I thought this comment found online was very well put:
The progressive’s great plan: “Corporations control the government, so let’s fix that by making the government more powerful.”
This is the crucial realization, the crucial myth-busting, that been driving so many from the liberal to the libertarian side.
Most everybody disagrees with the vast power that corporations have as a society. I bet every single person reading this would agree with that.
The progressives have one primary solution to this: more regulation. More rules, more laws, more red tape, THAT will put the corporations in a cage.
But this strategy has plainly failed.
Why has it failed? Because the corporations themselves are writing the laws. Even when they don’t write the laws, they can easily skirt them. Hire accountants, consultants, etc. Or, just break the laws and pay some puny fine.
Small businesses, on the other hand, don’t have these luxuries. They must pay full price, and many times the regulations are enough to smother them in their cradles, or at least keep them from expanding.
And this gets to the core of the matter: What corporations really fear is not regulation, but COMPETITION. They fear losing market share and revenue.
Seen from this context, the regulatory state very much helps corporations. It helps them squash their small competitors before they become large. Examples of this are legion, and can be seen in hundreds and thousands of cases from the local on up to the national level, in almost every industry in the economy.
Liberals often say that Government is needed to protect us from monopolies, but what we see in the real world is that 99% of monopolies are in fact created by the government.
The only US industry that has seen an explosion of small startups that rapidly become large and challenge the power players is the one industry that is least affected by regulation: tech.
Libertarians coldness to conservative’s fundamentalism, plutocracy, support of the police state, and war hysteria is obvious. But there is a reason why many libertarians have also become quite hostile to liberalism/progressivism: because we believe that the progressives are the unwitting architects of the corporatism they so despise.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))