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Baffled by Bafflement

The opposition of yours truly to a phenomenon variously described as 'economic centralization', 'globalization', 'managerial capitalism', and 'concentration' is perhaps a curiousity, a seemingly bizarre and incongruous outlier relative to the mainstream of conservative thought. At a minimum, this is the impression I often receive.

However, suppose I were to reformulate the questions posed by our own Steve Burton in a comment in an earlier thread.

Instead of:


In what way is "economic centralization in corporate hands" particularly "problematic?"

I would ask, "In what way is political centralization in bureaucratic hands particularly problematic?"

Instead of qualifying the question by stating that:


I'm not saying it isn't - and I'm certainly not saying that economic centralization *qua* economic centralization is a *good* thing.

I would state, "I'm not saying that political centralization isn't - and I'm certainly not saying that political centralization qua political centralization is a good thing.

Finally, instead of wondering whether anyone advocated economic centralization for its own sake, asking


Is there anybody who *does* say that?


Or are there people whose announced views are merely a "cover" for some such position?

I would wonder aloud whether anyone advocated political centralization for its own sake, asking, "Is there anyone who does advocate this? Or are there people whose public views are merely a cover for some such position?"

Now, my object in this elementary exercise in rephrasing is serious, and not wry or sardonic in the slightest measure. For there is a tendency, among many conservatives in America, to bifurcate the questions of political and economic centralization, as though the former is inherently suspect, while the latter may be beneficent or indifferent according to circumstances. Political centralization, the removal of certain questions, and of fundamental responsibilities, from lower orders of governance, and their transfer to higher levels, is considered suspect for several interconnected reasons. Political centralization is rightly considered undesirable, even positively pernicious, because it entails a disconnection of the centers of authority from the specific communities, and their circumstances, interests, and goods, with respect to which decisions should be made. The particularity of localities is subjected to the procrustean tendencies of bureaucracy, which requires standardization and uniformity. Political centralization is also considered somewhat threatening, inasmuch as the very distance between authority, or power, and the sites of its exercise increases the likelihood of its abuse. With distance comes a diminution of actual responsibility, so that indifference, callousness, or even outright malignity become more probable. Ultimately, however, these privations or evils are merely the natural consequences of violations of subsidiarity, the principal injustice of which violations is that they deprive communities of the substantive goods that are only possible when they are responsible for their own affairs and good.

Analogous judgments could be made concerning economic centralization, the concentration of productive assets in ever larger aggregations and in the hands of fewer agents. Hence, the conclusion that such concentration, and the policies that facilitate it, must be problematic.

Wealth and power are infinitely and indefinitely fungible and convertible, and no observer of the political scene could be faulted for imagining that wealth is a means of acquiring power, and power a means of acquiring wealth. Were it not so, abominations such as an immigration policy favoured by only a small fraction of the population - that fraction comprised of ethnic activists and business interests, with a small contingent of ideologues thrown in for comedic relief - would be inconceivable, absurd features of a world in which movements arise without discernible causes. Corporatist finagling of regulation and legislation, of the sort described by Kevin Jones, in a comment upon Tim Carney's book, The Big Ripoff, would be virtually inexplicable. Without belabouring the point further, many features of our political economy, features which even some 'economic conservatives' and libertarians can acknowledge, would be incomprehensible were it not the case that wealth and political power are, ahem, mutually contextualizing, currencies exchanged for one another as for commodities.

It is to be doubted that anyone ever pursues, or ever has pursued, either wealth or power purely for its own sake; neither is necessarily pursued for the sake of the other, and the Twentieth Century affords an abundance of illustrations of power pursued for the sake of some ideological object, rather than material comfort. Wealth and power are virtually always instrumental, then. They are problematic, therefore, to the extent that their objects increase the distance between the locus of effective power and the site of its exercise. This distance begets a divergence of substantive interests, and the resultant multiplication of factions is especially injurious to a republic, which depends upon a civic patriotism capable of subordinating private goods to a common, public good. Worse still, such factionalism leads to conflations of private, factional interests with the common good, and with the national interest itself - a republican dysfunction amply evidenced in our own time.

Conservative ambivalence or indifference toward concentrations of economic power apparently owes to a residual or tacit Lockeanism, according to which the legitimacy of political authority derives from consent, a consent extended to a government which exercises delimited powers on behalf of the acquisitive, property-owning and pursuing, rights-bearing, and preference-satisfying individual. Such rights are inherently claims against the smaller community, invocations of a certain degree of centralization towards the end of effectively negating the legitimate claims of the community upon the agent. Rights language, as is its wont, obscures more than it clarifies here, as even on its own terms, it is difficult to perceive how an individual could possess a claim right, or even a weaker non-interference right, as against the community, to perform actions deleterious to the community. Still less is it evident that an individual is entitled to appeal to a higher authority against the authority closest to him and his community, when the judgments of the latter are adverse to his wishes - but this is the legacy of political modernism, or liberalism. Nevertheless, popular conservatism seems to presuppose this political architecture, at least with respect to economic affairs, an incongruity often justified by reference to the manifest horrors engendered by centralist, totalitarian regimes in the Twentieth Century: since the political opponents of private economic concentration have often demonstrated themselves sanguinary and sadistic, or perhaps - in the case of the dirigiste regimes of Europe - petty, overbearing, and sclerotic, ought we not overlook the downsides of economic concentration, perhaps even coming to affirm it as a good if it is private, and may be portrayed as liberating us from the state?

I confess myself baffled by the bafflement of many conservatives at the criticism of economic policies that abet concentration. To be certain, no one really pursues such an end for itself; and instead of obfuscating with talk of rights, or dissembling myths of inevitability (of progress, or globalization, or whatever), we could debate the substantive value of specific acts and policies. But the existence of a great(er) evil and injustice does not obviate the existence of a lesser one; they imply, and are convertible with, one another. One would think that American conservatives would recognize the example of the European Union as dispositive on this account; but the lesson absorbed seems to be the familiar one of "bureaucracy, bad", rather than the more pertinent one of economic integration - a form of concentration - engendering political integration.

