"Daddy, what's a 'guv-mint' ...?"

Summary:  "Democracy" is people cooperating to accomplish what they together wish to do -- that is, governing their own lives for their own benefit.  "Free Market Capitalism" is the money economy freely and efficiently governing itself for its own benefit, not necessarily the benefit of the people involved.  Democracy and Free Market Capitalism are not the same!  They are independent, and neither requires or implies the other.  In fact, it's useful and important to keep in mind the ways in which they are actually antithetical and opposed to each other.  If the two are in balance, neither is bad and each is helpful.  I believe our particular culture works best when each of these two governing systems has its own separate realm of power and control, and the two are in constant interaction as equal forces.  This is currently not the case in our country or in the world.



I seem to be pretty much in charge of my own life.  Within the constraints of my body (gradually changing), and within the constraints of habit and belief that I've slowly built for myself over my lifetime (by action or inaction), and within the constraints of living peaceably with other people (or trying to), I'm able to do what I want with what's around me.  I can think and say what I choose.  I can paint my walls and move my furniture.  I can buy something if I have the money (and often, more creatively, even if I don't).  I can fix my own sidewalk if it needs it, or find a way to hire someone to do it for me.

Now, if the shared sidewalk owned by our housing coop needs fixing, we can do that, too.  Not any one of us alone;  rather, we get together and look at it, and decide together what we want to do, and figure out together how to do it, and maybe even work together to do it ourselves, or else cooperate together to hire someone to do the repair and get them paid.  So in situations like that, our housing coop is also in charge of "its own life", just like I'm in charge of mine.  Within its own constraints, the coop manages its own affairs, and the cooperation of the people who comprise the coop is what makes that possible.  Together, we can do something big or important that no one of us could do alone -- such as making a decision that no one member alone should be allowed to make, or doing a job that no one person wants to pay for alone or has the skill or resources to do by themselves.  Together we can satisfy our needs where, for whatever reason, the desired outcome requires cooperation.

Similarly, if the street out in front of our houses needs repair, again, we can make that happen.  In this case, we call the organization that manages the process a "city";  but the principle is the same.  We're fixing the street together.  It's us doing it, because we want it done.  The wish and the need and the task are bigger than what a single person could or should do, so we put together a "city" structure in order to cooperate to get it done.  But even though the city does it, the street repair is "of, by and for" us.

That's guv-mint.  Government, I mean.  Democratic government, specifically:  we use it to do exactly what we all, together, want to do.  (The differently sized units of government -- city, state, federal, world -- each do what's appropriate for their own scale.)


And who are the "we"?  Just people.  ("Of the people, by the people, and for the people," right?)
And why do we want the exact things we want?  Because we're people.  Go figure.  We want nice lives.  We want to feel good.  We don't want to be hungry, cold, miserable, scared -- none of us do.  If it takes cooperation to do the big things that get us what we want, then we cooperate.  Streets, power lines, water, sewer, law enforcement, fire protection -- we've done these things together, and we enjoy the benefits of them together.


But don't we all also want enough food to eat?  for everybody?  Help when we're sick?  for everybody?  Air and water and food that doesn't actually make us sick? 
Don't we appreciate that wild animals exist?  want them to keep existing?  Don't we want to make sure we don't run out of fish to eat?  or our children don't?  Make sure that the oceans don't completely fill with plastic?  that we don't kill the pollinators, you know, the ones responsible for most of our food?
Don't we kind of want to keep Florida above water, a generation from now?  and also some low-lying islands in various places in the world where lots of people live?

Yes, we do want those things!  All of us do!  No matter who you ask, they're not going to say "kill 'em": let those islanders die, kill all those elephants, every last one of 'em, we want their ivory, kill the fish till there aren't any left for our kids.  This pesticide kills people, so what, we don't care, use it and let it kill us, kill us all.  We don't really know what this drug or genetic manipulation or chemical does, and in the long run and the big picture they usually eventually kill us, but we don't really care about life and living and health and such, so bring that stuff on…! 

People aren't like that. 

