Among conservatives, there are those who like to sneer at the Affordable Care Act provision allowing adults to stay on their parents’ health-insurance plans until they are pushing 30, but who also are eager to see corporations act — to see them forced to act — in loco parentis, providing employees not only with health insurance but also child care, paid parental leave, and other benefits. Apparently, being dependent on your family is evidence of a moral defect, while being dependent on an employer is the height of liberty. There are a lot of us living in company towns without being quite aware of the fact.
Among progressives, the same people who bewail the influence of corporations on cultural and political life also propose to entrench the social role of big businesses by making individual Americans more dependent on them for everything from health care to retirement income. Senator Warren’s schemes aimed at punishing those who might seek to escape from her utopia (her proposed 40 percent wealth tax on certain emigrants) or resist it in their boardrooms (her proposal to dictate to corporations the composition of their boards and control their political activities) are what you get when the company-town model meets mid-20th-century authoritarianism: the company town you can’t leave.
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[T]he politics of money-laundering. Mandatory corporate paternalism is a good way to provide welfare benefits without enduring the unpleasantness of taking responsibility for their cost. Senator Snout (R., Snoutopia) wants to confer certain benefits on the hardworking folks back in Snouttown, but he is a good fiscal conservative, meaning that he will avoid, if it is at all possible, honestly accounting for his spending by putting the appropriations into the budget or — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — passing a tax to pay for those benefits. Instead, he will pass a law mandating that these benefits be provided by someone else, typically an employer. That is a happy outcome for Senator Snout: He gets to take credit for the benefits, the outlay ends up on somebody else’s budget while he “holds the line” on spending, and the revenue is provided by corporations in their role as national collectors of taxes both direct and indirect. Instead of blaming Senator Snout for higher taxes, those negatively affected instead blame greedy capitalists for the higher prices that are eating into their stagnant wages. Big businesses that have a lot of negotiating power can pass along costs to smaller businesses with less negotiating power, to workers, and, in some cases, to consumers. And if a few smaller businesses get crushed in the stampede, well, here’s Senator Rubio with a bracing lecture on economic patriotism and a fresh dish of subsidies.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
