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A Healthy Distrust For Power

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

Americans have always had a healthy distrust for power.  We know, as Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts".  With the recent corporate scandals at Enron, Worldcom, and elsewhere, our distrust of power has been aimed at large corporations.  Unfortunately, with so much finger pointing and haste to "do something" about the problem, a critical sense of proportion has been lost, which will cost us dearly.  In our panicked effort to protect ourselves from the power of corporations, we are increasing and unleashing a much more dangerous power. 

It is as if we are afraid of a few stray dogs, and, in an effort to protect ourselves from the dogs, we disarm ourselves and heavily arm a few dog handlers.  While the dogs, wandering alone in the street, could do little harm, the heavily armed dog handlers can indeed inflict serious wounds on us.

Corporations, no matter how large, only have the power to offer us opportunities such as jobs, products, and investments -- they cannot force us to work for them, buy their products, or buy their stock.  While a boss may be unfair or a product may be shoddy, we have choices.  We can find another job, and we can buy different products.  In other words, corporations are pretty tame dogs!  On the other hand, the government (the dog handler) has the power to make “offers” that we cannot refuse, because government has the legal power to use force against us.  Government can strip us of our property, take our children away, jail us, or shoot us if we do not comply, and we have nowhere to hide from this powerful force.

While we can choose not to deal with corporations we dislike, and we can put some companies completely out of business simply by refusing to buy their products, we do not have the same ability to control and limit government.  As voters, we only get a single vote, and, if we are not in the majority, our vote is of little consequence.  No wonder so many people fail to exercise their right to vote on election day!  Furthermore, politicians can lie to us long enough to get elected (telling us they plan to protect us from the dogs), and then, once they are elected, we have no ability to control what they do, even if we can manage to muster a majority of people to oppose them.  This makes government far less accountable to the people than corporations. 

The combination of government’s far greater power and far less accountability makes even a small government entity much more dangerous than the largest corporation.  In other words, the highly powerful and well-armed dog handlers are much more dangerous than a few stray dogs.

Of course, real mischief can be done when powerful businesses get into partnership with the government (the stray dogs join together with the handlers).  And this is where we tend to notice the abuses by corporations while ignoring the fact that these abuses are only made possible because of the corporations' partnership with the much more powerful government.  The few stray dogs could do little harm if they were simply wandering the streets begging for food, but the dog handlers beat down our doors to allow the dogs into our homes and then hold us at gunpoint and rifle through our belongings as the dogs attack us.  And we, in our ignorance, give the handlers more weapons and ask them to please protect us from the dogs!  

We are all familiar with government regulators being bought or controlled by the businesses they are supposed to be regulating.  And politicians love to create special subsidies and loopholes for their friends, while further taxing and regulating the rest of us. So, for example, Enron was very interested in the proposed government restrictions on the use of carbon, because it was positioning itself to profit handsomely from those regulations.  Enron received taxpayer-subsidized loans, and it profited from California’s energy regulations, while Arthur Andersen guided its clients in ways to use the complex accounting regulations to hide their losses from investors. 

When we create so many government regulations and controls, it becomes more profitable for businesses to cultivate the government than to produce goods and services for consumers.  This rewards the schemers and influence peddlers (the stray dogs) at the expense of the honest producers (the sheep herding dogs and sled dogs).  Does anyone seriously believe that giving the government even more regulatory power will do anything other than provide additional opportunities for these cozy, destructive relationships between government and business?

James Traficant was recently expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives for being involved in bribes and kickbacks, but his biggest mistake was that he was too straightforward.  Most of his brethren in both parties are much more sophisticated about their cozy relationships, being careful to remain legal while reaping far more lucrative benefits.  See, for example, Senator Daschle’s success at using our tax money to bail out the airlines, for whom his wife was a highly paid lobbyist, and his current efforts to exempt his home state from environmental regulations in order to protect his friends in the logging industry.  We can be sure that in the future, as in the past, the government handlers will use their power to benefit themselves and the corporate stray dogs at our expense. 

Unfortunately, many well-intentioned people, who squawk the most about these cozy relationships between business and government, propose “solutions” like campaign finance reform, which only make matters worse.  With so-called campaign reform, even more power is stripped from the people and put into the hands of those already in power, forcing the taxpayers to support the politicians who already hold the power while further restricting the public's ability to speak out or defend itself.  This is akin to giving the dog handlers bazookas and putting the dogs on steroids! 

Let’s face reality.  As long as the government has such excessive power, people will find ways to use it to their advantage, and there will be corruption and abuse.  Giving the government still greater power simply compounds the problem. 

Our founding fathers understood the need for a healthy distrust of concentrated government power, and they established constitutions, a dispersion of power, and a system of checks and balances in an effort to limit that power.  Unfortunately, over the years, we have forgotten their wisdom and have allowed a severe erosion of those limits and a concentration of power in the hands of government, which has resulted in the corruption and abuse we see today.  If we are going to begin to correct the problem, we must first recognize its source.  The problem is not the few stray dogs, who, left to their own devices, are pretty harmless.  It is excessive power in the hands of the dog handlers.  And the solution is not to give the dog handlers bazookas and put the dogs on steroids.  The solution is to get the bazookas out of the hands of the dog handlers and to restore the ability of individuals to shut their doors and starve the strays.

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