One would be mistaken to think so. I'm baffled.


Comments (29)

One thing that I have considered a possibility is some sort of limitation or weakening of the capacity of a corporation to hold property. It is not that businesses would be forbidden to hold property, but that some measures would be taken to insure that the property claims of individuals and families have a stronger protection in law than those of a massive corporation. It is, after all, something of a legal fiction that the principle of private property would extend to huge institutions that are very far from being private or personal.

Of course, in most cases the reverse is actually the case: the corporate power over property exceeds that of the individual. Here in Atlanta, for instance, a man must jump through considerable hoops to be able to cut down a tree that dangerously overhangs his house. Onerous though this may be, I do have some sympathy with city laws to protect our trees. But the whole principle of conservation is overthrown and falsified by the facility with which large developers can cut down vast swaths of forest. The small owner is trussed; the large corporate entity is liberated and unchecked. This is madness. A truer regime of liberty would rest on the very opposite principle: the large corporate entity would be far more restricted in its disposal of property than the individual owner.

I certainly haven't worked out all the implications of this proposal; and I welcome comments on it, if Jeff will forgive me my threadjack.

Very briefly--and I have to read the whole post later rather than skimming--I'm willing to say that I _do_ think political centralization is different from economic centralization--and definitely more suspect. To put it crudely, there's a difference between having the power to fire someone and having the power to throw him in prison or pass laws that mean he'll get thrown in prison for engaging in his daily activities.

As to whether there is anyone who pursued political centralization for its own sake, certainly there are. Jeff (Martin) has mentioned progressives who expressly advocate greater political centralization as a solution to various ills. Many people of liberal ilk have expressly hoped for something like a central global government, believing it to be more "rational" or "objective" than various national governments. And various forms of communism and socialism are predicated upon the deliberate centralization of political power. So yes, there are political ideologies that really do seek political centralization for its own sake. I think we're all agreed that they are wrong.

Whether anyone seeks economic centralization for its own sake, I'm not sure. But even if anyone does, I still think there's a major difference between the two. That, I suspect, is a major difference between me and some of y'all.

Lydia, I grant the distinctions you are so keen to assert; that was, partially, the burden of my last paragraph. What is unclear is how the manifestly greater perils of political centralization demonstrate that economic concentration is somehow unproblematic. Given the fact that the two processes have been associated, almost uniformly throughout history (For example, the economically powerful, in early modern Britain, had the power to limit the ability of the peasantry to engage in "self-provisioning" - routine agricultural activities, gathering, hunting - so as to "force them to be free" to accept meagre wage labour. My Irish ancestors risked death in order to poach, because the wage-labour alternative was so dire.), neither is it clear that economic power cannot deprive a man of the ability to engage in his routine life-activities. In fact, from the historical record, it is clear that it can do this, sometimes without direct political connivance, often by rallying the political authorities to the cause of "improvement" and "efficiency". Or, to take another example, eminent domain abuse is a manifest case of economic power purchasing alterations in the law and regulatory codes, whether through overt corruption or the lobbying process. Again, the two processes are convertible, and the greater evil does not somehow transmogrify the lesser evil into adiaphora, let alone a positive good.

As regards the pursuit of centralization for its own sake, I conceive of this as the pursuit of power for its own sake, without respect to any possible use of any acquired power. Those progressives pursue centralization for reason of the benefits they imagine will follow from it.

When I was rather briefly part of a particular "tribe" in the business world (and believe me, the businees world in its upper levels is very tribal, though like all good liberals would decry tribalism while practicing it) there were two things that stuck out as quite different from my preconceived notions. One was the sort of obvious "these folks put their pants on one leg at a time too" aspect that one understands intellectually but doesn't really appreciate at a visceral level until having been there. But the other was the smallness of the tribes. In a world of six and a half billion people most of us - that is, the "us" controlling a significant portion of the US economy, or at least its technological economy, and I say "us" only because I was a participant at any level at all not because I was someone important - lived within an hour or so drive of each other. We would go to these CEO-invites-only conferences where we would all fly half way around the world and give presentations to each other in a hotel in some exotic locale. But 80% of the people at the conferences seemed to be from the same 50 mile radius of Silicon Valley, and a great many participants were recognizable on sight.

The upper reaches of industrial capitalism is probably no larger a world than was the aristocracy of the high middle ages.

I'm probably a little more extreme than Maximos. I think corporations are nothing more than governments. On a large scale, look at what Hyundai (or was it KIA) extracted from Georgia in order for it to provide some of its wealth to the communities. On the local level, one need only look at the technical college system. If there aren't enough laborers with the skillset and hte cost the company desires, they collude with the technical college system to overstimulate demand. For the supposed tech shortage we have and had, we know have many network technicians making less than $14/hour.

Paul, no worries about threadjack.

I'd endorse your proposal, principally because the typical modern corporation, characterized by absentee ownership through shareholding, and by what amounts to technocratic management, typically lacks a structural incentive to respect the goods of the community(ies) in which it operates. Oftentimes, it will lack an abiding incentive to respect the goods of its own employees.

I could, were I to spend a few hours, adduce more than a few people who have been victimized by the perverse incentives, laws, and procedures governing corporate practice. An involuntarily retired airline pilot, a friend of an old family friend, lost a pension amounting to nearly one million dollars when his airline passed through bankruptcy. Now, were I to declare bankruptcy, I could not shuck my obligations so easily; I'd be required to liquidate assets if necessary. The airline, on the other hand, retains the majority of its assets while shucking its obligations to its employees. If the exists an objective morality, the assets of the airline should be liquidated down to the last tool, if that is what is required for contractual promises to be honoured. For what reason? Because a corporation is not more than its employees; it is a legal fiction, a fictive "person".

Plutocrats receive stock options and bonuses; old men lose their retirements and go to work, for crappy wages, at Wal-Mart.

