The Corporate Begging Bowl

For a number of years I was interested and cross about the rhetoric of free enterprise which lionised libertarian ethics yet are parasitic on morality. Then I read David Jenkin's well researched lay account of the flaws in capitalist ideology and practice which said similar things and pointed out that the parasitism extends to infrastructure and even financial systems. In other words, while insisting everyone pays their way, the world's richest corporations get everyone else to pay theirs, including future generations. This article does a nice job of contextualising that kind of insight in the UK economy and then globalises:

There is nothing unusual about these handouts for private companies. In his book Peverse Subsidies, published in 2001, Professor Norman Myers estimates that when you add the direct payments US corporations receive to the wider costs they oblige society to carry, you come up with a figure of $2.6 trillion, or roughly five times as much as the profits they make(8). As well as the $362 billion the OECD countries were paying for farming when his book was published (or rather, as we have seen, for activities masquerading as farming) they were shelling out some $71 billion on fossil fuels and nuclear power and a staggering $1.1 trillion on road transport. Worldwide, governments pay companies $25bn a year to destroy the earth’s fisheries, and $14bn to wreck our forests.

Now I'm not against trade and self reliance or manufacture and so forth, but I am against an ideology that masquerades as fair, self-reliant and rewarding enterprise when it is used as a masque to hide the exact opposite taking place servicing the world's most powerful and wealthy at the expense of the poor, the environment and the future. And no, I'm not advocating socialism, just fairness.
George Monbiot � The Corporate Begging Bowl: Filed in: externalities, subsidies, trade, environment, capitalism, business