“Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. The flames of the new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State … and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master, instead of servant.” - Henry Demarest Lloyd, in his 1894 book, Wealth Against Commonwealth. I doubt that Henry knew, over a century ago, how prophetic his words would be in our time in America. But, he was able to read “the writing on the wall.”
I came across this quote in reading Robert B. Reich's book, The System, Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. I am nearly finished reading the book and it clearly illustrates how we got here, but not so clearly how we solve the problem. I'm not sure that it is a problem. It could just be the natural maturation of a Capitalist Democracy. The free market system results in winners and losers. Wealth flows to less and less winners, but the amount of wealth grows larger and larger. A simple example is Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon. He has basicly won the retail sales war, is probably the wealthiest man in America and yet a third of his employees in Arizona are said to be on food stamps. He reportedly payed 1.2% in corporate income taxes last year on over $13B in earnings. My experience with this phenomenon is that forty years ago, when I founded the Arizona Motorcycle Dealers Association, we had 28 member/dealers in the state. Today, there are two and probably soon ... one.
So, how would you stop or at least slow this lack of healthy competition and widening of the wealth gap? When I visited Japan in 1965 as a district manager for Suzuki Motor Corporation, I noticed that there were no large motorcycle stores or chain operations, just small family owned businesses. How could this be in the heart of the motorcycle industry? Well, Japan had a law that there was no such thing as a quantity discount. So the small store owner would pay the same price for his motorcycles and parts as a giant retailer would (if there were such a thing). Could we have a similar law in America? Hell no. Our legislation is not designed to benefit the population. It is written by lobbyists and they represent giant wealth, not you.
It is probably too late to turn this dynamic around. The horrendous cost of winning an election and the Supreme Court's decision of Citizens United has cemented the power of large corporate dollars and lobbyists. Both of our political parties and therefore our government is ruled by corporate shareholders and they are guided by CEOs. The CEOs are guided by greed, power and influence.
Cheers, Old Buz 8/7/2020
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