I suppose one reason that people might be baffled by the very strong worries concerning economic concentration per se is because the connection between that concentration and political power is indirect. Maximos, you speak of their being "convertible," but this is by no means an automatic process nor even a directly predictable process. It takes place through all the varying screwinesses of human society. Political power is just political power. To be sure, we don't always know how it will be used, but if someone has the power to pass laws or enforce laws he just has it. He doesn't have to go through a process of using his wealth to obtain political influence.

I am not by any of this saying that it's right for a corporation to be able to declare bankruptcy and thereby get out of paying pensions to employees without liquidating assets. That sounds wrong to me, but before I recommend a radical change in the laws that allowed it to come about, I'd have to know a lot more about why those laws are in place and what the consequences would be of changing them.

Mr. Forrest, I am beginning to suspect that all of the 90s hype about the information economy, and the importance of my generation preparing for careers in those industries, was just that sort of manipulation. Now, tech managers cry, "Shortage!", when, in reality, they release older programmers in order to hire pimply-faced college grads for a fraction of the salary. Or, they simply eschew the American labour market altogether, and hire H-1Bs. Free market? Whatever. Words mean whatever fattens the bottom line.

The connection, or convertibility is at once unpredictable in its specificity, and as predictable as the orbits of the planets in its generality, its brute fact. It will occur, because it always has, and does now, though we might not be able predict the manner of its occurrence.

Moreover, there is something violative of subsidiarity in the fact that a corporation might determine the destiny of an entire community, even if there is no connection to political power. Once more, less bad does not equate to 'just peachy'. Or, in the terminology of the Cold War, the fact that communism is evil does not mean that managerial capitalism instantiates virtue itself.

As regards the bankruptcy proceedings, laws that result in such manifest injustices should be changed; in fact, those laws exist as a result of a lobbying process aimed at securing precisely those financial escape options. Why was the recent bankruptcy reform legislation so beloved of corporations and banking institutions? Because it tightened requirements (reasonably, one might argue) for individuals, while doing nothing of the sort for corporate filings, and pointedly ignoring the exploitative financial instruments that sometimes drive individuals to the brink. He who pays, writes the laws. Any halfway coherent reform could not conceivably be worse than a system that actually enriches the plutocrats while shafting the little guy.

"Moreover, there is something violative of subsidiarity in the fact that a corporation might determine the destiny of an entire community, even if there is no connection to political power."

That's the kind of statement I'm strongly inclined to disagree with.

I think corporations are nothing more than governments.

They are envious of each other (Reno vs Gates). The advantage of the one is that "antitrust" has the ring of justice.

If it is unjust - and it is - for a governmental body to render a decision or implement a policy, without accommodating the interests and goods of the community, so also is it unjust for a corporation to do so, and to have that power in the first instance. Power is as power does, and there is nothing in the nature of property 'rights' which exempts them from the claims of subsidiarity: private property is ordained for man, and for his good, and the good of his communities, and not man and community for the institution of private property.

The modern, liberal doctrine of functionally absolute property is a conceit of the Superman. Ironically, that liberal tradition also renders property conditional upon efficiency, which is why eminent domain abuses on grounds of aggregate financial gain are integral to the system: they merely recapitulate the mechanisms by which modern property relations displaced earlier ones. English common law reflects this, at least in the casebooks of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. After that period, it was a fait accompli. Hence, modern, liberal property is absolute, provided it is utilized most efficiently, ie. the greatest capitalists do as they will.

I'm inclined to say that it is _unwise_ rather than _unjust_ to have even political power concentrated. For example, monarchy is unwise but not intrinsically unjust. So I'd say the same a fortiori for the concentration of wealth. At the most, it is unwise. I can't see that it is unjust for some corporation simply de facto to have the power to make some decision from afar that affects an entire community. The nationalization of farms is both unwise _and_ unjust, the latter not because of centralization per se but because it involves confiscating people's farms.

But I really cannot sympathize in these posts with the combination of three attitudes or implications:

1) The contempt amounting to scorn for the notion that individuals should ever be thought of as having rights,

2) The very near inclination to speak of "communities" as if they _do_ have rights,

3) The rejection of the notion that corporate property rights have any connection to individual property rights.

If a corporation is a fictive entity, how much the more is a community? I cannot sympathize with the perspective that treats the Wal-Mart franchise owner as a leach and exploiter and the welfare mom who has children to game the system as a "stakeholder" and "community member." The former, to my mind, has far more claim to be a benefactor of the community--yes, even if he doesn't live there, sells goods made in another country, and doesn't pay his workers as much as the paleos think he should--than the latter.

And as far as injustice, it seems to me far, far _more_ unjust that the local community should have stupid ordinances forbidding (for example) Roto Rooter fully to install a garbage disposal--since that would involve _electrical_ work--even if it has employees qualified to do the job, than that a corporation wih headquarters in New England should own a business which is a major source of employment in Peoria and hence should have de facto power to make decisions that have a big effect on Peoria.

This doesn't mean that I think the state should strike down the local laws about plumbers installing garbage disposals. But that is because I think probably that degree of centralization would be unwise, not because I don't think the community can treat its individual members with injustice.

If a corporation is a fictive entity, how much the more is a community?

I don't think either is fictive, but a corporation is created in a positive act of the will in way in which most communities are not. I don't have a problem with either governments or corporations owning property, but on the other hand I'm not sure that completely re-thinking limits of liability isn't a good idea. Both corporations and governments have limits on their liability that I as, you know, an actual human being, do not have on my own.

Being the village authoritarian around here I don't have much problem with either corporations or governments in their proper place, though both do have a tendency to transform into self-justifying Golems pursuing their own triumph as a thing in itself.

I would contend that you are assimilating "monarchy" to the absolute monarchies which developed in the aftermath of the Renaissance and Reformation - in other words, during the early Modern era. So, I wouldn't even concede that monarchy qua monarchy is unwise; the monarchies of the Medieval period, limited as they usually were by the nexus of feudal laws and the rights of communities, were scarcely cases of concentrated power. As regards the wisdom - or lack thereof - of concentrated political and economic power, I would argue that, at best, this is a temptation to injustice, inasmuch as the very condition of concentration is that there exist no structural incentives to respect the community. To the extent that such concentration inhibits self-governance in the community, it inhibits the realization of genuine goods, and is unjust.