But corporations are.  They don't make life, they make money.  That's their job -- seriously (-think "articles of incorporation.")  Corporations are built of money, decide based on money, perform with money, see money, make money.  And money-based units are just as happy saying "kill 'em" as "make 'em happy":  it just simply depends on whether there's money to be made or money to be lost.   If there is such a thing as "corporate responsibility", meaning a conscience, it's the conscience of the people who temporarily run the corporation -- not the corporation itself, it's not built into the definition of incorporation.  Corporations don't have a conscience.  At the bottom line, real and honest "corporate responsibility" is by definition financial responsibility to owners and share holders, nothing more.

The people who run corporations are all doing their best.  But corporations they have will and purpose and momentum (and legal financial responsibility to owners), and good people can't always dependably make their corporations do the good things they want them to.

So corporations are not people.  They don't think or act like people, they're not motivated by human motivations, and they don't by nature automatically do what's good for people. They are not like people at all, and we shouldn't expect or trust them to act like people.

In fact, we can quickly and easily come up with a short list of the most visible corporate contributions that are in direct opposition to people's wishes and well being:  (1) global warming, exacerbated by actions of big oil companies performing ever more extreme extraction methods;  (2) overuse of pesticides (especially the certified dangerous glyphosate in "RoundUp") and petroleum based fertilizers, pushed by Bayer/Monsanto and friends;  (3) non-regulation and anti-regulation of development, production and promotion of genetically modified foods;  (4) the racism and classism, as well as counter-productive cruelty, of for-profit prisons;  (5) epidemics of new or unusual medical conditions apparently closely associated with poor quality and overly processed "corporate" food and hygiene products;  (6) loss of seed security and diversity caused by multinational seed companies;  (7) prescription drug disasters, encouraged by powerful pharmaceutical companies;  (8) deadly tobacco addiction and gun addiction, created by companies profiting from the causes of death;  (8) globally destabilizing high-tech high-profit national armament;  and on and on…


In general, we the real people are now in great need of protection from corporations.  And that's one of the purposes of real government:  we cooperate to protect ourselves from strong forces that intentionally or accidently cause us harm.   No wonder corporations don't like government:  if it were working, it would severely curtail their actions.


On the other hand, we might even understand that we are doing corporations themselves a disservice when, like parents of young children in a dysfunctional family, we let corporations run around with no supervision and then expect them to "be the adult" and take care of us…!



So exactly why are most of our "guv-mints", most of the time, serving the wishes of corporations and not people? 

Simply because we allow corporations to use their best tool -- money -- to influence government.  We all know the most obvious mechanisms:  lobbying, election advertising, "revolving door" jobs, privatization of government functions, corporate gifts and profit for elected officials.

But once elected corporate advocates have reached a critical mass within government, they start using other techniques to supplant the intended function of government (representing people) with their new purpose (representing corporations). 

Since corporations don't need government and don't want it, mass distrust in government is usually a factor in their favor.  And can we possibly see any government-created actions these days that are causing distrust in government…?  Shutdowns?  Privatization?  National debt?  Endless wars?  Legal problems of officials?  Spin control, marketing and grand-standing?  Lying?  Outrageous behavior?  Even the often-stated truism that on its face seems most neutral -- "both parties are at fault", "everybody in government is equally corrupt", "a pox on both their houses" -- is basically a pro-corporate stance:  its base message is that government itself is bad and we need less of it.  And in our current state of affairs, less government simply means more corporate freedom and resulting abuse.

Even the basic idea that government should be fiscally accountable, when taken to its extreme, is pretty dubious.  It's common to think that the bottom line for evaluating any action taken by government is whether that action is a good move financially.  But this idea commandeers democracy:  the most important and real needs of people are NOT based on money, and so government actions for the benefit of people should not be based primarily on money.  Remember, Democracy serves the needs of people, and Free Market Capitalism serves the needs of the money economy, and they should be expected to be in opposition.  Government should not be run or evaluated primarily by economics.

The most egregious example of this error is privatization of government functions.  From schools to prisons to armed forces, utilities to parks, postal service to health service to retirement income -- privatization is based on the idea that the free market economy can do government's job better than government:  that is, that corporations serve people better than people themselves do.  For all its admitted inefficiency, government is people;  corporations aren't.  (And let's review:  where exactly did the idea come from that inefficiency is a bad thing…?)