As a libertarian, this really offended me. I hated the excuses the establishment Republicans made, and I detested the “understanding” these companies had with the Democrats—if we play ball, you’ll help us snuff out our competitors.
Walmart was a particularly odious example. It backed Obamacare even though that socialist fantasy was anathema to any free marketer. Why? It was good for their business. Obamacare saddled smaller competitors with huge new expenses while letting Walmart dump its workers off on the public treasury by cutting them to 29 hours per week.
And it supported green scams because it could afford to—and it knew its competitors could not. It had the capital to invest in “greening” itself, but those expenses would cripple its competitors.
Walmart even supported gun control because it wanted to corner the guns and ammo market. Small shops would be swamped by the new paperwork and record-keeping requirements, leaving only Walmart.
By the second Obama administration, it was clear that Walmart and many other corporations were no longer about competition. They were about getting the government to kill of their competition on their behalf. And in return, there was campaign money and support when the politicians—in both parties—needed it.
What was worse for constitutional conservatives was that defending Walmart alienated conservatives’ natural allies, like us libertarians. The liberals Walmart sucked up to professed to hate it—they couldn’t say enough bad stuff about that retail monster, or about the banks or Big Pharma or any of the other corporatist frauds. The liberals got to pose as the protectors of the little guy when they were crushing the little guy.
And the Walmarts didn’t care what the liberals said; it cared how they voted, and the liberal politicians always went the way of their corporate allies in the end. So it ended up that the Republicans, including some conservatives, defended Walmart, thinking it was an ally, even as Walmart undercut everything conservatives believe in.
The thing is that the corporatists like Walmart were bringing ruin upon the working class by exporting jobs and driving down wages at home and then devastating the small business owners who formed the core of conservatism in America.
In other words, conservatives were too often siding with a liberal-aligned group that was wrecking the conservatives’ base. And all in the name of “free enterprise” that was hardly free and less an enterprise than a racket.
And if that was not bad enough, Walmart and other corporatists acted like a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking up the free money the government was handing out by expressly targeting the EBT card–wielding welfare cheat demographic. You didn’t see many Walmarts in affluent areas—you saw them where there are plenty of folks getting government dollars that could be spent in their megastores. And Walmart had no desire to see that particular well run dry.
Sure, it would occasionally try some public relations stunt, like promising crappy jobs to veterans. Awesome. For the “price” of getting a bunch of accomplished, responsible, drug-free individuals, Walmart got to look like this great corporate citizen where, in reality, it was embodying every stereotype of a corporate scourge.
As a libertarian, I used to like Walmart in theory. I thought it was a great American capitalist success story. Being a largely urban woman, I had only been to Walmart a couple of times. But then I saw that Walmart was everything wrong with American politics and a wonderful example of “free enterprise” that made its profits by, through, and from tax money stolen from the people who actually produce something.
The night the government checks arrived became payday for losers. It was party time in dependency city, and Walmart was there, ready to skim off that sweet, sweet government cash.
It was my money and your money at work. Or, more accurately, not at work. More like our pocket being picked and Walmart eagerly taking a cut.
So what could we do? The first thing we needed to do was take the blinders off. I’ll modestly take credit on behalf of the libertarians who became constitutional conservatives, but we started making the people in the movement aware that big companies were not necessarily part of the solution. Conservatives had been defending business for so long that they didn’t notice that many of the companies they defended had defected to the other side and were now part of the problem.
What was wrong with Walmart—its shameless corporatism, its rent-seeking, its embrace of the welfare state as a way to ensure its clientele has the dough to spend on cut-rate crap imported from Asia while crushing our core constituencies here at home—was pretty much the same as what was wrong with most businesses that you can stick the word “big” in front of.
They may have been companies, but they weren’t capitalist and they sure as hell weren’t conservative. Conservatives protected them because they didn’t see what the corporatists had truly become: part of the problem. In fact, they weren’t just part of the problem but active participants in worsening the problem.
See, progressivism was not a problem to these companies. Big government, regulation, entitlements—they wanted these things. They liked them.
So when conservatives defended them, conservatives were defending people who were not only working against conservative interests but against conservatism’s core constituencies. And conservatives let the left pretend to hate them.
Step one was to stop defending them. Walmart and the big corporations could take care of themselves—hell, they’d been taking care of themselves at our expense for decades. We needed to untie and uncouple conservatism from these rent-seeking rackets. That meant we needed to call them out—hard and loud.
And we did. Suddenly, constitutional conservatives were offering a critique of corporatist business. The establishment GOP, of course, hated this. The corporations immediately allied with them to fund pliable, controllable candidates to fight constitutional conservatives in the GOP primaries. They poured money into the fight through the consultant class. There was one problem—the establishment had most of the money, but we constitutional conservatives had most of the actual Republican voters.
Step two was that we took advantage of the alliances and opportunities that treating these corporate hacks just as badly as they treat us could offer. There was a whole strata of society that had been screwed by them, people who held us in contempt because they thought we were to blame. In reality, the liberals loved the big companies that happily aided and abetted them in order to ensure their profits through government action. They just hid their secret love affair with propaganda talking about how liberals were somehow the champions of the little guys the liberals were shafting.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, but we conservatives love small things more than big things. Name one small thing liberals like, besides a small military? Sure, they hate “big” stuff. My ass.
And step three, as our power increased, we pushed for new laws that leveled the playing field for our constituencies. In the macro sense, as we shrank government we naturally shrank the incentive to focus their business models on rent-seeking since we eliminated the potential to win in Washington rather than in the marketplace. When government did less, there was less to be gained from lobbying. They had to refocus back on actually earning business rather than paying K Street hacks to win them special government favors.
We also focused on targeted reforms that addressed some structural inequities. Small businesses already got slammed with higher individual tax rates because most small business owners paid taxes as individuals, while companies got lower rates. We fixed that. There were dozens of other subsidies, scams, and scandals that these rackets took advantage of. We rooted them out too, and we let the liberals fight to preserve corporate welfare. Which they obliged us by doing.