112 lines
6.3 KiB
Plaintext
112 lines
6.3 KiB
Plaintext
The Freeman
|
||
The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.
|
||
Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533
|
||
(914) 591-7230
|
||
|
||
February 1988
|
||
|
||
|
||
Economic Power
|
||
By Joseph S. Fulda
|
||
|
||
|
||
Economic power is a recurring theme among political theorists ranging from
|
||
radical political economist John Kenneth Galbraith on the left to
|
||
neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol on the right. The doctrine that
|
||
wealth is power is almost never challenged in our day and in many rather subtle
|
||
ways has come to underlie much public policy: Public campaign financing,
|
||
campaign contribution limitations, equal time, antitrust laws, and estate taxes
|
||
are examples. This concept, which originated in the late nineteenth century
|
||
and has since lain dormant in the public mind, needs re-examination.
|
||
|
||
Any analysis of economic power must being with a clear conception of power and
|
||
its antithesis, liberty. Power, as I understand it, is the capacity to rule
|
||
others: to make decisions for them without their consent and, in particular,
|
||
to allocate their time and direct their energies. Liberty, in contrast, is a
|
||
condition of noninterference and self-rule in which people make decisions for
|
||
themselves without asking any man's leave and in which they themselves
|
||
apportion their time and channel their energies in such a manner as to them
|
||
seems most satisfying.
|
||
|
||
An Unholy Alliance
|
||
|
||
If the capacity to coerce is the sum of power, it is hard to see how it inheres
|
||
in a pile of riches. The usual reply is that wealth can be used to obtain
|
||
instruments of coercion along with those willing to use them, and that power
|
||
can indeed be found in a stockpile of weapons and men of violence. Now this is
|
||
all very true, but inasmuch as the unholy alliance between wealth and force,
|
||
public and private, is universally proscribed in free republics, it cannot
|
||
account for the tirades, so common in the media, against economic power.
|
||
Neither bribery nor organized crime, typical examples of the alliance, is the
|
||
object of the fulminations. Economic power in that sense has no apologists
|
||
and, therefore, no detractors.
|
||
|
||
Nor is it the holders of power, as we have defined it, who stand accused of its
|
||
use in the economic realm. Indeed, government is seen as the enemy of economic
|
||
power, Galbraith's "countervailing power," the embodiment of Kristol's populist
|
||
temper. Government may indeed tax, subsidize, regulate, and monopolize, but it
|
||
is rather the wealthy and the coporations who are said to enjoy economic power.
|
||
But the only power which properly attends on wealth alone is dominium: "the
|
||
complete power to use, to enjoy, and to dispose of property at will" (The
|
||
American College Dictionary). But is this power? Far from being a "power,"
|
||
dominium is a liberty, the liberty to do with the fruits of one's labor and the
|
||
return on one's investment as one wills.
|
||
|
||
Market "Power"
|
||
|
||
Thus, proponents of the concept of economic power must be referring to
|
||
something other than power over the economy. What they mean, in fact, by
|
||
"economic power" is the ability to influence a variety of social and economic
|
||
conditions through the use of one's wealth in a volitive, rather than coercive,
|
||
manner. In a market society, those with the most purchasing "power" ultimately
|
||
decide what will be produced in greater measure than those with less purchasing
|
||
power. Likewise, those with the most to invest will proximately decide what
|
||
goods will be produced and what services will be offered in greater measure
|
||
than those with less to invest.
|
||
|
||
Yet this influence over the free economy is central to its operation: Either
|
||
what is produced will determine what will be consumed, as in the command
|
||
economy, or what will be consumed determines what is produced, as in the market
|
||
economy. Likewise, either profits and losses will take capital from those not
|
||
satisfying consumer wishes and reward thsoe more sensitive to others' needs, or
|
||
capital will be allocated and production decisions will be made in accordance
|
||
with political, rather than economic, criteria.
|
||
|
||
The notion of economic power, then, is really nothing other than what an honest
|
||
socialist would admit is economic freedom, what Marx called "that single,
|
||
unconscionable freedom." This freedom, mistakenly labeled power, is often
|
||
resented when it comes to play in the political sphere; this resentment leads
|
||
to all manner of "election reforms." It is also resented in the economic
|
||
sphere, and leads to a variety of anti- competitive "regulatory reforms." It is
|
||
perhaps most resented in the social sphere- just recall Mrs. Reagan's
|
||
difficult first months as First Lady- and the results in sweeping demands for a
|
||
new social order.
|
||
|
||
What is really resented is the necessarily unequal nature of this influence
|
||
that will always obtain when men are left free. The gurus of the far left
|
||
denounce concentrations of wealth as power, because the resulting influence
|
||
over who will lead and what will be produced and consumed is something they
|
||
feel is best left with them and their plans for our future.
|
||
|
||
The Hypocrisy of Collectivism
|
||
|
||
What other explanation can honestly be put forth for collectivist denunciations
|
||
of wealth in capitalist society, in view of their decidedly hypocritical
|
||
"solution"? After all, they propose to combine all corporations into one giant
|
||
Corporation, to endow it with all natural resources, to arm it, to invest it
|
||
with legislative and judicial powers, to grant it the police power, to imbue it
|
||
with quasi-spiritual authority, to place its public relations department in
|
||
charge of the media and its acquisitions department in charge of the military
|
||
and then, as final sublimating acts, to replace a much-decried
|
||
self-perpetuating board of directors with a self-perpetuating Party elite and
|
||
to simply rename this new Corporation, the State.
|
||
|
||
That is the socialist prescription for concentrations of both wealth and power,
|
||
and it is a very clear guarantee of poverty, misery, and tryanny, the three
|
||
things alone which socialism has produced beyond comparision. Not for nothing
|
||
is socialism thus sometimes, however inaccurately, described as "state
|
||
capitalism"! If one is truly interested in limiting economic power, one should
|
||
consider limiting government- for that is were power properly understood lies.
|
||
|
||
Electronic reprint courtesy of Genesis 1.28 (206) 361-0751 300/1200/2400
|
||
|