I don't wholly repudiate the language or notion of rights; human goods are certainly expressible in terms of rights; but this is a modern shorthand, a declension from clarity concerning the good, and is often obfuscatory. Don't tell me what you want to do, or what you think you should be permitted to do, calling these things rights; tell me what the good is, and I will tell you what rights you have - this, it seems to me, is more sane than rights-talk. I do heap scorn upon certain notions of rights, namely, those which assert a right of the individual to acts destructive of the community, and therefore a corresponding duty of the community to permit, or to secure the individual in the performance of such acts. I cannot possess a right to bring an entire community under my power, after the fashion of some improving landlord in Eighteenth-century Britain, because no community can be obligated to permit its reduction to servility.

Communities possess definable and determinate goods, goods which exert claims upon us, and upon governments; indeed, upon all actors. Again, these are expressible in terms of rights, but this is indirect and somewhat imprecise. A community is more than the aggregate of individual wills.

Of course corporate rights have some connections with individual property rights, but these connections are largely the consequence of positive law, or of historical custom - which is to say that they are not wholly natural, and are of a lower order than the individual rights. In this sense, the modern, limited liability, fractional-ownership, technocratically-managed corporation is a creature of positive law, which is to say that it is fictive. Corporations of various types existed during the Middle Ages, of course, but they possessed none of the defining characteristics of the modern corporation, and were limited by a host of competing economic bodies; modern corporations, by contrast, are prospectively eternal, and are not limited in the amount of property they can amass. In this sense, they are historically contingent, not natural, as the "inclination to truck and barter" must be culturally instantiated. Hence, they are specifically fictive, and generally, well, cultural.

Community, by contrast, is natural; we are born to it just as we are born into families, whether we like, or admit, this or not. This is why I hold community to be prior to things such as corporations.

I've never compared the Wal-Mart franchisee invidiously to the welfare leach; while income supports will be provided either via reasonable wages or welfare, the welfare mother is an exploiter, not a stakeholder, and I've never asserted the contrary. The Wal-Mart franchisee offers a benefaction that engenders servility: in return for those Low Prices Always!, the community suffers diminution of its capacity to provide for itself, through its small businesses.

The Roto-Rooter case strikes me as petty and inconvenient; but I'd not consider it an injustice if I had to contact two contractors to have one garbage disposal installed. I might just do it myself, as I've removed one rather than pay a plumber $200 to extract a corncob that found its way down. On the other hand, an absentee corporation holding the power to essentially abolish an entire community, if it should determine, say, to outsource manufacturing to China, does strike me as unjust. If option A is "having to call two contractors to complete one job", and option B is "corporation having the power to decimate a community", I'm not going to affix the description "unjust" to the former. There is no comparison.

I find that account of medieval monarchy implausible. Isn't it true that one of the arguments during the 13th century in England was over whether or not the king could appoint his own sheriffs without consulting the nobility? I've read that this was part of the fight that initiated the whole Magna Carta thing and that it was also one of the issues behind the fight between Simon de Montfort and Henry III/Prince Edward in the later 1200's. And local sheriffs had enormous power over the members of the community, including enforcing the poaching laws. And while we're talking about poaching, some of the nastiest poaching laws around were those brought by the Normans to England in 1066 and involved (at least, so I've read in multiple sources) flaying alive for those caught killing the "king's deer." Talk about centralized power encroaching on the ability of the members of local communities to engage in food gathering! It really won't do to romanticize medieval monarchy.

The Roto-Rooter case _is_ minor. I picked it for that very reason. The injustice involved is fairly trivial. (Injustices come in degrees, as I'm inclined to use the term.) I'd say the injustice is in part to the person who has the talent to install an electrical appliance but will be fined (or the law says he will be fined, so he will be fined if the law is enforced) if he does this for money unless he goes and obtains an electrician's license, which would require years of additional _documented_ training (he presumably already has the training informally). It involves treating both that person and his customers as irresponsible people who can't discuss the person's ability level and take their own risks. Now, the injustice is of so minor an order that it is only prima facie, and such a law might be called for if stupid and untrained people were really going around electrocuting themselves right and left, lured by the prospect of Big Bucks made at electrical jobs. But it seems to me ridiculous to have such a law merely because this _might_ happen.

So on my view some minor harm is being done to de facto qualified electricians who don't have the credential and to their customers who find themselves required to pay (as it were) guild prices to those who do have the credential. It's a small thing, but a concrete harm to concrete people.

Whereas for the corporation merely to have the _power_ to decimate the community doesn't even mean that they _do_ decimate the community. Maybe they do; maybe they don't. You're saying it's this dreadful injustice (a structural injustice, presumably), just for them to be able to. I can't see that at all.

"Community, by contrast, is natural; we are born to it just as we are born into families, whether we like, or admit, this or not."

es and no. I'd say there's a fair amount of arbitrariness and flexibility involved in what one includes in one's "community." Not an indefinite amount, but a fair amount. For example, the local public school is part of the community of my neighbor's children in a way that it isn't part of the community of my children. And the home schooled families around here are part of my community in a way that they aren't a part of my neighbors' community. Sure, the people who live in the houses immediately around me are part of my community in a way that I can't get away from (and I wouldn't want to--I like my neighborhood very much), as are the people at the local stores I frequent, my church ten minutes away, but beyond that...At the level of the county? You guys hundreds or even more than a thousand miles away are more part of my human interactions on a daily basis than a store owner twenty miles to the north, where I never have occasion to go.

So "community" is really only partly natural and partly a creation of choice.

Which is just one of the reasons why I can't see elevating it to such a high place. Temporally, sure, there were towns before there were corporations. But how much does that mean, morally?

Well, my generalization concerning medieval monarchy is only implausible if we assume that such examples as you adduce were characteristic of the institution. Controversies such as those of Thirteenth century England only arose because the prerogatives asserted by the monarchy were relatively novel, which is to say that they were traducements of established, albeit informal, custom. Enforcement of the game laws waxed and waned throughout the period, and was rather desultory heading into the reign of Henry VIII; once that serial polygamist had expropriated the Church and distributed its properties to the nobility - to whom he was somewhat indebted - the game laws began to be enforced more stringently. This, because the era of the enclosures, early capitalism, and the long struggle of the gentry against traditional agrarian life had dawned.

