I believe that over the history of the United State
individualism has been gradually replaced by collectivism in corporations, education,
government and so forth. I believe that is circumstantial rather than
necessary, and that the concentration of social power is an evolved fact that
tends to harm human society as well as help if. I read Sartre's 'Critique of
Dialectical Reason' long ago and have since viewed human social organization
rather more phenomenally and existentially. One might find a pre-determinism
element in Christian Church history however I think even the ecclesiatic
organizations are largely gone off course without much of the right priesthood
of believers aspect they should have.
These uncorrected social formations occasional are
terminated by revolt or war yet I think the phenomena of social scale remains
even following major disasters such as World War Two. The Zaibatsu were taken
under the wing of the McArthur administration and corrected with the feudal
power ended as well as the religious power of the Emperor yet the size of
Japanese corporations grew even so as did the government numbers with
democracy. It is a paradox that U.S. democracy has grown so large with
concentrated power for-itself tied into granting contracts to preferred
corporate bidders or non-bidding contractors as on occasion happened with
Haliburton during the Iraq nation rebuilding regime.
American history was fundamentally different from that of
many other nations because it started later and with more enlightened
leadership. Unfortunately that advantage of individual enterprise and
leadership is being subsumed in the corporate greed expansion uncorrected.
One is aware of the European and Chinese history of
imperialism of one sort or another, or that of Ghengis Khan and the Mongol
hordes ranging across Eurasia. The history of the Middle East and of Mesopotamia
from Sargon of Assyria to Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon and of ancient Egypt are
examples of countries without a foundation of free enterprise. The imperial
characteristic of human society is perennial and re-emerges in uncorrected
democratic dynamics with problems of scal and failures of enlightened
government public leadership.
In the first century of the existence of the United States
land and work for-oneself was more liberally available than today. In 1988 I
briefly held a 20-acre federal homestead tract on the Kantishna River north of
Mt. McKinley. I could afford remote survey costs and let it go. The program
closed down for good shortly thereafter.
Earlier in U.S. history land for homesteading was rather
plentiful, and because works wasn't concentrated in corporate control, and
because corporations if they existed at all were of far smaller scale
individual free enterprises were the norm. Sure large projects and companies
came to exist from Salt Works in New York to the construction of the Erie
Canal, yet the preponderance of individual enterprises and smallholdings was
more of a common fact than today.
One might consider the history of U.S. Grant after he quit
the Army in Eureka California because he wanted to go home to Illinois to be
with his wife whom he'd seen little enough during the prior years in which he
was passed over for promotion. Although he was finally made Captain he'd
already sent in his resignation.
Grant worked in Missouri on his own ranch-farm/wooded
property cutting wood for-himself to try and survive for a couple years. There
was much unemployment back then in the countryside and people found work and
life style with their own free effort without waiting to be hired by the large
global corporations.
Grant struggled to feed himself and his family and finally
had to go to work for his father-in-law as a hardware store clerk in Illinois I
seem to remember. It was the outbreak of the Civil War and his advancement as a
West Point Grad and history as a quartermaster that led the Governor to appoint
Grant leader of the Illinois National Guard and he made the most of his
opportunities before taking a commission in the regular Army.
Sure we know about Andrew Jackson's desire to get a fair
trading status on the commodities of the Tennessee River with 'globalists' of
New York, or of the effort of Ben Ficklin to build a southern route for a
trans-continental railroad before the Civil War through Texas to replace the
Butterfield Stage line, yet the concentration of wealth in global corporations
and it's volatility as in Diamond's Chase 6 billion dollar gamble and loss was
not anywhere near as common.
The phenomenality of large corporate networking has
increased far from the days when the British Hudson's Bay Company and the East
India Company were the closest things to large corporations that existed. Its
simply a matter of scale and domination of the geography and marketplace by the
corporate globalist world that displaces the free enterprise of the majority
reducing it to a vassilized, dependent status upon corporate patronage.
The word 'ret' in the earliest Egyptian language use meant
'red'. Rhett Butler as a symbol for the old south and of the 'greed is good'
nature of the slave trade was a character is a liberal tract on the evils of
human nature. 'Ret' appeared during the lead up to the complex social
allegiance choices between fascism and socialism. Free enterprise was always
the right choice-a free enterprise at a human scale within a governed
context-yet politically people tended to select the most extreme dysjunctive
examples because it is simpler to be rhetorically dogmatic rather than
philosophical for most.
Not only did Eisenhower warn of the danger of the military
industrial complex even during an era of cold war arms escalations that would
eventually lead to one million times the blast power of the Hiroshima device
being jointly held between the Soviet Union and The United States, the Vietnam
War and of L.B.J. and Secretary of Defense McNam(era) became a kind of
corporate McDonald's trillions and trillions of burgers sold in defense
procurements to Americans for a series of wars that helped concentrate wealth.
In some of the grand scale of corporate globalism today
there are vast planetary empires of networked businesses interfaced with
special government projects and politicians kickbacking wealth as a phenomenon
displacing alternative free enterprise by the majority of Americans. As wealth
and power are concentrated free enterprise inventiveness commensurately
declines amidst the polity. There are very few goods or services produced today
that could not perhaps be duplicated or developed better with smaller
corporations in a more competitive setting.
Corporate franchise feudalism with the Earth spaces
controlled by powerful with a variegated yet syncopated concentration of wealth
and power in an out of government means renting the right to exist to a
degraded humanity seems to be the most likely course of development today. I
believe its good to advocate for the taming of the corporate monstrosities to
reinforce a more competitive and inventive milieu of free enterprise.
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