death [under current law, corporations have even more rights than
individuals, and can live forever]. It didn’t happen through
parliamentary decisions—nobody voted on it in Congress. In the US,
as elsewhere in the world, it happened through judicial decisions.
Judges and corporate lawyers simply crafted a new society in which
corporations have immense power.
Today, the top two hundred corporations in the world control
over a quarter of the world’s total assets, and their control is
increasing. Fortune magazine’s annual listing of the top American
corporations found increasing profits, increasing concentration, and
reduction of jobs—tendencies that have been going on for some
years.
Von Humboldt’s and Smith’s ideas feed directly into the socialist-
anarchist tradition, into the left-libertarian critique of capitalism.
This critique can take the Deweyian form of a sort of workers’-
control version of democratic socialism, or the left-Marxist form of
people like [the Dutch astronomer and political theorist] Anton
Pannekoek and [the Polish-German revolutionary] Rosa Luxemburg
[1871–1919], or [the leading anarchist] Rudolf Rocker’s anarcho-
syndicalism (among others).
All this has been grossly perverted or forgotten in modern
intellectual life but, in my view, these ideas grow straight out of
classical, eighteenth-century liberalism. I even think they can be
traced back to seventeenth-century rationalism.
Keeping the rich on welfare
A book called America: Who Pays the Taxes?, written by a couple
o f Philadelphia Inquirer reporters, apparently shows that the
amount of taxes paid by corporations has dramatically declined in the
US.
That’s for sure. It’s been very striking over the last fifteen
years.
Some years ago, a leading specialist, Joseph Pechman, pointed out
that despite the apparently progressive structure that’s built into
the income tax system (that is, the higher your income, the higher