corporations

Barney Frank thinks that companies are people too:

"No, we're not propping up companies," Frank insists. "That's your mistake. We're propping up individuals. The world doesn't consist of companies. The world are people. The country is people. And yes, it is possible to argue that the government..."

So next time we try to cut corporate taxes to help our competitiveness, don't let him tell you that you are just trying to help companies.

Whenever the Democrats want to pander to the working class they love to speak of the evils of corporate greed. While corporate greed certainly exists, I've always found it amusing that the left does not see the greed that grows within big government.

Frederic Bastiat best described this phenomenon when he said, "If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers (Government) are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents (Bureaucracy) also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay that the rest of mankind?"

With that being said, why does the left try to combat corporate greed with big government, while simultaneously demonizing the enormous lobby of the corporate world? The corporate world lobbies government because they are involved in their affairs. Corporations know well the greed of government, and they use that to try to gain competitive advantage through lobbying efforts.

Republicans on the other hand too often take the Gordon Gekko approach that "Greed is Good." Ambition is good; competition is good; but greed coupled with concentrations of power, whether in government or corporations, is never good.

The greed of big government is unrelenting. There is no profit motive, just blank checks. If revenues aren't high enough deficit spending is always an option. Someday soon we will hopefully start to see that government cannot be the solution to all of our problems, and more often than not it is the cause.