Right-Wing and Left-Wing ParanoiaRight Wing (in America) means favoring private property, individual rights (private enclaves of freedom for peaceful people), free markets, and constitutional limitations on government. In such a system people would be free to satisfy their needs and wants through private alternatives offered by selfish-motivated (profit-seeking and loss-avoiding) businesspeople in the marketplace.
Left Wing means opposition to private property and the desire for the government to take over and control everything (at least the major industries) in one big government monopoly. Under such a system, people have to depend on one monopoly source for the things they need. Private alternative sources, if they exist at all, only exist as "black" (illegal) markets run by criminals.
Right-Wing Paranoia - fear of Big Government abuse of power and tyranny.
Left-Wing Paranoia - fear of corporations and Big Business abuse of power and exploitation.
The Left's phobia seems excessive or misplaced altogether. Neither corporations nor any other business in the market can actually force (use violence on) people to make us deal with them, buy from them, or work for them. It's all by voluntary choice and consensual contract. Whatever their faults, businesses -- even big corporations -- have to rely on persuasion -- advertising, marketing, attractive alternative pricing, new products, fancy packaging, etc, not coercion.
As long as a businessman confines his behavior to purely market means (non-violent persuasion), no one is forced at the point of a gun to deal with him. Any coercive power a corporation may have comes from its association with or privileges from . . . . ta-da! . . . interventionist government (political statism)! The source of such abuse is therefore not the market, but interventionist political government -- Big Government with the unjust authority to take from some and intervene to dish out goodies and privileges to others, and is made possible only when government is permitted to go beyond its proper role of protecting peaceful citizens' rights by using its own powers of coercion to combat the use or threat of coericon by criminals and foreign aggressors.
The government cannot give anybody anything without taking it from somebody -- and it almost always uses the force of taxation or some other form of coercive intervention to do that. When any agency of government is permitted to do this -- to positively intervene in peaceful peoples' lives by taking away what belongs to some and giving it to others -- it is violating the rights of peaceful people and is acting improperly, for it is doing what an ordinary citizen cannot do without himself committing a crime by violating the rights of others.
Ordinary citizens have the right to use violent force to defend their lives, families, and properties from the violence of criminals; so, it is legitimate and proper for people to organize together to form a government to perform this crucial function in society. But, by the same token, no ordinary citizen has any legitimate right to use violent force ("coercion") to violate the rights of other peaceful citizens. And neither does the government. Put another way: crime is no less wrong when done "legally" by government officials or by corporations empowered by special privileges gained from government intervention (regulations, taxes, subsidies, controls, tariffs, etc.) coercively imposed on the other people in society.
So, it seems to me, if one really wants to keep business abuse of power at bay, one should advocate a policy of laissez faire, viz., allowing anything that's peaceful (non-violent and non-fraudulent) but having the government come down on all fours on criminals and foreign aggressors who pose a threat to peaceful people.
Laissez faire means extending the First Amendment's "disestablishment clause" (with government taking no sides and giving no privileges to any church or sect) to all market (i.e., non-violent) activities. Despite its imperfect application, religious disestablishmentarianism has worked well in the U.S., and is a major reason why America was spared the bloody religious wars that took place in Europe in past centuries.
If government is made to concentrate on its proper role of using its powers to combat crime instead of trying to regulate peaceful peoples' lives or run their businesses for them, or spend their earnings for them -- and allow peaceful business competition as we now successfully allow peaceful religious competition -- that would be a policy of laissez faire and would result in maximum freedom for peaceful adult people.
It seems to me the Right's concern about the growth of Big Government is much more justified and on-target than the Left's paranoia about big (or little) business. Businessmen are driven by the selfish desire for profit and the avoidance of losses, and they can only become wealthy by producing something that other people want and for which they are willing to pay a price that will more than cover the costs of producing it.
Mrs. Fields may charge a dollar a cookie -- but nobody is forced to buy the cookie. If somebody does buy the cookie, it is because they want the cookie more than the dollar they are giving in exchange for it. No violence is involved. It is a voluntary exchange. The cookie buyer may be impelled from within himself by his own hunger or sweet-tooth desire for the cookie, but the key point is that hs is not compelled by Mrs. Fields or any other human being. The same cannot be said for government programs. You are (for example) forced to pay into FICA taxes whether you like it or not, whether you will ever live to receive the promised benefits or not, whether you agree with it or not. It is compulsory, not voluntary. You are given no choice; the money is taken right out of your paycheck before you get it and immediately spent by government.
Mrs. Fields may use advertising to seduce or persuade people to decide to buy her product -- but no violence is involved. By contrast, virtually all government programs are funded by the violence of coercive taxation and operate by coercive regulations and controls over peaceful (non-criminal) people. Coercive controls and restrictions belong on government officials and on criminals -- not on peaceful citizens.
It is not true, as is sometimes charged by leftists, that the American Right (libertarians and conservatives) favors welfare (government subsidies) to Big Business. The Right wants to deregulate and untax as much as possible and as many people as possible, including businessmen. Government should neither "help" nor hinder any business enterprise any more than it should help or hinder any religious enterprise. Ideally, government should not positivley intervene at all in peoples' private affairs or voluntary (market) relations. After all, government cannot "help" some without hurting others by violating their rights, and when it does that it contradicts the only justification for its own existence -- to keep rights from being violated.
And, in fact, even though a few Republicans (not real consrvatives or libertarians however) have been implicated in some business favoritism, most of those involved in the recent major corporate scandals (Enron, Global Crossing, Goldman Sachs, etc.) have been limousine "liberal" Democrats (i.e., leftists) such as George Stepanopoulos, Robert Rubin, Joseph Lieberman, Terry McAuliffe, Richard Gephardt, Christopher Dodd, and Martha Stewart.
Who or what is the real enemy? Economic "exploitation"? Or political tyranny? The attrocities at Waco and Ruby Ridge were committed by government goons, not corporate executives or greedy businesspeople. In the Twentieth Century alone, Big Government socialism (communism and naziism most especially) has been responsible for the mass murder and enslavement of hundreds of millions of peaceful human beings. However wealthy a businessman or company becomes, and however imperfect any businessman or company may be, nobody is forced to deal with market entities the way they are with governmental agencies and compelled to pay the taxes that fund those agencies and their bureaucratic programs.
Those on the Left should check their assumptions about the alleged inherent evils of business and keep an eye instead on the real threat to liberty and progress -- namely, big government -- instead of being distracted by Marxist propaganda and duped into supporting still more draconian political regulations and taxes over us all on the belief they are fighting "evil" business folk or protecting the environment.
Okay, you may say, BUT . . . what about the Enron and Arthur Anderson accounting scandals? And what about the loss in value of so many peoples' pension funds and retirement nest eggs as a result of the plunge in the stock market? Don't these events indicate a fundamental problem with capitalism? Isn't private greed and the profit motive to blame?
The answer is: No; click here to find out why market capitalism is not to blame and discover what really is to blame