Medieval monarchies were hardly ideal. Political theorists, after all, did not want for foils for their theoretical constructions. However, they were far superior, in terms of the substantive freedoms they afforded, than later absolutist regimes; they were also far preferable from the standpoint of the peasantry, ie, the overwhelming majority of the people.

Your point regarding the injustice perpetrated against the contractor in the Roto-Rooter example is a fair one - one I ought not have sidestepped. Nevertheless, this is still a minor injustice relative to the virtual annihilation of a community, wrought by corporate outsourcing in the name of mammon. This, in my judgment, is a dreadful injustice; the injustice of the corporation's possessing that power in the first instance, a lesser injustice - unjust because it violates goods of subsidiarity, reducing our hypothetical community to dependence and, thus, servility.

Your conception of community is manifestly voluntaristic, at least insofar as the accenting is concerned; I find nothing objectionable in this, inasmuch as such communities are, in fact, vital human goods, necessary to proper flourishing in life. However, community of the inherited/given type is as much an element of the human good as the voluntary type, and this for the same reasons that learning to live with family - however troublesome they may be - is integral to the good. We Americans, individualistic and voluntaristic almost as a second nature, tend to overvalue, to the point of valorization, the chosen types of communities, while derogating the given types; this is a form of moral imbalance, of failure to grasp and pursue the good. A CEO cannot licitly claim that his authoritative community is comprised solely of shareholders, investors, and his fellow corporate officers, and on this pretext unleash the whirlwinds of destructive creation upon given, rooted communities. Recognizing this reality - of the claims of given communities - is merely an acknowledgment of our boundedness, of the fact that we do not create our worlds, but receive them as gifts - whether we appreciate them or not.

"Controversies such as those of Thirteenth century England only arose because the prerogatives asserted by the monarchy were relatively novel, which is to say that they were traducements of established, albeit informal, custom."

I know this must seem like nit-picking, but are you saying that the Plantagenet kings had not previously selected their own sheriffs, that King John and his nobles (or Henry III and his) were in conflict because he was doing this against settled custom? My very strong impression from what I've read of the period is that this is incorrect and that it was the consultation with the counsel of England, the barons that constituted the very embryonic Parliament, that was the novel idea. As for the modern monarchy, I'll grant you the Tudors as strong rulers, but the era of the Stuarts was a good deal different, and that, almost abruptly. The idea that Charles I--harried and pushed around by Parliament, not to mention the Scots, long before he lost his head--was a more absolute monarch than Edward I, who scarcely had a Parliament to speak of, who rampaged about the British Isles virtually unhindered, and who was able to hang, draw, and quarter the subjects of the King of Scotland for treason to himself without a peep from anyone--seems to me ludicrous. I have to say that it seems to me that you have a bit of a tendency to treat everything before that dreadful 16th century rise of capitalism (not to mention the era of the enclosures) as having been much, much better, and the notion of the limited medieval monarch does seem to be an example of this.

"The injustice of the corporation's possessing that power in the first instance, a lesser injustice - unjust because it violates goods of subsidiarity, reducing our hypothetical community to dependence and, thus, servility."

Right. Here we're up against a long-standing disagreement. Again and again you will characterize dependence as servility. This is true of, for example, employment. You consistently and repeatedly regard the state of being an employee as a state of "dependence." Here, too, the mere fact that a corporation employs a lot of people in a physical town and hence _can_ cause that town great distress by moving its operations or letting people go is automatically, to you, a case of "servility" and "dependence" in a negative sense. The same for one country's owning another's major industry. And so forth. These mere instances of de facto power in human relations just do not move me in themselves. And in fact I'm baffled that they should be regarded as so bad in themselves, cases of "servility" in themselves. I cannot for the world see it that way.

I don't derogate physical communities. I think they're important. I would be very upset to leave my own. I think it's a good idea not to be moving around every few years, and I think people should make it more of a priority not to be doing so. It's healthy to have the same neighbors for a long time, to know people around you, to help each other out. You might be surprised to find me as rooted in my own physical locale as I am. I know the very trees and houses all around a very regular walking radius, and many of my neighbors know me, if only by sight. I'd feel wretched, sentenced to exile, to think of moving. I'd go to great lengths to avoid it. But, yes, I do tend to think of local communities as in no small degree aggregates of individuals. And I can't see preventing the rise of corporations _just because_ that will mean that a man in New England can hire a lot of people in a town in Ohio and thus attain an important degree of power over that town.

I think that it would be interesting to see what Professor Stephen Bainbridge would think of this conversation.

I've never read anything concerning the role of Sheriff selection in the runup to the Magna Carta. King John became embroiled in a succession/marital controversy in France that ultimately resulted in his loss of French territories, which were quite lucrative; in order to compensate for this loss, he imposed higher taxes upon his nobles. Then, crawling back to the Papacy after a controversy over the procedure for nominating the Archbishop of Canterbury, he required additional revenues for the payment of an odd (technically) feudal due to the Papacy. His imposition of an income tax, increases of scutage payments (in lieu of direct military service), and Forest laws, along with some 'innovations' in legal practice, would seem to have occasioned the rebellion. Certainly, the language of the Magna Carta is abundant in references to the restoration of rights and privileges, and while some of this language might well have been nothing more than dissembling (along the lines of later rights-talk and theories), there was a status quo ante that the nobility wished to restore. And formalize - this was the real innovation.

I apologize for the lack of clarity regarding royal absolutism. Absolutism was a Continental phenomenon, and I scarcely meant to imply otherwise. But the notion that early modern political settlements unraveled a rich tapestry of law, custom, and privilege, and afforded national governments the luxury of a more direct exercise of power, in places and manners previously unknown, is a commonplace of historians - regardless of what one thinks of medieval monarchies. And of course, to state that in this specific respect the medieval order was superior to the modern is not to state that it was superior tout court. This specific respect is really the only one I've ever addressed in this forum, as between the medieval and modern orders.

