For Certain Reasons

In my more conservative days in college, I was routinely annoyed by the attitude of my more liberal classmates toward "corporations."  They used the term as a monolithic catch-all of evil.  Faceless, soulless "corporations" were encroaching on our freedoms, destroying the environment, and ruining our democracy. 

"But not all corporations are 'evil,'" I would say.  "Many provide jobs and charitable donations.  In fact, I would guess that most of us owe some of our financial well-being, including the ability to afford college, to corporations."

Now as then, I still think that making a blanket statement about "corporations" is a bit wrong-headed.  There are good corporations and bad corporations.  I do, however, find an even larger fault with the corporate-worship of the right, and the Supreme Court ruling which basically granted personhood to corporations is just nuts.

For the past several years, I've heard the same type of blanket statements being made, only now they are coming from the right, and the word "corporations" has been replaced by "government."  The government is doing this, the government is doing that, the government is encroaching on our freedoms, etc.  The government is the catch-all for the evil in this country.  President Bush seemed to harbor this mistrust, as he railed against the ineptitude of "big government," then showed us precisely how to make government even larger and even more inept.  We need to remind the folks who hold this position that we are the government - all of us.  It's a representative democratic republic.  For all the wrong you think the government is doing, at the end of the day - or term, more accurately - you have the opportunity to change it. 

I hate needless bureaucracy as much as the next person, but the truth is that, whether we do so willingly or unaware, we all implicitly endorse a complicated system of economic and social relationships.  Unfortunately, maintaining that system takes people and paperwork.  I would much rather deal with these "hassles" than have to constantly worry about feeding and protecting my family.  Though our government sometimes functions badly, the answer is not to throw the whole thing away, but to calmly and rationally try to fix it.