Posts Tagged Corporate Rights
Friday Freedom Post: How Freedom Was Lost
Posted by The Marginalist in Freedom Fridays on May 15th, 2009
Yeah, yeah, a new series… Freedom Fridays. The first post is a response to a Daily Kos article that a friend of mine wanted me to talk about.
How freedom was lost
IN the article, “How Freedom Was Lost,” Devilstower wrote of the deaths caused by pollution from a zinc factory in Donora, Pennsylvania, the floods from a coal mine in Saunders, WV, and the tragedy of the triangle shirtwaist factory in New York (NYU, by the way, owns the building now).
No one implemented health, safety, and environmental legislation because they thought it would be fun….. We did it because that kind of freedom, marketplace freedom, was literally killing us.
Read the article before going on — the rest of this post will make much more sense. Today’s topic: regulation and the free market. Onwards!
What a free market is (and is not)
CONSERVATIVES and free-marketeers talk about a “free market” all the time, but it’s sometimes unclear what this term means.
John Locke is famous for coining the three essential freedoms of humanity: life, liberty, and property. The violations of these three freedoms take some form of the following crimes: murder, slavery, and theft. According to many believers in the free market, the protection of these liberties is not only the purpose of society but creates the best outcomes.
That’s what a free market is — a society in which individuals are free to mutually trade with each other, given that they do not infringe on other peoples’ rights.
But, Devilstower argues, a purely free market lacks regulation, and without regulation, people infringe on each others’ rights — just look at the pollution in Donora!
Why a free market lives on regulation
The answer to this is that the situations Devilstower describes are not genuine free markets. Clearly pollution destroys property and injures — sometimes kills — people. That’s an infringement on those peoples’ rights, and therefore not part of a free market. A world where corporations can simply earn money without bearing the costs is corporatism, not freedom.
Devilstower tries to equate free markets with a complete lack of regulation — but from a geniune free market point of view, that’s preposterous. Of course free markets need regulation — it’s impossible to have a free market without regulation. Freedom needs government to protect it.
For example, police and courts are the most important form of regulation. The police regulates our behavoir in a free society so that we don’t infringe on the rights of other people — we don’t murder, steal, or enslave.
So no, Devilstower — the free market wasn’t killing us. An unfree market was. Don’t equate free markets and individual liberties with anarchy! Freedom is not only about protection from the state, but from other people.
I have a proposal, sir
So, as part of the conservative/libertarian/classical liberal backlash against Obama, I’ve called him “socialist.” I regret that. His policies certainly tend towards that direction, but to call him “a socialist” may — at least, for now — be too much. The word “socialist,” I think, is quite extreme, and isn’t so much used to accurately describe Obama, but to elicit an emotional reaction from listeners. Wrongheaded his policies are, but socialist they are not.
So, I have a proposal. I promise to stop calling Obama a socialist… if progressives and liberals stop calling our current system a free market. Because we don’t have a free market, and you can’t blame the free market for something if it doesn’t exist.
Corporate Rights
Posted by The Marginalist in Links, Politics on April 21st, 2009
I was driving home this afternoon, and during the commercial break at KJR FM 95.7 (I listen to ollld music), I switched over to Democracy Now!. Democracy Now! is a very left-wing radio show, but Goodman reports news that no one else does, and they’re not bound by party identities.
The guest on was an attorney named Thomas Linzey, who was speaking about a “Community Bill of Rights” in Spokane. The full transcript is available here.
Corporations today have the same constitutional rights as you or I, but because of their wealth, of course, they can exercise those rights to a greater extent. So, even though you and I have First Amendment rights and Fourth Amendment rights and Bill of Rights protections under the US system of law, corporations have those rights too. So, Wal-Mart Corporation, for example, has First Amendment rights and Fourth Amendment rights under the law.
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And one of the most amazing things about this—these particular Community Bill of Rights, which are being amended into the Spokane city home rule charter, is that it actually deals with that, declaring in that bill of rights that corporations don’t have rights that can actually exceed those rights of people within the city of Spokane. And so, it’s pretty groundbreaking stuff, in addition.
I’m not exactly sure what the specifics are in Spokane, but philosophically, this raises some issues for me. After all, aren’t corporations simply people exercising their right to assemble, as per the first amendment? Then why wouldn’t a corporation be entitled to all of the other rights that people have?
Also, if corporations are simply assemblies, then would Linzey advocate a charter that denied Constitutional rights — such as the right to free speech and petition — to groups such as the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, or any other non-profit organization?