Amerika

Big questions often go unanswered because they point to disturbing aspects of our reality that people fear they cannot change. Chief among these room-hogging elephants might be the question of why American corporations have shifted to the Left since the 0bama years.

In particular, they seem to give generously to diversity/anti-White causes, such as the billions pumped into Black Lives Matter which trickled down to Antifa and other rioters:

Companies and corporations pledged or contributed an astonishing $82.9 billion to the BLM movement and related causes. This includes more than $123 million to the BLM parent organizations directly. These figures, while shocking, likely underrepresent the true magnitude of the shakedown as some companies failed to make known their contributions, and many BLM organizations remain unknown.

How is BLM using the money? It is difficult to track, but some examples are likely demonstrative. The Global Network is investing tens of millions of dollars to support future operations, purchasing luxury real estate, engaging in nepotism, disbursing grants to dozens of BLM chapters and revolutionary organizations, and operating a PAC to “elect progressive community leaders, activists, and working-class candidates fighting for Black liberation.”

In theory — bear with me — corporations do only what is profitable for them. This includes cultivating goodwill and employing advertising, but generally not donating to radical causes. For that reason, there must be some financial incentive behind this.

We think, in our simplistic voter-ese, that lobbyists influence government, and clearly there is some evidence of that going on. But when government swings turns toward Keynesian ideas, they end up creating a state of permanent Keynesianism where business depends on government handouts.

In the Keynesian ideal, government “primes the pump” of business by dumping money onto consumers, who then spend it chaotically and pump up Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which turn causes growth to continue and the economy to keep moving forward.

This creates a situation where without growth, the economy is doomed even if it was fully functional, because growth offsets the burden of taxes which is distorting the market and causing it to underperform. As with most human error, the solution is the cause of the problem in a feedback loop.

The power of government to warp markets can be seen in mass spending and its effect on the growth of the economy:

The AJP and AFP will increase spending and tax expenditures by US$4.3 trillion over the next decade (about 18.7 percent of 2021 GDP), although the final size and composition of these plans will be subject to negotiation in the US Congress. The spending would be partly financed by raising taxes on corporate profits and high‑income households.

Overall, IMF staff estimate that the AJP and AFP will add a cumulative 5.3 percent to the level of US GDP during 2022-24, as spending ramps up over the next few years. This estimate takes into account how different types of government spending have different ‘fiscal multipliers,’ meaning that they affect the economy in distinct ways and to varying degrees. For example, cash transfers to households, such as the child tax credit, are likely to boost spending in the economy, while childcare support may also increase participation of parents in the labor force. Spending on the construction of physical infrastructure, research and development, and education may raise productivity over a longer horizon.

When government can add percentage points of GDP, a phenomenon known as consumerism results: the economy is driven by constant consumption of products and services funded in large part by government in order to keep the economy moving rapidly enough to have value.

Modern societies of the postwar variety adopted the mixed economy alongside liberal democracy:

Mixed Economy: in economics, a market system of resource allocation, commerce, and trade in which free markets coexist with government intervention. A mixed economy may emerge when a government intervenes to disrupt free markets by introducing state-owned enterprises (such as public health or education systems), regulations, subsidies, tariffs, and tax policies. Alternatively, a mixed economy can emerge when a socialist government makes exceptions to the rule of state ownership to capture economic benefits from private ownership and free market incentives. A combination of free market principles of private contracting and socialist principles of state ownership or planning is common to all mixed economies.

In developed Western economies between the late 1800s and early 1900s, most political economists and governments believed that social prosperity progressed best in economic systems composed of free markets, in which social and monetary order was protected by the actions of governmental and banking institutions. This belief was profoundly shaken, however, by the system’s twin catastrophic failures that came to be known as the Great Depression (1929–39)—failing first to prevent the global economic collapse and then failing to recover communities from the horrendous human tragedies of unemployment and poverty wrought by the collapse. Between 1933 and 1939 the New Deal, a series of interventionist legislation and government programs in the United States, was championed by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to head off social unrest caused by widespread unemployment during the Great Depression. In the mid-20th century many people agreed that the Great Depression arose from fundamental flaws in the free market theory of equilibrating supply and demand and that this meant that the free market alone would be incapable of recovering from another global economic downturn.

Social democratic programs that arose in continental Europe in the 20th century created coalitions of business interests with major social groups to improve social welfare without jettisoning private property and the market economy. This mixed economic approach included economic planning, high tariffs, guarantees of group rights, and social welfare programs.

Spending of this nature naturally leads to internationalism or globalism because the high taxes required to drive it raise the costs of labor in the host nation, leading its businesses to use overseas labor in order to stay competitive with the rest of the market.

In addition, it makes business entirely dependent on government, since government now occupies a large portion of the market and therefore lack of government participation counts as a significant loss. Businesses do what government indicates will be rewarded.

Consumer economies also reward the plurality of consumers, or lowest common denominator, and therefore stop designing products around quality and focus instead on lower price and novelty. “Planned obsolescence” kicks in at this point because there is no penalty for lower quality.

This creates a steady progress toward socializing industries or making them partially government-owned because of this dependency on government funding:

Now, what the authorities did over the weekend was absolutely profound. They guaranteed the deposits, all of them, at Silicon Valley Bank. And what that really means, and they won’t say it, and I’ll come back to that, what that really means is that they have guaranteed the entire deposit base of the U.S. financial system, the entire deposit base. Why? Because you can’t guarantee all the deposits in Silicon Valley Bank and then the next day say to the depositors, say at First Republic, sorry, yours aren’t guaranteed. Of course, they are.

And so this is a breathtaking step, which effectively nationalizes or federalizes the deposit base of the U.S. financial system.

Now, the authorities, including the White House, are not going to say that, because what I just said of course implies that they have just nationalized the banking system. And technically speaking, they haven’t. But in a broad sense, they are verging on that.

Another way to view this is that government becomes both a customer and shareholder to these businesses. Without government, they cannot get as much funding as their competitors; without serving the product government wants to buy, they have no protection from the government-created markets.

Mixed economies naturally tend toward having a few big monopoly companies in every industry. When costs go up because of taxation, smaller firms find it harder to get started and compete, so a few fat firms buy up the rest and soon you have a “Big Six” in every industry.

During the 0bama and Biden years, government has signaled hard that it will support pro-diversity companies and spends most of its budget on anti-poverty and anti-diversity programs, the former of which spend heavily on minorities

With an increasing emphasis on fiat currency, business risks getting left behind if it does not support the assumed new consumer base of diversity citizens and does not have government protection through bailouts and subsidies.

Under the Clinton, 0bama, and Biden regimes, the assumption that White Replacement is not just inevitable but good has been passed on to business like instructions from a centralized economy. They must support the New Americans or they will be left behind.

Consequently, business has become an enthusiastic advocate of all pro-minority initiatives, including Black Lives Matter, but this situation only exists because government, free stuff from government, and high taxes are distorting the otherwise free markets.

Tags: black lives matter, business, corporatism, entitlements, government