I wound up watching a bit of a PBS documentary on the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. One of the underlying themes at play was a stark split between the rich landed folks and the poor landless peasants. "Land reform" was the theme of the latter and their backers, trying to give the little guy access to land of his own rather than having the patrons have all the land and power.
Fast forward to the 2010s and a nascent leftist movement (or rebranding of an ongoing one) in the OWS crowd. Giving the little guy 40 acres and a John Deere tractor is unlikely to appease this crowd, for not everyone's looking to get back to the farm.
That makes taking power from the rich and giving it to the little guy problematic. We've gone from a largely agrarian economy to a goods-and-services economy. The land reform that would work in pre-industrial societies in the early 1900s doesn't fit the modern US. We've moved on to something... different.
When I was thumbing through the coverage of the Kentucky governor's race (despite the troubles of the Democrats nationally, Gov. Beshear is cruising to reelection) the platform of independent candidate Gatewood Galbraith proved interesting.
In his writings and speeches Galbraith goes into detail on what he calls “Synthetic Subversion”. This theory seeks to explain when, how and why America, specifically Kentucky, moved from an agricultural agrarian society into an industrial synthetic society. ... Up until the early 1930's, America and Kentucky relied solely on agriculture to fuel the economy. Galbraith explains that, out of necessity, Roosevelt's shifted America towards a more industrial (synthetic) society fueled by alliances with “Greedy Corporations.”
It's easy to run an agrarian culture without too many big companies, especially if you have the government do some of the larger-scale things like banking and railroads. However, it's hard to do a manufacturing economy without having corporations of some sort. For instance, Apple has been used as a counterpoint to the OWS crowd; you need the economies of size that a big company brings to get those wonderful toys to market at a price that the average person has a shot of affording.
If we can't do land reform, what can we do to help the little guy? The US stock market has about 16 trillion in market capitalization. If we took half of that and gave it to the population at large, each person would get $27,000 worth of stock. A nice sum, but not enough to make people set for life. Also, such a operation would not make corporations less greedy; stockholders are still primarily looking to make money off of their investments.
The answer isn't giving the wealth to the "99%." If corporate greed is your bugaboo, you need to ditch the corporation altogether. That will mean government control of industry if something needs a larger scope than mom-and-pop proprietorships can handle.
Comments