Democratic capitalism is an oxymoron

Democratic means government by the people.  It is commonly understood that each person has one vote.

Capitalism is raising money for an enterprise with the contributions of a few people or thousands of people.  Each contributor of capital to the enterprise has as many votes as the number of shares he or she holds.  One can argue that this is fair; the person who put one million dollars into the company had a greater interest than the person who put one hundred dollars into the company.

In practice, capitalism becomes distorted to the rule of a few.  Capitalism leads to a plutocracy both in the enterprise and in the various governments.

In the enterprise, members of the board periodically award themselves and the top executives shares in the enterprise, thus increasing the number of votes they have, at no or low cost.

In government, the executives and other large shareholders put a lot of money into lobbying government for laws in their favor and into campaigns of political candidates who they believe will be sympathetic to their interests.  Regular readers of this blog know what Adam Smith thought of that influence.  See "The Invisible Adam Smith".

Capitalism, when there are many companies with similar focus, is a very good idea.  It means that there are many people working on bringing new or lower cost products to the market.  This doesn't mean that government can't produce good ideas; it just does not have enough resources to produce as many good ideas as are needed.  And often government is needed to encourage good ideas in certain fields or to curtail bad ideas that are harmful to the public.  In fact, corporations fall all over themselves to get government contracts to build roads or build more lethal weapons.

You might be able to come up with a better blended phrase that reflects the need for both democracy and capitalism.  My best shot today is balance of democracy and capitalism.  Now the next question is: when will this balance be achieved?

If government is so bad then why…

...do so many companies try to get government business?

Privately run prisons
Military contracts
Highway and bridge contracts
Private schools with government vouchers
Sports stadiums with tax money

And to boot they want government to protect their businesses with

Courts to adjudicate disputes among companies
Courts to protect copyrights with large judgments against individuals (what's this about tort reform?)
Enforcement of patents
Trade negotiations
Employees educated and trained at government expense

I'm sure you can think of many more things that governments want from government without paying any taxes to support their wish lists.

Like a little kid, they want the tooth fairy to leave a quarter under their pillow every morning.  That's a quarter million or even a quarter billion.

Read before signing

How many of us read all the details before we sign a document?  Few of us read software agreements and blithely click "Agree".  Sales people often say it is a standard contract as they wish we would stop reading and sign the damn document.

We are having our shaker porch rebuilt, and Wednesday a local lumber company delivered the materials the carpenter ordered.  The delivery guy stacked the dimension lumber all nicely in our back yard and I signed the order form.

Later I looked out and there was a new pile of cedar shakes.  I looked at the form and saw that the shakes were listed.  Probably the delivery guy saw the mistake after another delivery and came back.

There are honest people in the world, lots of them.

Who creates jobs? Government or Corporations?

According to "The Myth of Job Creation", Editorial, New York Times, 2012-10-21, Obama and Romney agree that "government does not create jobs".  The New York Times disagrees, "Except that it does, millions of them — including teachers, police officers, firefighters, soldiers, sailors, astronauts, epidemiologists, antiterrorism agents, park rangers, diplomats, governors (Mr. Romney’s old job) and congressmen (like Paul Ryan)."

It is so hard to break the Norquist attitude that government is useless.  If government was so useless, why do so many corporations spend fortunes to get a government that will pass laws they favor?  If government was so useless, why do so many corporations seek government contracts?  If government was so useless, who would give corporations patents?  If government was so useless, who would adjudicate corporations billion-dollar suits against each other?