We're Batteries
Capitalism requires consent: you make X, you sell it for Y price, and a consumer wants to buy X at Y price because X is beneficial to him. The requirement that a capitalist has to convince a consumer to make a sale incentivizes productivity, and meets human needs to a degree unprecedented in the history of the world. But how much of 21st-century corporate capitalism is capitalism, and where are corporations headed? And what do we do about it?
As Alex Berenson noted this morning, the founders of the pharmaceutical company Moderna, a young corporation in historical terms, have made their debut on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. It’s a success for the free market, in the sense that you have to consume one of their products or the government will punish you.
About that government punishment for not obeying vaccine mandates: your private sector employer performs the act of punishment by firing you, or a restaurant performs the act of punishment by refusing to feed you, or a doctor performs the act of punishment by refusing to provide you with medical treatment, or, soon, an airline performs the act of punishment by refusing to allow you to travel. It’s a governmental act executed by private actors. It’s gleichschaltung; it’s the marriage of state power and the increasingly notional private sector. Is Moderna making a product you must consume on the threat of state-coordinated punishment capitalism?
Remember the moment, eleven years ago, when Senator Tom Coburn asked the Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan this question in the wake of Obamacare’s individual mandate to buy health insurance: “If I wanted to sponsor a bill, and it said, Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day, and I got it through Congress, and it’s now the law of the land. Gotta do it. Does that violate the Commerce Clause?”
Kagan found the question absurd – imagine government telling Americans what they have to put in their bodies! – and declined to locate a constitutional issue in Coburn’s hypothetical mandate: “Sounds like a dumb law…But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from the question of whether it’s constitutional. And I think the courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.”
This is where we are, now: the Pfizer-Moderna broccoli trust sells you broccoli that you have to eat, because the government says that it’s good for you, while senators unabashedly direct Amazon on the topic of which books they may or may not sell, and fantasize out loud about the creation of a regulatory agency that will decide what speech Facebook may allow. Click on the link for that letter to Amazon: Senator Elizabeth Warren warns a private company that she finds them “either unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products.” She does not hesitate to announce, as a government official, that she has determined which products are appropriate to sell. The operation of free markets, you see.
There’s a much heavier lift to get to the core of what I suspect is happening, and I’ll be attempting that heavy lift in sequence over the months, and probably years, to come. But what I think is happening is the commodification of existence, the streamlining of the market in human minds. The parallel employment and social media purges of political wrongthinkers and the unvaxxed look to me like an effort to produce reliable producer-consumer-citizens, populations that can be managed: voting reliably, buying reliably, consuming reliably, behaving predictably. Fruit ripe to be juiced, on schedule and through predictable processes. The purges belong in the context of data mining and predictive consumer analysis, and equally with the growing importance of data operations in the dismal product being sold by political consultants.
In practice, this means that a Senator Kirsten Gillibrand calling for the regulation of Facebook is on Facebook’s side. She’s trying to smooth their product and their market, to erect barriers to entry for competitors, to lock in a dominant social media producer’s place in the online landscape, and to free a private company from the burden of policing content and being responsible to users, advertisers, and shareholders.
The world of government mandates and regulatory barriers works for wannabe oligarchs. It traps their customers, steers their behavior, and renders “markets” stale and steady. Take a guess how Gillibrand’s fantasy Data Protection Agency would treat Twitter – and how it would treat Gab.
That’s where we’re headed. And to a significant degree, that’s where we already are.
People on the right have been skeptical of growing government power, particularly the centralized power of the federal administrative state, and admirers of business and the private sector; people on the left are increasingly supportive of government power, even to the point of abandoning a traditional skepticism of the national security state, and have long been critics of robber barons and big business. If big business and central government are partners in a coordinated oligarchy, what does the left-right distinction mean?
To be continued.