Borrowing from John Ralston Saul, some excellent economist, and some excellent and scholarly work on the late Roman Empire, we bring you the first in a collective-noun of Panchrestons concerning The Corporate State.
Large corporations are inefficient. That's not news. They don't really or fully satisfy the requirements of a modern 'post industrial' economy, they are maladaptive but present everywhere. They can't really innovate to adapt to change, so they parasitize smaller, more innovative organisations - buying them, sucking out the creative juice, and discarding them in a later 'restructure.'
Large corporations don't create, they market (although some of them are so large they create their own weather.) If there's any way to do it, they collude and monopolise and charge rent. Increasingly, they are given wide latitude to do this, even though it is considered to be bad for the 'conomy.
Large corporations don't follow the law, they create it. They lobby continually and if that fails they finance attack ads.
Small and Medium Enterprises are far more agile and innovative, they employ more people, they get stuff done. But SMEs aren't really fostered by the state.
How come?
I think some insight may be gained by considering this fascinating fact: Tax Recovery Rates from employees of corporations runs over 90%, but for independent contractors it runs at around 30%. (cite excellent economist here.)
Emperor Constantine became a Christian, reportedly because he saw a miraculous vision which vouchsafed him victory in battle. It was a cross, so he said, and who am I to gainsay that? People see crosses, and arches, and UFOs everywhere. Maybe he was having a migraine.
Coincidentally, at the time Constantine became a Christian, and declared it the official state religion, he had recently reunited the Roman Empire, which had been bifurcated with an Augustus in the East and one in the West. It wasn't easy to control the empire, it was very difficult to collect taxes over such a wide geographic area with the social organisation of the time.
Enter the Bishops. They had a nice efficient decentralised tithe-collection system, they had efficient hierarchal comms, they could collect taxes for Constantine. The price was wholesale conversion, and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion.
Not bad, huh? From being sacrificed as atheists (they didn't believe in enough gods) to holding the imperial purse strings.
This kind of strange inversion, I think, has occurred in the lifetimes of some living today. Was a time when corporations were aggregations of human beings, formed to get something done then to distribute their earnings and dissolve. A convenient way to collect enough capital to cooperate on big jobs. That was the Joint Stock Corporation. Nice concept. Then corporate personhood was surreptitiously inserted into the law.
So corporations could sue, be sued, own property in their own right, generate new corporations, own them as property, avoid taxation on those things needed for a corporation to survive, and most importantly: live forever. Wow. Where do I get a gig like that? Under US law, it's not legal to discriminate against a corporation, 14th amendment or something.
From being the representative of a collection of persons, corporations became persons collecting people for their own ends.
John Ralston Saul said that modern state leaders changed their attire from military uniform to business suit as economic power became more important than military power.
Summary: It is my considered opinion that the State colludes with the Corporation because otherwise it would be unable to collect taxes, anything but corporate serfdom having fallen into disfavour a couple of hundred years ago.
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