China

Corporations: Just Like You And Me, Except When They’re Not

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I’m no expert on international business.

But there seems to be an inherent illogical in the left’s approach to taxation and corporations.

“Big business does not paying its fair share!” “Income inequality!” “The wealth gap has grown massively!” “Occupy Wall Street!”

Crony capitalism is certainly a problem and oddly enough Donald Trump of all people rode the populist wave of discontent into the White House (his opponent, meanwhile, couldn’t seem to convince people that she wasn’t still in bed with America’s kleptocracy). As the WSJ pointed out the other day, Trump’s enemy is not globalism, but mercantilism in which corporations lobby government acquire subsidies, trigger bailouts, and increase regulations that only their army of lawyers can comply with and subsequently hamstring competitors (the little and middle guy), thereby increasing their coffers, and only then doling out the incidental sops to the rest of us.

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China v. Vietnam v. America: How Quickly We All Forget

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American napalm, that was so four decades ago.

The left loves to excoriate America’s strategic, altruistic, and ultimately flawed foray into Southeast Asia as cynical corporate imperialism. Noam Chomsky is particularly fond of this interpretation. But LBJ’s escalation of America’s participation in Vietnam’s civil war goes hand-in-hand with his beliefs about the ability of government to remake society and the world. The Great Society and Vietnam War were flip sides of the same coin. Champions of the left such as FDR, LBJ, and Obama in recent years, have characteristically opted to ally with corporations to advance their altruistic goals, which creates dissonance within the left driven by a misunderstanding of cause and effect. Corporations become the boogeymen that drive war, when in fact well-meaning, left-wing pipe dreams animate conflicts that corporations then more than willingly accommodate. Conservatives, supposedly so pro-corporate, have made less use of them than liberals.

I digress. Back to Southeast Asia. While the Vietnam War is a favorite topic of American-haters, Vietnam doesn’t share their obsession with getting stuck in the past. The other day The Diplomat published an excellent article that explored both Vietnam’s strategic considerations and its historical consciousness. America’s massive crime of getting involved in that far off land appears to be little more than a blip.
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The New Cultural Imperialism: America in Africa

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There has always been a certain dissonance at play with America’s response to imperialism.  While the United States routinely criticized European power land grabs around the world during the 19th and 20th century, as long as Europe stayed out of the Western hemisphere, Americans did not meddle. With the coming of the Cold War, however, America found itself awkwardly confronted by a necessity: while they rejected imperialism they also feared the expansion of communism. Consequently, the liberation of European colonies, while desirable at the level of principle, proved practically difficult as many were ripe for communist intervention. National security and national principles existed in an uneasy tension.

In the aftermath of that dicey and often contradictory time, it remains fashionable among members of the left to excoriate European imperialism and America’s complicity with it. The irony is that left wing attacks upon America’s past actions miss the fact that the left itself propagates a cultural imperialism in the developing world.

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