Communism is an anti-corporate posture. Or calling for repeal of the laws that create corporations in the first place. No one, on either side of any political divide in America, is making those claims (well, there are fringe groups that are on the fringes of the fringe which are virulently anti-corporate, but their postures are not represented in the Congress or the national discussion). There is nothing "anti-corporate" in taxing corporate income or supporting collective bargaining of corporate employees than there is in having a federal agency regulate the sale of corporate stocks.The anti corporate posture is there in each party. In one case manifesting itself in calls for boycotts and in the other in calls for taxation and unionization https://t.co/u3U2pnW6AY
— Sam Stein (@samstein) April 4, 2021
Corporations are a fact of modern American life. If they are people under the law, they can be taxed, they can be subject to collective bargaining, and they can be boycotted. Nobody was charged with trying to “cancel” Nestle company back when we were all supposed to boycott them because of infant formulas.
Maybe we should all just try to stop talking nonsense, for even a few minutes. The silence alone would be refreshing.
Being behind on my reading of her essays, I haven't yet read Marilynne Robinson's criticism of "rights based" conceptions of freedom and democracy but I think we're running up against all of the problems with that articulation and conception of them all at once.
ReplyDeleteThe history of human thought seems to have one theme, people coming up with ideas that looked good at the time, those gaining influence and turning out to have major problems with them. I think that's what happens just about whenever anyone addresses issues of "liberty" "freedom" "rights" "The First Amendment" etc. these days. Lawyers, legal scholars and judges all seem to think their job is finding opportunities in the once idealistic sounding language for the worst actors with the most money. And the better ones don't seem to be too fast on the uptake when those problems with those words arise.