Libertarians, Dystopia, Young Men and Big Corporations

What do these have in common? The young men part is easy. They are dependent on their family till working age or at least teens. They value the family, personal effort, rewards from work. Then they get a job and they have to pay tax. They have no idea what the government does, other than at the city and county level where the results are plain to see, roads and police and fire protection. But in general, government is just restrictions on life and supporting people who are not able to make a living.

Then they go to college or perhaps just pick up a book, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Rand was a Russian émigré who knew all the evils of socialism. She painted a dystopian future of a strictly controlled planet. From this pretty much all modern dystopian fiction comes out. The comic book or Hollywood version, or even the lyrics to the album 2112 by the band Rush. Paul Ryan read the book as a college student. He still acts based on it, as pretty much all government is evil. He is on a mission to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as these are all part of the unnecessary and evil things that the libertarian teachings of Rand introduced.

I have to pause here to explain how they would like to run things. You pay a small tax, say 5%, or maybe even 10% if you need snow plows. This takes care of government at all levels. You stash away money that you will later use in place of Medicare or Social Security, which they have done away with. Works fine if you have a boring life and nothing happens to you before you turn 60.

Corporations figure into the thing in a sort of convoluted way. They cannot completely dismiss government, as they depend on it to make near monopolies in any one field. The lobbying efforts have led to many industries having only three or four players. Food is grown by many farmers, but the processing and bringing to market is in the hands of a few giants. Even seed production for the farming is in the hands of a corporate giant.

So we are essentially at the point where any kind of welfare or government control of any production is disappearing. The corporations use the state to their ends. By supporting “capitalism” we are essentially doing the opposite of what we intended, we make ourselves slaves to consumer products instead of the socialist state the Rand feared.

The industries dictate the bills that control their industry. The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 made sure that only the biggest farms and ranches made money for mass produced foods. Smaller farmers then started things that have different labeling, such as organic foods. These require more manpower and cannot always be grown with big machines.

Much of the farm end of things is explained in the book What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) by Thomas Frank.

Politics have entered what he calls Culture Wars. We don’t understand material benefits anymore so we concentrate on other politics, and people in the middle of the country have become Republicans simply because of values, religion etc.

As we move toward monopolies, the dystopian nature of corporations is becoming clear. Just recently, the move away from Net Neutrality allows the service providers to push some information and even block pages it does not want you to see. But they probably only want to control our consumer behavior.