I believe in the free market.

A long time ago, I read a book from John Stossel (the 20/20 guy) about the free market and how competition in the market keeps prices down and quality up. This is the basis of our antitrust laws and why the government has small businesses grants and assistance — no one knows who’s going to become the next Microsoft. The free market is all about ideas, creativity, and marketing.

Unfortunately, it’s also about scamming to get every advantage that you can over your competitors, and therein lies the American market’s downfall. To wit: Mussolini once said “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Wikipedia defines corporatism:

corporatism or corporativism refers to a political or economic system in which power is given to civic assemblies that represent economic, industrial, agrarian, social, cultural, and professional groups. These civic assemblies are known as corporations (not necessarily the business model known as a ‘corporation’, though such businesses are not excluded from the definition either). Corporations are unelected bodies with an internal hierarchy; their purpose is to exert control over the social and economic life of their respective areas. Thus, for example, a steel corporation would be a cartel composed of all the business leaders in the steel industry, coming together to discuss a common policy on prices and wages. When the political and economic power of a country rests in the hands of such groups, then a corporatist system is in place.

Now, having read and understood that last sentence, dig this: Dwayne Andreas, chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland (the corn, high-fructose-corn-syrup, and ethanol giant), said in 1995 “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country.” ADM, by the way, has purchased the entire sugar lobby and uses their political clout to demand artificial, politically-mandated minimum prices on sugar — which insures that their corn syrup is the cheapest sweetner on the block. Never mind that the actual sugar producers, who don’t have any control over their own political lobby, are suffering.

Now, ADM has given millions of dollars to politicans’ campaigns to get politicans to treat ethanol like it was liquid gold. They’ve played on the American fear of the “Islamic threat” to make energy independence into an anti-terrorist agenda item. Never mind that a gallon of ethanol only produces two-thirds the energy of a gallon of gasoline, and that it’s horribly expensive to make compared to gas — ADM has lined enough pockets to get Congress to write into law an ethanol subsidy of more than $800 million per year. According to James Bovard, former Cato Institute policy analyst and author of “The Bush Betrayal”:

The ethanol debate is unlike the typical economic argument for an infant industry to which the government provides small subsidies or trade protection for a short period to help the new industry get on its feet. Instead, a perpetual, massive subsidy has been maintained in order to keep an existing industry from sinking under the weight of its own helpless uncompetitiveness. Rather than an infant industry, ethanol is an industry that, in economic terms, was born senile and has since gotten fat.

Further, Robert Bryce, author of “Gusher of Lies”, writes (bold mine):

Even if the U.S. turned all of its corn into ethanol, it would supply less than 6% of the U.S.’ total oil needs.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that ADM is the big evil threatening the freedom of our American market. I’m pointing out that they are taking advantage of an unfortunate weakness in our democratic system: the ability of a company to acquire political power. Whether it’s done by purchasing talking points in politicans’ speeches through campaign contributions, sending members of boardrooms off to join the government’s administrating agencies (The FDA’s upper echelons are currently almost entirely staffed by former pharmaceutical-company upper management), manipulating lobbying groups into pleading for laws contrary to their constituents’ interests, or engineering subsidies for industries that couldn’t competively exist without those subsidies, every method by which corporations gain political strength is a method by which the free market and everything strong about capitalism is undermined.

Separation of church and state is one of the founding principles of our country and an ideal that drove the colonists away from the shores of the Old World. Today, separation of business and state has become an ideal of enough importance to me that my wife and I went so far as to check a book out from the library about how to move out of the country. There is so much corruption, and so powerless is the public to defend itself from the corporation/government hybrid that controls our country (did you know that dairies are allowed to put literally anything in non-whole-milk and they don’t have to put it on the label or tell you it’s in there if they can claim it ‘helps the product more closely resemble milk’?!?) that increasingly, the only solutions seem to be escape or Waldon Pond style produce-everything-you-consume living.

I believe in the free market — I believe that people are smart enough, as a group, to drive companies that are producing dangerous or unviable products out of business. But I also believe that the people trust in the media and the governmental organizations that supposedly make our country safe, and without a clear separation of the interests of those organizations from the interests of the companies they oversee, that trust is constantly being violated.