It's not all mercantilism. It's also simple monopoly control, and tail-wagging-the-dog government influence which feeds back into subsidies and other favours, but just as well into selective deregulation.
Added emphasis to point out where the actual problem arises.
Regulation in itself has no polarity; it can be necessary and good as surely as it can be exploitative. Sometimes it isn't immediately obvious which is which, but it isn't all one way or the other. Surely you don't damn all consumer protection, and all environmental protection, just because government is the only means available to the people (whose interests only the government, by way of the law, is able to represent at such levels) to enact and enforce such things.
Actually, yes. "Consumer protection" - outside of simple prevention-of-theft measures - is immediately going to be exploited by the biggest fish in the pond. It invites and nearly guarantees the "tail-wagging-the-dog government influence," precisely because it makes government influence essential to do your business.
Let's assume a perfectly innocent version of this, just to illustrate how the problem is all but inevitable: The biggest purveyor of packaged meat obviously has concerns when they learn that certain meat-packing plants are unsanitary by any standard. He even agrees with the government's decision to regulate this. Knowing that he maintains factories so clean he would happily eat steak tar-tar straight off the machines, he is determined to
help make sure that the regulations do the intended job. (After all, if Dilbert teaches us anything, bureaucrats who don't understand what they're managing create nothing but obstacles and often make problems
worse.)
So he lobbies - both in contributions to politicians who are engaged in this noble, consumer-protecting effort, and in "soft" money spent to help educate the public and create a PR press to assure people that this problem is fixable - and gets himself involved in the writing of the regulations, using his own factories' policies as a guide.
Now, all the way through, he's acting in good faith, and we can even assume all government actors are, as well. But you can already see where this could gain the
appearance of corruption. Coincidentally, when these new regulations go into place, his factories
already meet all standards because they
set it. His competitors - the big ones - have sudden expenses to bring things in line. Some may genuinely deserve this, because they were running the grotesqueries depicted in
The Jungle. Others may have had perfectly clean facilities, but their standards were
different from the biggest meat packer's, and so they also incur costs to come into compliance. Maybe it's just that the metrics are different (and, if they'd lobbied successfully to get on the board, our hypothetical "biggest meat packing mogul" would have had to spend money despite being established as perfectly clean), but still, they must spend money.
And then there are the local butchers, the small one-town factories, or the growing hub-village surrounded by ranches where a few intrepid ranchers' sons and daughters were going to build a new meat-packing plant. They were going to hand-clean everything every night; it is a small facility. Unfortunately, meeting the new regulations is not something that "hand-cleaning every night" will fix. "And so they shouldn't be in business!" you might argue, but they weren't going to run a filthy sty. Just different, smaller.
So, by the logic that they shouldn't be in business,
only those wealthy enough to afford the cost-of-entry artificially set by this regulation can even BEGIN to compete. And that may seem right and fair to you; if so, then you should approve of the current gaming industry; if you're "indie," you've no business being in business.
Now, let's remove the thought-experiment-imposed assumption that the mogul is ethical. I'm sure you can see where this becomes a problem.
And it's not because the mogul is engaged in capitalism: it's because there is an avenue whereby the mogul can legally exert force or threat thereof to crush competition. That legal use of force (or threat thereof) is the exclusive province of the government.
You want less corruption and "tail-wagging-the-dog influence" in the government? Restrict it to only having power to make and enforce laws that deny anybody the right to use force, threat, or guile to take something that a fully-informed owner thereof would not part with. (No burglary, pickpocketing, mugging, extortion rackets, or scams selling something other than what is represented.)
The government doesn't "represent the people" when it tries to pro-actively regulate HOW people may produce products. It is best handled by private concerns doing the investigation, and making their money off of selling their findings to the consumer. Why do we need "FDA-approved Meat?" The FDA could easily be one of possibly several private agencies, paid by the companies themselves (and in brutal competition, always looking for each other to give lax reviews so they can undermine their competitors' public trust), or even paid by consumers who subscribe to their newsletters/blogs/magazines/whatever in the interest of buying "the safest meat" or what-have-you.
Regulation is needless at that point (beyond "you're going to jail if you promote working conditions that lead to people getting hurt or dying, and it can be shown to be criminal negligence"). Consumers have professionals who are doing the deep-level investigations for them, and those professionals will investigate each other, as well. The professionals are discouraged from lying to the consumer because, when caught, they will be ruined (as nobody will trust them and thus their rating system will be worthless). The industry is encouraged to live up to the best standards they can, because consumers look for good ratings from those private agencies.
