From Of Two Minds:
Truth is the first victim of the Company Store's dominance.
My view of the Status Quo as a neocolonial, neofeudal arrangement is
succinctly captured by correspondent D.C.'s description of
state-corporate capitalism: the Company Store.
In the plantation model (i.e. any economic setting dominated by a
primary corporate employer and/or the state), almost everyone works for
the company, and is beholden to the company for their livelihood and
security.
In exchange for this neofeudal (often described as paternal) security,
employees must shop at the company store, which maintains a
near-monopoly (i.e. competition is limited because the company owns the
land and/or colludes with local government) as a means of extracting
monopoly prices.
The company store extends credit to employees (in the modern version,
student loans take the place of employee credit), and since prices are
kept artificially high and wages are kept stagnant, the employees never
manage to pay off their debts at the company store.
This describes the core dynamic in our state-corporate system. The state-corporate Status Quo suppresses competition (few other stores are allowed in town), usually by indirect means: high
land leases, high fees for doing business in town, mountains of absurd regulations no small businesses can afford to meet, etc.
In state-corporate capitalism, small business thus poses a threat to
the monopolistic partnership of the government and dominant
corporations. Small businesses that try to meet all the regulations
and pay all the fees and taxes are either marginalized or driven out of
business by the high overhead.
But those that live in the nooks and crannies between the major players
pose a threat to the guaranteed profits of the state-corporate Status
Quo. As a result, despite the propaganda about how the state supports
small business, the real agenda is to marginalize small business in
every way possible so the small-business sector can never gain enough
political weight to challenge the corporate interests and their
partners, the state fiefdoms.
Here is D.C.'s gloves-off, truth-to-power commentary:
The decline of small businesses serves the same purpose as continuous, compound monetary
inflation: Both keep everyone on "company property" buying at the "company store."
Inflation means that people can't save in a medium that is not ready-to-be-seized (by
the IRS, any Federal court, any creditor like a hospital, i.e. by any minion of the
central state Corporation). If people could save honest money "under the mattress"
without continuous erosion, then some of their wealth might remain fully private.
We can't have fully private wealth. The Company must always be able to take what the
Company deems its fair share, or take whatever payments the Company Store levies
(since people are largely compelled to purchase their medical services, for instance,
from the CS and prices are not marked on the shelf...only assessed in arrears).....MORE
When I read stuff like this I almost always mentally add that line at the end of Churchill's "
Finest Hour" speech:
"...all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new
Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights
of perverted science..."
