paid model is
challenging.)
This means that early adopters of non-Corporate
State paradigms must evaluate the “costs” of the old paradigm
higher than their neighbors. The lingering consent of the neighbors
to the old paradigm will place heavy burdens on the early adopters of
new paradigms.
A significant problem with forging new
paradigms is that the earliest of adopters are overt criminal
organizations. Non-criminals will intentionally be conflated with
criminal networks as the Corporate State’s minions war on
alternatives that threaten its parasitic and dysfunctional monopoly.
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