The Corrupt Romance Between Big Business and Socialism

A Google sign is seen during the China International Import Expo (CIIE), at the National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai, China on Nov. 5, 2018. Aly Song/Reuters

News Analysis

There’s an odd and ironic romance between big business and socialism.

In otherwise free societies, corporations have become the extralegal enforcement bodies of cultural laws—able to fire, shame, and ruin the lives of people who defy the unofficial systems of political correctness.

The Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed in June 2017 that so-called “hate speech” isn’t illegal in the United States, and is protected as free speech by the U.S. Constitution. But elements in society are ignoring this constitutional protection.

Of course, “hate speech” is largely undefined, and as a practical matter, its meanings change based on the political needs of the socialist left. There’s a steady flow of cases, but recently, a Google insider revealed to Project Veritas that Google is censoring conservatives to prevent a future Donald Trump presidency. Even the Ravelry knitting community announced it will ban users for supporting Trump under the pretense that the president has become a symbol of ideas they deem hateful.

In all cases of supposed hate speech, people who are allegedly violating these unofficial laws risk being publicly exposed by news outlets—as we saw in June, when the Daily Beast exposed and publicly shamed a black forklift driver in the Bronx for allegedly creating a joke video that portrayed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slurring as if she were drunk.

We saw a similar situation in February 2018, when CNN sent a reporter to the home of an elderly woman to accuse her of sharing an alleged Russian article on Facebook. We saw this again when 16-year-old high school student Nick Sandmann was falsely accused by the big corporate media of harassing an elderly Native American man. In response, celebrities joked on Twitter about assaulting or murdering him and his fellow classmates.

Political correctness originated with Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party, when he established in 1967 that those who support socialist policies are “politically correct” and those who oppose them can be publicly shamed, arrested, or killed.

News outlets and big business have become the enforcement bodies of unofficial laws and the current arbiters of political correctness. They identify people, shame them, contact their employers, and attempt to ruin their lives. They send the message that any person, regardless of age or race, is open for attack if he or she violates the corporate-enforced socialist laws of political correctness.

Big businesses, in cahoots with socialist political factions, have found a way to enforce socialist dictates that aren’t criminal under normal law. And through political terrorism, they send a message that speaking against the politically correct narratives can ruin your life. People are then terrorized into coerced silence.

‘State-Capitalist Monopoly’

Contrary to popular belief, socialism doesn’t get rid of big business. It gets rid of the true principles of free trade and places businesses under state control. It then subsidizes them through high taxation and manages them through strict law. The new state businesses become immune to independent competition; people can be appointed to work for them as the state sees fit; and taxes prop up businesses that would otherwise fail.

Don’t believe me? Name one socialist country or regime that did away with the factories, big businesses, or debt-riddled social regimes that many people oppose in capitalist systems. Many countries under the “Nordic model” are arguably more capitalist than the United States—in Denmark, for example, it’s easier to start a business than in most U.S. states, and there aren’t even minimum wage laws.

Even in so-called “agrarian” societies such as tsarist Russia and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, where there were no “capitalist” systems to destroy, the socialist tyrants “seized the means of production” from common people, which included seeds, farming equipment, and land. And in both cases, this led to genocide for the “socialist cause.”

Lenin explained the intention of having business serve the state to the Russian people from the get-go, referring to socialism in 1917 as a system of “state-capitalist monopoly” that was a necessary step toward the end-goals of communist social and moral desolation.

The result is that independent business is destroyed, the means of production and resources are seized, and the state attempts to micro-manage the nation’s economy through massive state business and bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the fat cats in corporate big business are sometimes all for this. After all, socialism doesn’t get rid of corruption or greed—it subsidizes it. Socialism is all about monopoly, only it’s “state” monopoly.

This is part of the reason that anti-socialists in the early 1900s were opposed not just to socialism, but also to the emerging forms of collectivist corporatism that have come to define the modern economy in the West.

We can take the famed writer G.K. Chesterton as an example. Like many anti-socialists of his time, he recognized that the problems of socialism weren’t limited to the official socialist systems that we recognize today. The problems extended to the direction the “free” market was taking under corporate monopoly.

Many writers, including Chesterton, framed their criticisms more broadly as opposing “tyranny” and “monopoly,” which included the full spectrum of socialism, and of the darker parts of big business.

Chesterton wrote in his newspaper GK’s Weekly in 1925: “There is nothing in front but a flat wilderness of standardization either by Bolshevism or Big Business. And it is strange that we at least have seen sanity, if only in a vision, while they go forward chained eternally to enlargement without liberty and progress without hope.”

The Tyranny of Big-Business Socialism

Socialism is a system of subsidized tyranny and corruption. It takes all the worst traits of big business and corrupt politics and solidifies them in society through high taxes and bureaucratic state control.

The classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises explained in his 1947 book “Planned Chaos“ that while ”nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy” and many political factions levy different accusations against capitalism—to the extent that they contradict one another—many of their criticisms are actually against socialist concepts that have been adopted into the free market.

Mises wrote: “Although capitalism is the economic system of modern Western civilization, the policies of all Western nations are guided by utterly anti-capitalistic ideas. The aim of these interventionist policies is not to preserve capitalism, but to substitute a mixed economy for it.”

The reality is that many big businesses support socialist policies, since they stand to benefit from the systems of monopoly and state subsidies offered by socialism.

Why is it that the pharmaceutical industry is backing politicians who want socialist health care? It’s because socialist health care would finance their operations and give them immunity to the problems encountered in the business of medicine.

Instead of forcing big-business medicine to cut costs and improve services, socialist health care would make these issues non-negotiable. Socialist health care would finance big pharma with high taxes, rather than force these businesses to fix the roots of public complaints by reducing the costs of medicine and improving quality of care.

Socialism would also mean that big government could regulate public health and force people to receive medical care, while limiting outside options for care.

The same principle applies to colleges and the plague of student debt. Rather than lower the cost of education and reform what’s taught to help ensure graduates can get jobs after college—and thus pay off their debt—many institutions want socialist policies to subsidize their industry. This allows them to use taxpayer dollars to solidify high tuition costs and to continue offering degrees of little use in the real world—since it won’t matter if students can’t find jobs to repay their loans.

The reality is that socialist tyrants in politics work hand-in-hand with big-business interests.

Politicians who are financed by these big businesses become puppets working on their behalf. In this exchange, these politicians create narratives to convince the public to vote in socialist policies that subsidize big business. And through these corrupt ties, the socialist tyrants come to represent the interests of big business over the well-being of the people they’re supposed to represent.

This corrupt network between socialism, big business, and corrupt politics has always existed. It’s a foundation of the socialist system. During the Cold War, Wall Street in the United States was pumping money into the Soviet Union, and it wasn’t until this channel of finance was cut off that the communist regime collapsed. We see the same ties between today’s Wall Street and the Chinese Communist Party.

If a business is corrupt, it can’t last long if it grows too large. Businesses that fail to provide competitive prices and good services can only last if they hold a monopoly—and free societies are supposed to break up monopolies like that. Socialism also eliminates competition from small and medium-sized companies.

So why are so many big businesses pushing for socialism, if socialism allegedly gets rid of the “capitalist” system that they depend on?

The basis of socialism is monopoly. Under socialism, big businesses are allowed to persist—albeit under state control—through tax money, which means they don’t need to be competitive in prices and services. Socialism is the preferred model for corrupt big business, since it eliminates the risks and obligations that go along with big business.

And it’s likely for this reason that so many “millionaires and billionaires” support it.