Editor’s Note: Originally published at The Roots of Liberty August 2015. Lightly edited.
If I were to describe my work status nowadays, it would most succinctly be dubbed “semi-retired.” I have work that I must do, but it only occupies a couple hours a day and a couple days a week. I have work that I choose to do, that advances my business interests, and that tacks on a few more hours a week. This leaves me time for other pursuits. This blog is one of them, and while I publish on a regular schedule, it’s not a full-time gig. Being a homeowner generates its own workload, I’ve adopted a regular exercise schedule, and I dabble in a couple hobbies. Add it all together, and my days do fill up rather nicely. Still, there’s time for entertainment, and in this day of DVRs, Netflix and its clones, and countless television channels and content producers, there’s plenty of entertainment to choose from.
I recently gave a series called Mr. Robot a try. It launched this year on USA network, and it’s the story of a young computer hacker and his involvement with some sort of resistance movement. The bad guy in the series is a multinational conglomerate called E Corp. The main character, who voice-over narrates the story, calls it “Evil Corp.”
A couple years back, I caught up with an old friend from high school, who was in town for a conference. Since he’s a physician and has libertarian tendencies, the topic of conversation turned to Obamacare and health insurance. During that conversation, he observed that insurance companies are evil. Not having dealt with them from his quarters, I wasn’t about to dispute his view.
Big corporations are evil is not an uncommon opinion, and there are certainly enough examples and anecdotal evidence to support the opinion. Lets set aside the question as to whether such a broad categorization is fair, and stipulate that they are, in fact, evil. What of it? What do we do?
The common answer is to what do we do is something. As in… Someone oughta do something. As in… the government should protect us from the evil that corporations do. As in… legislate, regulate, monitor, punish.
And that’s what government purports to do, for well over a century in this country.
How’s that worked out? Government spending as a percentage of GDP is, with the exception of the WWII years, at an all-time high. Surely, somewhere in all that spending, must be sufficient anti-evil activity to protect us from Evil Corp. Listen to the news, though, and you’ll hear that corporate evil is running free and unchecked throughout our nation and the world. The banks are evil, the finance houses are evil, Big Oil are evil, the big agricultural companies are evil, Big Pharma is evil, the insurance companies are evil, the music companies are evil, heck, even Disney is evil. But, if 40% of the nation’s GDP is government spending, shouldn’t there be sufficient force to balance out the evil?
What if – gasp! – government is also evil?
Republicans think Democrats are evil. Democrats think Republicans are evil. Liberals think conservatives are evil. Conservatives think liberals are evil. Christians think atheists are evil. Atheists think Christians are evil. Warmists think deniers are evil. Deniers think warmists are evil. Feminists think men are evil. Men think feminists are evil. Statists think libertarians are evil. Libertarians think all not-libertarians are evil.
Surely, not everyone can be evil. But, who’s not evil? Superman and Captain America come to mind. Unfortunately, they’re comic book characters. They’re fictional, they’re constructs, they’re ideals. Back to the real world we go. Yes, there are individuals who are not evil, and individuals who are good and do good. We look to them as role models, we extol them, we admire them, we hold hope that everyone can be like them. And, sometimes, we empower them. But, if we institutionalize power and authority based on the expectation that a particular good person will do good, what happens if that person fails, or when that person moves on and another assumes that institutionalized position of power and authority? The evil is no longer held in check.
What do all those evils have in common? They all involve people. Or, more specifically, people consciously committing bad acts. Unfortunately the remedy that’s often presumed as a counterbalance (i.e. Government counteracting Evil Corp) also involves people, and those people must consciously commit good acts. Surely, at least some of those people in the counterbalance are not evil, right? Some of them must be Good Guys doing Good Things to counter Evil Corp, right? Well, if so, they’re certainly not effective. If nearly half the nation’s GDP is government, and yet evil continues to flourish, government’s anti-evil mojo isn’t working. Is this ineffectiveness or is this evil? Just as we can trot out a long list of Evil Corps, we can trot out a long list of Evil Politicians. Why would we try and give government a bye when assigning evilness? Why, when the evils perpetrated by governments dwarf the worst predations of Evil Corp, do we continue to think that government is the way to protect us from Evil Corp?
What are we to do, then? Are we doomed to being beset on all sides by evil, in perpetuity? Where can we find not-evil? The answer lies within the notion of conscious action. Feedback:
the modification or control of a process or system by its results or effects
is what we look for to counter Evil Corp. Feedback can be active or passive in nature. Someone in government taking action to counter Evil Corp’s action qualifies as active feedback. Active feedback can fail if the actor acts ineffectively, or makes a bad decision, or doesn’t act, or acts evilly himself. Passive feedback, on the other hand, requires no consciousness guiding the response – the system automatically reacts to an undesired act in a fashion that counterbalances it. The answer to countering Evil Corp lies not via the active hand of government, but via the passive invisible hand of the free market.
Free markets are aggregates of active participants, each making good or bad decisions or no decisions are all, and each operating somewhere on the good-evil spectrum. It is these aggregates that counterbalance and punish Evil Corp. They do so passively, with no need for someone in a position of power and authority to act with knowledge, wisdom and goodness. Free markets, having no consciousness, are neither good nor evil. They are indifferent. And, they are relentless, as inevitable as the tide, and utterly lacking in agenda or conflict of interest. Were this not true, there wouldn’t be endless effort on the part of Evil Corp to subvert market forces by lobbying government and donating to politicians. Evil Corp fears market forces far more than it fears Big Government. Big Government can be bought, subverted or fooled, and it routinely is. Free markets cannot. In fact, if we look at the evils that Evil Corp perpetrates, we’ll often find government protection or complicity in the mix.
None of this says that free markets are perfect, or the complete antidote to Evil Corp. They’re not. Nothing is. There is no system in the world that can perfectly cover every bad intent or guard against every bad act. Even Superman cannot be everywhere at once. Christopher Reeve couldn’t stop both of Lex Luthor’s missiles, and ended up having to break his father’s rules and reverse time to bring Lois Lane back from the dead. But free markets are the only true antidote to Evil Corp. Unfettered competition, robust property rights and a court system to enforce contracts are what enable the aggregate forces that millions of actors in the free market, each acting in his or her own self interest, to deter and punish Evil Corp. When markets are free, Evil Corp is less evil.
Mr. Robot had a number of things going for it, and engaged me for the first few episodes, but it ultimately didn’t hook me deeply enough to keep watching. But, I must say, Evil Corp has a nice ring to it. Nice enough to inspire 1400 words or so.