Trumpism Attacks the Roots of National Corruption
Power always corrupts. Relying on government to “conserve” the American Way will lead only to further disasters.
As the continuing and intensifying demonization of President Donald Trump and his supporters indicates, the political polarization of the American people is greater than ever. The two positions diverge fundamentally on the question of which element in the organization of society is more naturally destructive and subject to corruption: the private sector or the government.
Social thinker N. S. Lyons wrote a thoughtful article on public-private partnerships which has implications far beyond that specific type of enterprise and is pertinent to this basic issue because it deals directly with these two areas of endeavor and explores their relationship. Lyons notes that such collaborations between government and business have become “a trendy model of doing things,” and his article analyzes the logic and premises behind these activities, identifies who benefits from them and who usually does not, and explains how they have been and continue to be implemented in the United States and the rest of the world.
These partnerships exemplify the rapid increase of the economic and social system called corporatism, in the United States in the present century, which has been built on strong foundations laid in the twentieth. Corporatism is a process in which government uses private organizations to do its bidding. It is a way of concealing a government’s increasing accumulation of power.
The key point Lyons makes is that public-partnerships involve the central offense of all corporatist government activities: they are for the benefit of the government, and secondarily of the corporation (and the latter only to the extent necessary for gaining cooperation). They are not motivated primarily by a desire to benefit the public, except insofar as that is necessary to avert a voter backlash, which is generally accomplished by indicating (or merely pretending) that the partnership will produce a social good:
The key problem with the public-private partnership model is that, despite the word “public” appearing in the name, far too often in practice the actual public seem to be left out of the approach entirely. That is to say that the alignment of corporation and state that occurs through the public-private partnership model seems far too often to operate entirely outside the system of democratic governance. The interests of various “stakeholders”—corporations, NGOs, state bureaucracies, and numerous self-interested officials—may be consulted, but the demos notably is not.
As Lyons suggests, the “public-private partnership” model relies on a perversion of language, a bait-and-switch in which the words “public” and “private” are applied to things that they are not: a political regime and its captive but willing partners in business, respectively.
The malign influences do not stop at a nation’s borders. Lyons goes on to explain that “when multinational corporations and state bodies with supranational ambitions collude to pursue interests and objectives extending beyond the national level, the result is overwhelmingly likely to transgress and trample the interests of sovereign democratic polities. Which again far too often seems to be precisely the goal of such ventures.”
In that vein, Lyons notes that the global climate change agenda serves the interests of the current national regimes (more power; vastly more, in fact) and multinational corporations (subsidies, mandates to use their products, regulation to hamstring their competitors, etc.).
The same is true, Lyons writes, of “the censorship-industrial complex,” which Lyons describes as follows:
A vast, transnational, wholly unaccountable network of international bodies, government bureaucracies, technology and media companies, and zealously ideological NGOs now works tirelessly together to systematically remove and censor politically inconvenient information from the internet, manipulate search results, algorithmic feeds, and AI models, boost chosen propaganda narratives, blackmail advertisers and financial institutions into sidelining political adversaries, and, increasing, to justify the outright authoritarian criminalization of dissenting opinions—as we’ve seen recently in places like Britain, Brazil, and of course Brussels.
Notably, the goal of this furious public-private effort seems overwhelmingly to be to manipulate and silence growing public criticism of, you guessed it … elites’ anti-democratic use of public-private collusion on controversial issues like migration and climate change.
This scheme amounted to the Biden administration and other governments around the world working with social media companies to do the regimes’ (or, as some would argue, regime’s in the singular) dirty work in limiting what information people may send and receive. It is government “cooperation” with cronies to perform censorship that the government does not have the right or even the codified authority to engage in directly.
Lyons ultimately concedes that “some level of state-corporate cooperation on critical issues like industrial policy is both inevitable and potentially very beneficial,” if “done rightly.” I am much more skeptical about that. Lyons’s accurate description of these partnerships applies to much government regulation of business and the economy, and the premises behind them would certainly drive any industrial policy, as it always has.
