Power centers

It may not be an official founding document of the USA as the Constitution is, but the Declaration of Independence lurks behind the institutions to remind our legislators, judges, and governors that the framework which their power comes from can be revised at the people's displeasure.

Of course the last couple of times this was tried there was a war, with the losers forcibly constrained to stay with the country, or mostly emigrating to what became Canada and Louisiana.

Similar principles were applied in a slightly different field. When economies of scale made is profitable for business owners to systematically squeeze their workers, many of them did. For a long time governments sided with private power, but eventually unions succeeded and grew to have political power of their own. I'm not concerned with subsequent history, but with noting that there's precedent for collective efforts to oppose private oppression, and against alliances between the government and private firms. It took a while, with some violence along the way, but for a while we achieved a balance of powers (both sides need each other). (The industrial union adversarial model is problematic for public-sector workers--the result is inevitably adversarial, inescapably political, and as experience shows, often becomes a Praetorian Guard.)

One route for dealing with oppressive private firms, frequently tried elsewhere, has been to put the government in control of the private firms--with predictably miserable results.

Our federal government is not attempting censorship, or harassment and firing of people high officials disagree with. Private firms are, and are attempting to enforce conformity with their socio-political views. But since they're private, the Constitution says nothing about them. That does not mean they are not power centers. They are.

Curiously enough, even totalitarian governments don't actually need to do this sort of thing themselves. The real power wasn't vested in the official channels or the Soviet constitution.

You can take a light-hearted view of the system we are being constrained to live under, but we are concentrating a great deal of political and social power in the hands of a few people who answer to nobody I know of. Given how frequently firms ignore the empirical "go woke go broke" rule, I wonder if they are even answerable to shareholders anymore.

I wonder how this is going to evolve. I don't want the government taking sides--that almost always turns out badly. And, as we saw before with industrial labor unions, collective action will probably be prosecuted as "restraint of trade." And there will, as always, be some nasty characters on both sides. This time, though, the power of the controllers is much more far-reaching--you can't just leave town and find another job elsewhere.

I'm afraid I don't have good answers or compromises in my back pocket. We're told "just create your own competitor," but that's not very practical. Boycotts? Hard to do, as Dr. Boli points out. AVI has a thought.

Every society has ways of trying to ensure conformity. That's not objectionable by itself--but the unaccountable imbalance of power is.

I was reading about Innocent III yesterday. Who knows, maybe the church will become a secular power center again. That's not a pleasant prospect.