Using Progressive Means to Restore Liberty

Scores of millions of Americans sense that something terrible has been happening in our country recently. Democracy has been steadily slipping away for years, but never faster than in the catastrophic year of 2020. Meanwhile, the process continues at an ever-increasing rate under the administration of the cognitively declining man in the White House. Incompetent tyrants at the federal, state, and local level rule the American people. Who knew that anonymous local health officials could violate our property rights by shutting down small businesses and that governors could restrict our rights to freedom of association and of worship? Who knew that social media corporations could censor our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech?

Leading American corporations publicly embrace the radical agenda of the far left while holding in contempt much of the population whom they seem to regard as “white supremacists.” It would be hard to find a major American corporation with an international presence that does not think of itself in global rather than national terms. This should not be surprising. Globalism is the antithesis of nationalism -- or should I say, patriotism.

CEOs of major corporations act like oligarchs who can do as they please as long as they have government on their side. So, they donate hundreds of millions of dollars either directly or indirectly to the party of government and tilt the electoral process toward their friends in high places. What’s more, many of those big corporations have gone woke in an effort to please their Democrat allies. In the aftermath of the recent intervention by much of corporate America into the controversy about Georgia’s election law, many conservatives are awakening to the magnitude of this problem. Scores of millions of Americans feel helpless in the face of this overwhelming threat posed to our liberty.

It is time to revive the use of anti-trust action to deal with the oligarchs of our time.

As I explained in a post some five days ago that, "We need to use the proper words with their proper meanings to correctly identify problems. If we do not correctly identify problems we then end up solving the wrong problems." That was in reference to the use of the term oligarchs.

Here we have a proposed solution of trust busting based on that idea we need to do something about corporate oligarchs. Let's examine what happened to Standard Oil, since it is perhaps the most famous example of trust busting. In 1911, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was used to break Standard Oil into 34 companies. The charge against Standard Oil was it was a monopoly. While Standard Oil was dominant at the time, it is debatable if Standard Oil was a monopoly. There was competition. I point this out because, the problem being identified was, "Monopoly Bad". The solution proposed and implemented, "Trust Bust".

The trust busting at the time was not directly so much at large businesses, but the individuals running those large businesses. That is an important parallel to what is being proposed with Big Tech. We don't like the Zuckerberg's and Dorey's of today because of their political views, and for some, their wealth.

Back to Standard Oil ... A great deal of zeal was levied against John D. Rockefeller and the public was sold on the idea slitting Standard Oil into multiple companies would deny Rockefeller his wealth derived from Standard Oil. The fact of the matter is that Rockefeller, while not in control of the new companies, still had substantial shares in many of them. His wealth did not evaporate. What was created were 34 companies, mostly controlled by his colleagues. Those colleagues were very much like Rockefeller, and if they were on the public's radar at the time, the public would dislike them as much as Rockefeller. Trust busting may have been effective in breaking up a monopoly, if one existed, but it did not destroy Rockefeller's wealth or influence. In fact, the 34 companies derived from Standard Oil just dispersed the perceived problem.

If we apply trust busting to the Facebooks, Twitter, and Google's of the world, we will get many smaller companies, run by the collogues of those we so despise. Zuckerberg and Dorsey's wealth will not diminish in any appreciable manner, and even it did, what's $10 billion vs. $50 billion in personal wealth? It's still more money than they can spend. Their political influence will not diminish, since today's progressive-Marxists will still laud these tech-barons. I predict, that we would have many more, although slightly smaller, problems that still exert political influence, lobby, and spend millions on rigging elections.

The problem is corporatism, not oligarchs. Trust busting does not eliminate corporatism, it just spreads it out. Let's start correctly defining problems so we get the correct solutions.

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