What if corporations were made of metal?
The need for a strong government is obvious when you think about corporate power. Many corporations are vast, rich, and powerful legal constructions whose only purpose is to generate more money for their shareholders (or, as is so often the case, to enrich their MBA-class officers and board). Without government laws, courts, and enforcement, corporations would be free to poison us for profit, cheat us for profit, steal from us for profit, collude against us for profit, kill us for profit . . . in fact, they would be legally mandated to commit such actions if there were no government laws to stop them. So the push to weaken government oversight of corporations has always struck me as suicidal, and not serious.
Apparently, the majority of my fellow citizens feel differently. They have bought the rich man’s lie that government needs to be small, poorly funded, and weak, that government needs to “leave us alone”, while forgetting that the government is often the only thing stopping the rich and powerful, through corporations, of really oppressing us. They all seem to forget that corporations exist, and that they could be terribly harmful if not checked.
And maybe that is natural. Corporations are just groups of people and resources, bound together by papers and ideas that let other people invest in them. They are a legal fiction, a machine for allowing investment and dividend. But they themselves are not visible, only their effects on the world are. And what is not seen by the very vision-oriented human animal is often not considered.
Imagine for a moment if corporations - these money-focusing machines made of law and paper, were made of metal instead. Imagine that they were huge, metal robots occupying our land. Each of these robots, built with the money of a few very rich people and benefiting a relatively small group of people, performs actions to maximize their profit. They deny claims of insurance policy holders, they pollute our air, water, and earth, they get real people hooked on drugs, entertainment, fashions. They chew up our natural resources, they pay people as little as they possibly can, and they buy up our politicians. As their money and power grow, their ability to make more money and power grows.
Normal citizens begin to notice that all of the federal government’s decisions favor only the robots. The government says that metal citizens have all of the rights of flesh and blood citizens, but very few of the responsibilities. They are limited in their liability if they kill people, for example. They mostly can’t be sued, and they are always pushing for “tort reform” so that real people can’t beat them in court. The government lowers their taxes and lets them get away with not paying much, in any case, while raising taxes on real people.
After a large tax increase on flesh-and-blood people in 1983 to pay for the social security of the baby boomers, SS amasses a huge fortune of savings bonds worth $2.7 trillion dollars. But the federal government has spent all of its money making the metal citizens richer, and doesn’t want to pay it back to the people!
Can you imagine how the people in this country would react? Especially our gun-happy, ‘Merica-loving brethren? Do you think for one minute that “smashing those metal mother-f*ckers to junk” wouldn’t be a national past-time? Instead, we are treated to nearly half of the populace, in effect, voting to make their robot overlords stronger and stronger, to give them more money, more power, more license to run roughshod over us.
I think this idea would make a great science fiction/allegory movie. Hollywood, I’m willing to sell it. But I wish my fellow citizens could actually see what was happening around us.
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