And the corruption you likely fear? The idea that these agencies would actually take bribes from the industry to lie about its cleanliness and other standards? That already happens with the government regulatory agencies, but there's no recourse. Nobody else is looking into it. Government agencies are made of people just like private ones; government ones just also have no competition, and the legal power to use force against you if you do not comply. And if they decide you're not in compliance for any reason (say, trying to call them out on corruption), they can abuse that power to use force to shut you up.
You argue as if business -- publicly traded corporations in particular -- can do no wrong outside the use and abuse of government, when in reality the publicly traded corporation can not only do wrong, but faces far less punitive consequence even when caught clearly breaking the law.
What do you think a "publicly-traded corporation" is? It's made of people. Do we have far too many stockholders in such companies who are wholly disinterested in the actual running of their property? Yes. But if you think that getting people together to beg (or command) the government to regulate them is doable, why do you think it
not doable to rally the shareholders against a company that is actively failing to serve their interests (or, worse, as they're often also customers of the same, is abusing them)?
The truth is, there are power-brokers who
want to use you to get the government more power over the private sector. No, this isn't conspiracy; this is simply the government officials and those already in bed in crony "capitalist" - i.e. mercantilist - practices using their power of PR to convince people to cede them more power. If the same PR mechanisms were used to encourage stockholders in publicly-traded companies to demand compliance from the companies they own, the companies would change much faster and more responsively as new leadership was hired by said shareholders. But that empowers the individual people and doesn't kill off the competition of the power-brokers. It's something you and I need to push for, along with pushing for greater personal awareness on an individual level. It's hard work managing one's own fate, rather than turning it over to an all-powerful entity, but it's more effective and worth it.
It is not possible to jail a corporate entity. The CEO is a dispensable and replaceable appendage (a mere employee acting at the behest of the remote and liability-free investors), as is even the corporate entity's name and legal identity. If a corporate identity is ever damaged significantly to threaten it's survival, it can morph, merge, re-brand itself, and continue on as if it were a perfectly respectable citizen, rather than a psychopathic felon.
CEOs who actively engage in criminal activity can and are punished. Less so in today's highly regulated environment, because the CEOs of the biggest groups are often the ones most in bed with the government (conflating regulation and enforcement of genuinely needed laws and leading to cronyism protecting the criminals from things they could never get away with without it).
The "liability-free" shareholders still have liability in the form of their ownership in the company. And, again, are you saying that many of us on these very boards are evil corporate masters because we own stock in publicly-traded companies? No, our largest guilt is in assuming there's nothing we can do, or that it's too much work, when in reality, if we educate ourselves and push our fellow shareholders to do the same - if we can initiate a culture shift away from the thought that government solves our problems towards a thought that we can solve our problems and that it's our responsibility to do so - we will create a better situation overall. People, individuals, will be educated on matters of concern and tangentially informed on matters peripheral. And then grass-roots efforts alone will push the "corporate giants" to better behavior as the stockholders don't tolerate the company they own acting irresponsibly with their money, or worse, with their health as consumers of said companies' products.
These are all things that no human has the power to do. If it is all the government to blame, it is because corporate personhood should never have been established.
Nonsense. Everything "corporations" do is something people can do. Same with the government. The government is the body with exclusive legal right to use force to compel behavior. It should not be given broader areas in which it can do so, because that encourages the worst aspects of humanity to seek control of it. It encourages the corrupt union of private interests with government power, and removes the equality under the law that is promoted when you don't need "industry experts" to tell you how best to regulate their industry.
I'm no anarchist; government has its place and its purpose. Without it, we devolve into despotism as
anybody can use force to take whatever they want. But its purpose is to prevent
that, and little to nothing more. When it gets involved elsewhere, the temptation of its exclusive legal right to use force to compel obedience becomes too great, and corrupt or corruptible people gravitate towards it.
Corrupt or corruptible people may achieve power in private industry, in corporations or as moguls who own private enterprises. But without the ability to use force to compel obedience and to forbid competition, their ability to act on their corrupt impulses is curtailed. Separate the ability to dictate
how business is run from the ability to use legal force to compel obedience, and the separation of powers creates a competitive environment such that even the corrupt at both ends are policing each other to prevent exploitation of their power, lest it be used against them. Unite them through the power to regulate being combined with the need for experts to write the regulations, and they reinforce each others' corrupt power against the "little guy."
