Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [155]
As I noted above, an idealized "libertarian" laissez faire society/economy would fully accommodate the worst excesses of exploitation and serfdom. As I discussed in detail in Chapter Fifteen: The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism, "unfettered markets" are not self-regulating but rather mechanisms which enable vast exploitation of the gulf between the carefully nurtured ignorance of the exploited masses and the equally carefully protected insider knowledge of the exploiters.
For more on this concept, I recommend Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents.
What those mired in the dogma of "free markets" (in an analysis of where the knowledge lies, there is never a truly free market) fail to grasp is that capitalism's ontological drive to deploy capital and knowledge in whatever configurations maximize profits will elevate windfall exploitation, monopoly capital/cartels and opacity/secrecy as the most desirable conditions, as each one maximizes profits by reducing risk and concentrating (and thus leveraging) capital, power, production and protected knowledge.
This enables manipulating the market via price-fixing, fraud, collusion, etc. and/or the establishment of an ersatz "crony capitalism" simulacrum and presenting it as "market capitalism" via a mass media propaganda machine.
Just as the selective advantages of concentrating capital, collusion and cloaked knowledge are ontological, so too is the outsized influence such concentrations of power will bring to bear on the State's attempts to regulate over-reach and excessive exploitation. The collusive and mutually rewarding partnership of the State and Plutocracy is thus inevitable, as each gains irreplaceable benefits from the other concentration of power and from looting/exploiting the non-Elite/non-State productive citizenry.
From one perspective, this (along with globalization) is simply windfall exploitation writ large.
This mechanism explains why socialism and Marxist regimes and structures (such as unions) are prone to the same looting, corruption, collusion and fraud as private capital: the State and unions are also concentrations of power and thus they too have undue influence over non-Elite productive citizenry.
A recent news item noted that the fire chief of a small California community gamed the system to "retire" at 51 years of age at an annual pension of $241,000, while continuing to work for the fire department as a "consultant" at a salary of $176,000 a year. If that is not looting the non-State taxpaying citizenry, then pray tell what does qualify?
Just as is the case with private-sector capital, obfuscation and opacity serve the State and its Elites well; the pension rules in the above case go back to 1931 and run in the hundreds of pages, guaranteeing insiders can game the system while keeping the citizenry safely in the dark.
Since the major print media is also union-dominated, the unions and their State collaborators have had little to fear from media exposure. Indeed, the mass media can only issue shrill appeals to "save our institutions" via ever-higher taxes; investigations of fraud, collusion, looting, gaming the system and other State-authorized mechanisms of exploitation are rare.
Thus both ideological dogmas, capitalism and socialism, share the same fatal flaws of concentrating power and opacity.
Each is a mechanism which exploits the gulf between the carefully nurtured ignorance of the exploited citizenry and the equally carefully protected knowledge of the Power Elite.
Is there any wonder that crony capitalism can thrive under fascism as easily as it thrives under Neoliberal democracy, or that the State and its upper-caste fiefdoms can thrive equally under so-called socialist regimes and so-called free market regimes? Just as the Plutocracy and the State are two sides of one coin, so too are monopoly capital and State fiefdoms two sides of the same concentrated-power coin. Both suppress