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Kata ton Dynaton

But the issue before us is not how Wal-Mart grew to scale but how Wal-Mart uses its power today and will use it tomorrow. The problem is that Wal-Mart, like other monopsonists, does not participate in the market so much as use its power to micromanage the market, carefully coordinating the actions of thousands of […]

But the issue before us is not how Wal-Mart grew to scale but how Wal-Mart uses its power today and will use it tomorrow. The problem is that Wal-Mart, like other monopsonists, does not participate in the market so much as use its power to micromanage the market, carefully coordinating the actions of thousands of firms from a position above the market. ~Barry Lynn, Harper’s

The name I use in the title, dynatoi (the powerful), is the name applied in Byzantine imperial legislation to curtail the acquisition of land from smallholders for the aggrandisement of largeholders and aristocrats.  The comparison may seem a stretch, but the problem with megacorporations, of which Wal-Mart is the preeminent example, is their concentration of wealth and power that they use to dictate the economic lives of tens of millions.  Entities that leverage this kind of power over an entire society have nothing to do with economic liberty and positively abhor real economic liberty; they do not want a free market–they want a controlled market, where they give the orders; they do not want competition–they want obedience.  Those who fall all over themselves about the benefits that these entities provide the poor or the general economy seem to miss a vital point: serfs can be well-treated and amply provided for, but serfs they remain.  Those who object to Wal-Mart and like entities from a traditional Jeffersonian perspective do so because they object to servility in those who should be free men.  If recovering liberty meant the end of one-stop shopping and “low prices,” wouldn’t it be worth a worthy exchange?  Or is “freedom isn’t free” a slogan that people only say when they are cheering on another one of the state’s wars? 

It is a consistent traditional conservative and libertarian critique that government should be as decentralised as possible to avoid the concentration of power in too few hands, to prevent abuses and to keep the citizens secure in life and property.  The rationale for keeping power diffuse applies in the private sector no less than in the public.  (It is also the same rationale that argues for the agrarian idea of the wide distribution of real property as a check against concentrations of propertied wealth and thus of power in the hands of a relative few.) 

It was George Grant’s devastating observation that decentralising government without decentralising corporate power would be simply to create a band of oligarchs–and I believe this is precisely the word he used, redolent as it is now of Russian cronyism and corruption.  He observed that for the purposes of securing the liberty of the free small property owner it would accomplish next to nothing to reduce the state while leaving the corporations as they were.  Indeed, in certain parts of everyday life, it could create new relations of dependence that are more immediate and tangible than when there is dependence on the state.  That does not in any way imply that either form of dependence is preferable for free people.  The key is to reject the concentrations of power in both, rather than allow them to play citizens off against each other in foolish squabbles over which master is to be preferred.

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