Finally, if you do in fact regard communities as aggregations as individuals, this would be the origin of our differences. To my mind, such a conception of community fails to capture the essence of our experience of given community, imposing a voluntarist filter between the mind and the reality; it also effectively negates community, reducing it to nothing more than a temporally extended crowd or gathering, such as a sporting event, or any other mass spectacle. And, of course, I believe that it implicitly begs the question of the substantive claims of place, rootedness, and stability: after all, if a CEO in New York can hire a group of random individuals who happen to dwell in the same geographical area of Ohio, and then let them all go when he decides to outsource his manufacturing, this is quite a different thing than hiring and firing the heads of families whose interwoven lives are constitutive of a community. The former case concerns data points or statistics; the latter concerns, well, people. In other words, the individual is just another modern abstraction/reduction, either the Superman, or the Superman's Prime Matter.

"If a CEO in New York can hire a group of random individuals who happen to dwell in the same geographical area of Ohio, and then let them all go when he decides to outsource his manufacturing, this is quite a different thing than hiring and firing the heads of families whose interwoven lives are constitutive of a community."

As a sheerly factual matter, some of the people employed in the Ohio town might be heads of families while others were bachelors. (And bachelors need jobs, too.) Some might have their lives tightly woven into the community while others were new arrivals, and so forth. And this will be true even in a relatively old-fashioned town.

But I'll grant you a fair bit: I'll agree that it's good for families to be supported by a single wage earner who is the head of the family. I'll grant that such family heads should give job stability and stability of location a high priority in their choice of jobs. I'll grant that it's more likely that a CEO of a big company headquartered far away will fire all the people in the Ohio town and hire people elsewhere instead than would someone running a business that had been based in the town for a long time. I'll grant you that firing all those people at once is a negative thing and that the CEO (or the local business owner) should not do it lightly.

But it simply is too much to conclude from this that there _should not be_ corporations that even have the _power_ to do such a thing and that employ the people in the town from headquarters far away. There are too many variable factors. The heads of households might be grateful for the job with the corporation and might be wise to take it, even with the risk of losing it. In some cases the job with the corporation might permit the family to stay in the town when otherwise, for whatever reason, they would have to move. The head of the household might be physically unable to run a subsistence farm and might believe rightly that his kids would be better off with a healthy father employed by someone else in a white-collar job for which he is fitted rather than a father trying to farm and be more fully independent of an employer, for which he is not fitted. And on and on.

To imply that we ought to try (if we could) to change the world and eliminate the whole phenomenon of corporations that hire towns-ful of people from afar, and that we will thereby make the world a better place, seems to me extreme and unjustified by the considerations raised.

This is the quintessence of the perspective that leaves me baffled. We can survey the vast sweep of human history, and note that political and economic centralization are correlated; we can attend to the annals of our own national history, and observe the closely correlated (and indeed, causally related) emergence of political and economic concentration; we can determine that political centralization is the condition of the possibility of greater mischief and wrongdoing than decentralization, and that economic centralization facilitates political centralization - both by means of the manifest convertibility of wealth and power, and by the inexorable political intervention summoned forth by the greater dislocations and more severe downturns which occur under conditions of economic concentration; we can observe, in our own time, the mutual contextualization of these phenomena in our own nation; we can observe, moreover, that economic concentration facilitates a corporatocratic subversion of the nation-state, occasioning a transitional phase intermediate between the nation-state and God only knows what comes next (although the European Union does provide a case study); and we can easily demonstrate that economic concentration subverts existential goods of human flourishing, replacing them with promises of servile abundance.

And even so, we are somehow not permitted to conclude from all of this that economic concentration is problematic, morally and pragmatically. The forest is being overlooked in favour of the trees:


There are too many variable factors. The heads of households might be grateful for the job with the corporation and might be wise to take it, even with the risk of losing it. In some cases the job with the corporation might permit the family to stay in the town when otherwise, for whatever reason, they would have to move. The head of the household might be physically unable to run a subsistence farm and might believe rightly that his kids would be better off with a healthy father employed by someone else in a white-collar job for which he is fitted rather than a father trying to farm and be more fully independent of an employer, for which he is not fitted. And on and on.

The trees, that is to say, the individuals, and their interests and limitations, their perspective(s) and preferences, suffice to preclude the possibility of any effective and authoritative appeal to the common good/communitarian values/decentralism/teleological goods of human nature. Of course individuals might be grateful for those jobs; certainly I might be were I living in such town. Of course some men are unfitted for manual labour and farming (and who ever said anything about mandating widespread subsistence farming?). The controversy between distributism or agrarianism, on the one hand, and corporatism, on the other, is not one between modernity and the methods of antiquity, but one concerning the appropriate human scale of our institutions and enterprises:


"At this point I want to say point blank what I hope is already clear: Though agrarianism proposes that everybody has agrarian responsibilities, it does not propose that everybody should be a farmer or that we do not need cities. Nor does it propose that every product should be a necessity. Furthermore, any thinkable human economy would have to grant to manufacturing an appropriate and honorable place. Agrarians would insist only that any manufacturing enterprise be formed and scaled to fit the local landscape, the local ecosystem, and the local community, and that it should be locally owned and employ local people. They would insist, in other words, that the shop or factory owner should not be an outsider, but rather a sharer in the fate of the place and its community. The deciders should have to live with the results of their decisions" ("The Whole Horse," 121). (Patrick Deneen, quoting Wendell Berry.)

And if my political thought seems extreme, wait until the endgame of the establishment is unfurled in all of its miasmic, anarcho-tyrannical, yet curiously brittle obloquy. The future the centralizers of business and government are constructing looks more like China, Brazil, or 1990s Russia than anything Americans have ever known. That would be, "more like", not "alike in every conceivable respect, including the totalitarian politics".