This is the true way of things: people in government act in what they perceive to be their own interests just as surely as people in (ostensibly) private enterprises do. (This is the idea of public choice theory in economics.)
More government is not the answer. Power always corrupts. Relying on government to “conserve” the American Way will lead only to further disasters.
The George W. Bush administration, for example, entered the White House with lofty goals of restoring traditional values through federal government initiatives. Bush ended up giving us forever wars, the Patriot Act, and the Great Recession. None of the “normie” initiatives came about. What resulted was President Barack Obama. America’s politics, culture, and economy declined further.
To me, however, the issue is not largely a matter of consequences, dismal as they are when this fake “public” engages in sweetheart deals with “private” organizations, however artfully these agreements may be characterized in their particulars. My fundamental objection is that a regime has no right to take resources away from the real public and give them to cronies who will do their bidding—nor even to give that wealth to others of the real public except en masse through the direct production of truly public goods highly unlikely to be accomplished otherwise—such as roads, postal service (which is now obsolete anyway), defense, courts, and other strictly necessary activities of government.
Even within that category, most, by far, of the things governments do today are unnecessary and destructive.
Fundamentally, all public-private partnerships that are not for true public goods are unjustified trampling of the rights of the people.
Lyons’s analysis of these partnerships and their implications accords with the perspective I have outlined here:
In fact, often the advantage of the approach—as perceived by said stakeholders of both corporation and state—seems to be precisely that public-private partnership allows for a convenient end-run around the obstacle of the broader democratic process and any potential concerns that the voting public may hold. And, once they are shielded from democratic accountability, policies and priorities pursued through the public-private partnership model naturally become particularly ripe for rent seeking, regulatory capture, corruption, and abuse. Or, worse, there develops a gross distortion of basic interests between the “agents” involved and their true “owners”—that is, the public.
Limiting the federal government to its legitimate activities is the necessary first step in reversing this corruption of government and the nation’s institutions and system of private enterprise.
To take a practical example, I believe that a reduction of the concentration of power in extremely large corporations (nearly all of them multinational) operating in the United States could be accomplished much more elegantly, efficiently, economically, and beneficially through tax and regulatory reform that reduces the great advantages the federal government grants to limited liability corporations. Limited liability is an enormous gift from the government, for which corporations pay nothing except their taxes—which are often lower than what other people must pay.
To end crony capitalism on the national level, we should first try reducing the damage done by the federal government, and then see if additional, more direct measures are needed. I believe that such follow-up direct action will prove unnecessary, though I am willing to accept correction if the experiment indicates otherwise.
Note that this negative-liberty, damage-limitation, devolutionary approach to reforming the national government can be reconciled with President Donald Trump’s economic nationalism both intellectually and in practical terms. It requires only acknowledgement of the inherent philosophical dangers in conceiving that positive national-government action can achieve negative-liberty goals over the medium and long terms.
Only negative national-government action can do that: devolution of power to the states, localities, communities, families, and individuals.
The United States urgently needs such a devolution, and it is going to happen within a decade whether we want it or not, because the current and projected levels of national government (and especially debt) are not sustainable and are rapidly diminishing the government’s ability to function. The question is whether the devolution will be voluntary and somewhat orderly, or involuntary and catastrophic.
Trump is working for a voluntary devolution, though what he will be able to accomplish may very well prove insufficient. Trump clearly has some respect for notions of negative liberty, though his proposals often are designed to use government to achieve that. Perhaps that is the best we can hope for in the present state of things.
Democrats propose to accelerate the movement toward an involuntary devolution. They want to extend and expand the reach of the federal government, which would certainly bring on an unsolvable fiscal crisis in addition to further accelerating the public’s loss of trust in the national government.
We will not achieve a restoration of true (negative) liberty through government, especially the national government. The only way off the road to serfdom is through less government, especially on the national level at this point.
The least possible “positive” intervention by the federal government will be the best.