Beneficence: Smallville

July 15, 2004

Smallville

DARN! I thought that in the comments to Civil Society and Corporate Contributions, etc, I was beginning to make some headway in understanding the progressive critique of Big Business and see some common ground between myself and Gerry and Phil around issues of corporate welfare and rent-seeking.

I thought I was beginning to see that progressives and classical liberals/libertarians might share dismay with the political power of corporations but differ essentially on the question of how best to restrain corporate accretion of political power, with progressives seeing Regulation as the answer and libertarians believing instead that Market Forces set in an elegant set of procedural institutions (private property, rule of law, etc) are ultimately the best discipline of corporate energies.

Now I read at GiftHub that what we really need is a world in which no successful "big guy" ever puts a "little guy" out of business. Meaning that all the other little guys who want a cheap tube of toothpaste so they can put another dollar into their kids' education fund pay for the business inefficiencies of the little guy's "way of life."

To pursue this substantive vision of the Good Society contra the free market, in my mind, constrains us to some sort of static utopianism that promises that no one ever suffers, no one has to adjust their plans to those of others, and we can all dwell pleasantly in a monochromatic, but of course diverse, Smallville (or some idyllic New England town of the 19th-c).

I'm torn, because those good ole family shows (the Beaver and Andy Griffith) from my childhood do carry some appeal. I'm no apologist of Wal-Mart--though I do shop there on occasion--and do not want to privilege Wal-Mart through some sort of corporate welfare. But to suggest that no "big box" store could ever be a legitimate marketplace player seems to me a Jeffersonian-style retreat to simple subsistence-level, pre-industrial agrarianism. The world was more complex than that in 1787, and it's not gotten any less complex.

That said, if we're merely arguing that each community qua community should be able to weigh whether or not they offer the various incentives and concessions (carrots of corporate welfare) that I presume many corporations seek on the backs of the jobs the bring, then I agree. But it has to be as legitimate for a community to decide to admit Wal-Mart as it is for a community to reject a Wal-Mart. And I'm troubled about the scenario where a private landowner is willing to make the deal against the sentiment of the community. do we give the communities an expanding right of eminent domain, and open up even more opportunity for rent-seeking and speculation in regulatory takings?

I want to take these matters seriously, but rather than fight what in some instances sound like old battles of the industrial era, I'm truly more intrigued by moving forward to understanding together what a genuine knowledge-era society might look like!

Has the institution of property itself fundamentally changed in the knowledge -era? Doesn't the knowledge-era turn old assumptions about scarcity on their head? What does self-determination of a community look like, and how do we hold that in viable balance with the freedom of the individual and retain the relative freedom of the marketplace and the positive contributions to quality of life corporations make everyday?

These seem important and fruitful questions for us to explore further together.

July 15, 2004 in ThinkingPolitics | Permalink