Commence Unrestricted Free Enterprise

In response to a friend and colleague's post on Bush getting big donations in return for tax cuts for the wealthy, I responded:

Okay Jeff. I'll bite. Step one: the Republican Party has become a wholly owned subsidiary of big oil and other mega corporations. The Democrats are certainly not a terribly moral party, but at least they remain a party with multiple sources of support rather than a single master (extreme wealth).

As far as capitalism goes, there's nothing wrong with a free enterprise system. The problem is, we don't have one in America today. The government gives massive tax breaks and massive kickbacks to various huge corporations, and thus totally destroys the concept of a free market. America today is an economy controlled by the central government.

The facts show that a great many corporations pay zero taxes. This includes General Electric which actually makes a profit off the US government. In what way is this competition? The answer is it is competition only in the sense of who can get the most corporate welfare from the US government.

Entitlements ARE a big problem, but not the entitlements given to individual US citizens. The real entitlement problem in America, one which destroys our budgetary stability, is the entitlements of huge corporations; the vast subsidies paid to them by the US government no matter how incompetently they run their businesses.

Corporations constantly scream and yell about the high US corporate tax rate, but they know that is only on paper. In reality we have a tax system so beneficial to those corporations that we not only have the lowest effective corporate taxes in the developed world, we actually have a negative tax rate in which we pay out to the corporations. Remember, during our economic boomtimes, the 1950's, the tax rate exceeded 90%!

What we have today is the equivalent of unrestricted submarine warfare. We have unrestricted free enterprise, in which wealth can destroy the functionality of the free enterprise system by granting itself endless bonuses and endless benefits.

If we were to return to a well regulated system such as we had in the economic glory days of the 1950s, when United States dominated the world in all economic areas, partly as a result of the disaster of World War II, but also as a result of a superior economic system, We could restore many of those past benefits.

Note that the individual entitlement system under the G.I. Bill was huge then compared to now. This was an economic engine that drove economic development, not the drain that ideological conservatives and fantasists would have it to be. Facts matter. Fantasies matter only to those who hold the fantasies and to those who suffer the consequences of their delusion.

The United States today has become a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Mere human beings are no longer considered to be full, first class citizens.


Lots more at:
http://el-naranjal-del-desierto.blogspot.com/?m=1