It can work the other way sometimes. Companies are quite often dependent on communities, and a single (say) environmental ordinance in such a community can ruin a company. As with communities, the bigger and more diversified a company is the harder it is to be hurt in this way: Joe's Diner is usually in no position to take on the government of Ohio, for example, just as Pokeytown is literally helpless against Wal-Mart. I absolutely agree with Jeff's point that conservatives (or sane people generally) should view corporations and governments with equal suspician. They are coextensive institutions of the governing elite with all that that imples. What the corporation lacks in terms of having the final say on the use of violence within a given geography it makes up for with its license to operate in any geography or, in the case of some kinds of operations, no particular geography at all. Governments are not limited in terms of the application of coercive violence within their jurisdictions; corporations with their more indirect powers, including tremendous influence on governments, face no jurisdictional limits.

Companies generally really do take on some of the character of real communities, certainly as much or more as hollow communities like modern suburban neighborhoods do, and a CEO who thinks otherwise and sees the company as just a formalism that he can shuffle around at will is setting himself up for a terrible failure. A classic example is Gil Amelio and Apple Computer. For that matter the very technocratic Amelio's prior tenure at National Semiconductor was similar, though it didn't fully play out because of his move to Apple. NSC at least at the time (things may be far different now) was where tech workers went to take a break: skills could still produce a paycheck in return for honest work without the relentless requirement to demonstrate every day, if you don't want to get fired, what your own planned next steps are on the ladder to the CEO job (the one nobody sane would want). Sometimes the CEO job description (whether the CEO likes it or not) is "take a bullet for the workers, because shareholders be damned they are going to do what they want to do." It all depends, and it sure as Hell isn't a matter of just formal arrangements. Modern people idealize the world in a positivist way and then wonder what went wrong as they step up to the gallows.

So I do take Lydia's point about neigbors etc. Certainly there are problems with the power and structure of our communities, most significantly in the loss of subsidiarity (and indeed the loss of the concept "local" altogether), but the larger problem is their hollowing-out, the deconstruction of their souls and substance. Jeff Culbreath's blog is at the same time a great contrast and antidote for this; to the extent Rod Dreher's crunchiness is coherent it represents in part a reaction against this. Structures are important, but the thing that is really killing us is ourselves: the positivist/nihilist way we've structured modern life. The hard-on-the-outside empty-at-the-center structures large and small in which we live and move and have our modern being aren't unimportant. But at the end of the day they are just symptoms of the death of God.

"...and we can easily demonstrate that economic concentration subverts existential goods of human flourishing, replacing them with promises of servile abundance.

And even so, we are somehow not permitted to conclude from all of this that economic concentration is problematic, morally and pragmatically. The forest is being overlooked in favour of the trees."

I don't recall ever conceding that the net effect of the existence of corporations is that most people find the "goods of human flourishing subverted" and "replaced with promises of servile abundance"--in other words, that most people would be better off--at least in all the senses that matter most--if we got rid of corporations. In fact, I've specifically questioned the notion of "servile abundance" as an overstatement and the whole notion of "servility" as fuzzy and questionable in this context. A local boss whose family has lived in the town for generations can be just as much of an overbearing, manipulative jerk as a far-away CEO, and it doesn't seem to me any more "servile" to work for the latter than for the former. And if it brings more "abundance," there is nothing wrong with that, either. I happen to believe that material prosperity is a "good" as well and not to be lightly dismissed.

So it isn't as though I'm admitting that the world would be a better place for most people if we somehow made corporations illegal (whatever-all that would involve, legally) and required that all ownership and lots of manufacturing be "local" (whatever-all that would involve) but that I'm holding out on advocating doing so because in some exceptional cases a few people might be worse off. Far from it.

I'm relying on the gobsmackingly obvious fact that an economic system in which ordinary, middle-class Americans have their jobs outsourced, downsized, insourced, or eliminated outright, with an American president (Clinton) assuring them that an America in which they would have to exist on a perpetual treadmill of retraining and instability, in order to earn those 9 or 10 different jobs they could expect to hold during the course of their working years, was radiant with future glory; an economic system predicated upon the risible fiction that America can subsist on retail trade, consumer debt, and the higher usury, and that Americans are all above average in intelligence, and hence qualify for employment in the New Economy; an economic system which, as its own defenders sometimes concede, will exacerbate stratification and impoverishment, as well as rend the social fabric all but irreparably in consequence; an economic system that justifies the immensity of the leverage that glorified middleman functions can exert upon communities either by reference to aggregate wealth or the rights of individuals - the only arguments ever adduced for this system (the arguments have not changed in 400 years), and largely irrelevant ones, at that; an economic system which, by its own immanent logic, subverts the very political and social order of the Republic; and an economic system brittle in its dependence upon finite, diminishing natural resources, and upon the assumption of their indefinite availability at low costs, is an economic system utterly inimical to many goods of human flourishing.

An excellent illustration of the meaning of servile abundance is the astounding ignorance of Americans concerning the manner in which food is produced and distributed. It would be at least something if people had some comprehension of these things, and of the enormous externalities of the present system; it would be still better if they at least understood what is required to produce food; but people assume that these things arrive almost in cargo-cult fashion. Servile, as will be manifest when commodity and resource costs render the system uneconomical in many respects, and people have not the slightest idea as to how they might fend for themselves (a bit more). For that is another indictment of the system: it concentrates knowledge (the individual bits of market knowledge that Hayekians speak of are really of consumer preferences, desires, and as such, are not really knowledge, let alone wisdom. Knowledge of what one wants, or of what someone else wants, is neither a liberal art, nor one of the servile arts requisite to civilizational survival.) and leaves people dependent upon a highly centralized, mechanized system for their subsistence.

Again, there is a difference between the local boss and the absentee boss: the difference of scale and propinquity. Then again, moderns have been appealing to leviathan to liberate them from the local tyrant (who is not normally a tyrant, but sometimes is tyrannical) from the very dawning of the age. How has that worked, macro-level?


And if it brings more "abundance," there is nothing wrong with that, either. I happen to believe that material prosperity is a "good" as well and not to be lightly dismissed.

