In order to spot free market, lessaiz-faire capitalism, we would need to travel back in time. We would need to rewind in an epoch where economic exchanges didn’t have any regulating intermediate to dictate the rules. We would eventually find out that pure Capitalism only existed in very rare instances. Indeed, what we will eventually realise is that today most societies operate on a rotten version of Capitalism.
We almost always had politician-businessmen and businessmen-politicians, working together, imposing their own interests through the coercion of the State. The phenomenon still continues under what appears to be a “legal system”. Every single country on the face of this planet controls in some way the economic activities of its citizens. They make sure that a few elites can benefit at the expense of everybody else. This phenomenon goes by the name of Corporatism or Crony Capitalism. It hijacks all the benefits of free market Capitalism, allocating them only to a certain few.
Corporatism resembles a viral infection. One cannot really get rid of it completely. The freer the market, the less exposed it is to the ills of Corporatism. The more restrictions a country has, the more Corporatism it experiences. Every single table of data we have reveals that the less prevalent the effect of Corporatism, the more economic prosperity it enjoys. For example Switzerland, considered one of the most successful countries in the world, employs economic freedom to the maximum limiting corporatism significantly. Other countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and Luxembourg follow a similar model.
Most people in the rest, not so free economies, still believe that their own government is there for their own good, protecting them against the “evil capitalists”. The funny thing is that almost nobody thinks that the government might be a business in itself, taking advantage of the citizens through legal means. This is after all how monopolies are created. Special rights are allocated to certain individuals while the rest are stripped off from economic benefits. Under a free market, the occurrence of natural monopoly becomes impossible. There is not a single piece of technology or natural resource that cannot be subjected to competition and innovation under a free market.
A great example of corporatist monopoly is the energy market. A few companies that are in bed with the government get the privileges for fossil fuels all around the world, while holding at the same time the technological rights for renewable energies. Only after fossil fuels run out completely will renewable technologies be fully implemented. We could have gotten rid of fossil fuels completely by now if it wasn’t for a few corporatist operating companies that control how these technologies are rolled out. The Kyoto Protocol fiasco stands as a great example to this. Other markets, like the ones of healthcare and real estate, follow a similar model.
The infamous 1% elite ruling the planet, the “Bad Capitalists” that we so often hear about, was partially created by the democratic approval of the 99%. Since most of society remains economically ignorant of Corporatism, it still votes for its own economic enslavement instead of freedom. On top of this, the elite 1% is largely a delusion since wealth shifts positions constantly. The truth is rather scarier. People enslave themselves.
A way to demonstrate this absurdity is to consider an individual who takes a loan to own a house. This person will immediately find themselves in the 1% elite spectrum, even if the 1 million property is still owned by the bank. He would be in a sense an "evil elite". The calculations for coming up with the privileged 1% don’t just take into consideration what one has, but what one owes as well. In a culture of debt the 1% becomes rather an abstraction in regards to what really goes on. Corporatism, or rather corporatist mentality, has put the entire planet in debt, unable for anyone to distinguish who owns and who owes what. It is as if the cumulative irresponsibility of the entire planet has been accumulated in one place. Everyone is waiting for everyone else to bail them out.
The problem was never the 1% but the rest 99% that complains about the problem and keeps voting, thus perpetuating the phenomenon of Corporatism. Our mothers, fathers, sisters and friends are the responsible ones. They don’t realise that their cumulative vote creates corporatist elites that turn people against one another. The hope that the next politician will be better than the previous one is a common shared delusion. The situation reminds an abusive partner, a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome, where the victim tries to protect and defend their abuser. We are practically torturing ourselves by giving power to our worst nightmares.
Perhaps the most prevalent reason against the idea of Capitalism and the consequential support of Corporatism is the misconception against the nature of selfishness. People believe that the world is structured in a way that the strongest thrive at the expense of the weak. The masses are kept under control by fastening chains on their own ankles. We give power to some representatives in order to regulate our own insecurities. Evidently, this only adds to the problem, it doesn't solve it.
If Corporatism prevailed at full power on our planet, humanity would have perished centuries ago. Luckily enough, the new information age allows people to come into new realisations about the structure of the economic world. Less and less people vote for their political systems. Most governments, unable to handle their massive debt, are forced to allocate more freedoms to individuals and companies in order to bail them out. Corporatism itself is inefficient and it slowly crumbles under its own weight.
Nonetheless, it is vital for newer generations to have a basic economic understanding in regards to what constitutes freedom. Corporatism feeds on a primitive fear for the unknown, the unregulated. As teleological beings we naively strive for control and order. Truth is, as I mentioned in a previous article, the world has been and always will be spontaneously ordered. Corporatists that are given power by the public know this very well. This is why they do whatever they want to, while convincing everyone else to follow their own rules. The solution against Corporatism is what constitutes it immune to begin with—and what the masses are often brainwashed to dread; anarchy.
Are we brave enough to live by our own rules?
