Quote Of The Day - Corporate Royalty

 

(click to enlarge)

 

“Corporate America has generated its own royalty. What is different about 2012 from five or ten or fifty years ago is that people are now cognizant of it. The most interesting right-wing movement in the United States is the nascent Tea Party. While I disagree with them vehemently (as a left-libertarian, and also as one who favors science over emotional argument) I will give them credit for this: at their intellectual core (and, yes, there is one) they are aggressively anti-corporate. Post-2008, Americans get that the Corporate System is not a meritocracy, not rational, and not even real capitalism. It’s designed to provide the best of two systems (socialism and capitalism) for a well-connected social and increasingly hereditary elite, regardless of merit, and the worst of both systems for everyone else. For themselves, they create an economic arrangement in which they can derive enormous personal benefit from random variables that exist in the economy, but at the same time build a jealously guard a private social-welfare system that ensures they stay rich, well-positioned, and well-connected even if they fail. For the rest, they provide mostly downside, displacement, and discomfort. A perfect metaphor for this is air travel. Well-connected people get discounted or free air travel, special lounges in the airport, and access to comfortable private aviation. The rest of us get Soviet-style service and capitalistic price volatility: the worst from both systems.” - Michael O. Church