In other words, the exchange of a higher degree of independence and self-reliance in individuals and families, and of the capacity for self-governance in communities, with all of the attendant human goods and virtues, for prosperity is a fair trade, a net gain, in fact. A faint pall of Brave New World hangs in the air, though even Tocqueville wrote about the servility engendered by concentrations of power in democratic societies, if the Huxley invocation is unfair. Moreover, material adequacy, let me state, is unquestionably a good, a blessing, in point of fact; but it is not a trump for the genuine goods of human character, virtue, and community, which are cultivated only in circumstances propitious to their realization. It is not the abstraction, "working for someone else" that engenders servility, but the specified, "working for someone else as a cog in a vast economic apparatus that concentrates the knowledge and productive forces necessary for the provision of the means of life", as opposed to the specified, "working for someone else as a part of a reasonably cohesive community capable of providing for many of its own necessities and luxuries", that engenders servility - dependency, that torpid state of expectation inimical to self-government, and thus, to republicanism.

"Then again, moderns have been appealing to leviathan to liberate them from the local tyrant (who is not normally a tyrant, but sometimes is tyrannical) from the very dawning of the age."

I didn't suggest appealing to anybody to liberate anybody from anybody. I just suggested that servility can be just as evident in one's relation to a local boss as to a far-away one. I've known some local tyrants, as I'm sure have you.

"Servile, as will be manifest when commodity and resource costs render the system uneconomical in many respects, and people have not the slightest idea as to how they might fend for themselves..."

But I thought you had conceded that not everybody has to be a farmer. I would think that even in a situation where things were produced and distributed on a smaller scale lots of people--ill-suited to grow and prepare any significant proportion of their own food--would still not know how and be dependent on those who did.

There really isn't anything servile or intrinsically bad in specialization. I know you think there is. I've never agreed. In fact, specialization seems to me to have been a very good thing and to have permitted and encouraged lots of the "goods of human flourishing."

"In other words, the exchange of a higher degree of independence and self-reliance in individuals and families, and of the capacity for self-governance in communities, with all of the attendant human goods and virtues, for prosperity is a fair trade, a net gain, in fact."

It might be. It would depend on _how much_ of a loss of prosperity we were talking about and _how much_ of a gain in "self-governance, with all of the attendant human goods and virtues" we were likely to get. Personally, I think you might be more likely to get a bunch of ghost towns than a bunch of flourishing, self-reliant, virtuous, homespun local communities if you started outlawing corporations.

Sorry, I've been out of the building, and I haven't had time to read the comments, yet.

So this is just in response to Maximos' original post.

I don't *necessarily* object to the centralization of *political* power, any more than I *necessarily* object to the centralization of *economic* power.

I mean, it all depends, doesn't it?

In my opinion, there are only a very few things that ought to be subject to political power *of any sort* - and national defense is first among those things. And national defense should probably be pretty centralized, for obvious practical reasons. So, I guess, in that case, I'm in favor of the centralization of political power.

But, when it comes to the education of our children, for example? Not only do I not want political power centralized - I don't want it involved *at all*. So, I guess, in that case, I'm opposed to the centralization of political power.

In other words, the question of *centralization*, as such, just doesn't strike me as any where near morally central, here.

I didn't suggest appealing to anybody to liberate anybody from anybody.

I wasn't attributing that notion to you; I was only observing that modernity has been characterized by repeated appeals to remote authorities over against nearer authorities. Of course, local bosses can be tyrannical, and can engender servility; in a more decentralized political and economic order, the effects of their misdeeds would not only be more localized, but as least as likely as in the present to redound against them, for there would be no higher authority to legitimize and defend them. Higher political authorities have, often enough, eliminated local oppressions, only to establish the conditions of later, more general ones; economic consolidation has often resulted in more rapid local improvement, only to establish the conditions of subsequent, and deeper, troughs.

Believe me, having witnessed precisely how local governments can be bought and sold by development and business interests, I harbour no romantic illusions about them. On the other hand, better that a corporatocratic interest be limited to buying a local government, than that it have the ability to purchase a state government, or more.

But I thought you had conceded that not everybody has to be a farmer.

Of course not everyone must turn to agriculture. It was merely a singular illustration: we ought to be more cognizant of where our food comes from, and the externalities of the present system; and we ought to understand that when globalization works its "magic" and consumption in India and China rise - quite independent of any speculations concerning peak oil, globalization will exert strong upward pressures on commodity and transportation costs, even if peak oil does not occur until 2100 - there will arrive an historical moment at which localization will become imperative. At that point, more people than are now involved in agriculture will have to return to then land; but majorities will remain to pursue other occupations - merely on a more localized, smaller scale.

There really isn't anything servile or intrinsically bad in specialization.

Specialization is not equivalent to centralization or concentration, except perhaps in a few reductionist economics textbooks. A reasonable division of labour is quite compatible with a more localized scale of production. Beyond that, certain "specializations" are intrinsically servile: a man who does nothing more than tighten the lug nuts on the wheels of cars emerging from the assembly line is engaged in servile activity, to his own personal detriment - even if he receives a generous union wage for doing so.

Personally, I think you might be more likely to get a bunch of ghost towns than a bunch of flourishing, self-reliant, virtuous, homespun local communities if you started outlawing corporations.

Well, I haven't exactly advocated abolishing the corporation, merely reforming it, perhaps more stringently than others might desire. Limitation of size and scope and scale, proscription of, say lobbying, and subjection to greater liability do not amount to abolition. Of course, any reforms must be undertaken with judiciousness and deliberation; haste almost always results in ghost towns.

I consider the provision of national defense, under the conditions of modern technological development and the order of nation-states disanalogous with political and economic concentration per se. Some sort of Federal provision of national defense is a prerequisite of continued national existence in this era; centralized political direction of the educational process, and economic globalization/concentration are not necessary for the diffusion of knowledge and prosperity, respectively.

No one, so far as I can determine, pursues concentration for its own sake, but with respect to the objects it makes possible. The argument is thus that most of the objects of political centralization, and virtually all of the objects of economic centralization, are either illicit, or attainable by other means, means with fewer risks and externalities.

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