Originally posted by normbenign
[b]Regrettably for the corporations, they have accumulated immense financial assets in places where they can get no value from it.
Sure, you know more than the CEOs operating these multinationals.
The reality is that corporations have huge cash surpluses which are not circulating productively in our global economy,
And you know this h ...[text shortened]... either. Whether it works or not, it is totally immoral, and the work of demented criminal minds.[/b]
Your ideology relies on so many falsehoods and misrepresentations it is tiresome to respond. Instead, a good place to send you is an American classic: The Contours of American History by William Appleman Williams. Since you uphold the false notion that the 19th Century
"was the heyday of merchantilism. Laissez Faire never had a heyday" you would benefit from his detailed chapter describing the differences between mercantilism and laissez faire, starting out in Elizabethan England, working through England's Glorious Revolution and the huge differences between Lord Shaftsbury (exponent of Mercantilism) and his protege, John Locke (who has become America's favourite "philosopher" through his presentation in an early form of the hidden hand of the market). He then takes us through a century of American history, in which the debate between mercantilism and laissez faire was by all means a lively one but consistently settled in favour of the latter. When you protest there has never been a true free market environment, that is because you are promoting a level of fundamentalist insanity worthy of the American Taliban. Your ideal is a fantasy and you know that - it cannot work as an intelligent part of any practical debate. The reality is that Laissez Faire was the dominant and prevaling ideology of the first American century.
Your hatred of government in all its forms is part of your dangerous and anti-social (potentially traitorous) fundamentalism. Williams describes very well the instability and weakness associated with the weak state, both in the early days prior to establishing the federal constitution, and in the following century as the limitations of free market ideology were laid bare. What emerged in the 1870s to supply a far more effective and sustainable political structure was not any form of socialism but the dominance of the (still quite new) corporations. Their managerial expertise in the running of large corporations gave executives the perfect skill set to operate the political system in similar form, and direct the nation of course to their own sectional interests at the expense of any wider social concern. You should see Donald Trump very much in this American tradition and he should make Americans very afraid.
The whole point of Mercantilism was to prevent one interest group exploiting its political and economic power at the expense of other interests. This applied both to vested interests within the elite (eg between landed wealth and business) and to relations between rich and poor; with a healthy respect for the capacity of the poor to foment mischief when provoked. These subtleties were wasted on Locke, whose unbalanced, market centred ideology provides no protection against the capture of the state by vested interests and addresses the poor only with violence.
The fact is, though, that your pretentious appeal to mercantilism and pure laizzez faire ideology does not even address, let alone refute, the evidence of market failures in 19th Century America and the necessity for state engagement to supply stability and even, indeed, to supply the conditions for fair competition without which markets will inevitably fail and routinely have done, notably in the great crash of 2008 which you are hiding away from recognizing.
When Americans support the political demands of their corporations, always under confused and ill informed appeals to free markets, they need to appreciate that the corporations are the major part of America's problem and that the executives running those corporations are not working for the benefit of shareholders (which includes the accumulated savings of ordinary citizens) but for their own perverse ends and at the public expense.
That is also the context in which to see the $2.1trillion held in foreign jurisdictions and primarily in poorly regulated tax havens by Amerian based corporations in order to evade taxation legally imposed by a democratically elected state. If you cared a toss for deficits and for national debt, you would recognise that this level of tax evasion is a major assault on American democracy and the American state, placing Americans in the ridiculous position of being unable to pay their way and forced to turn to countries like Saudi Arabia and China to fund state bonds from the proceeds of their trade surplus with the US. As Williams points out, this reflects a long standing strategy of the corporations - to get the American state to provide the funds from which other countries could buy American products and the military force to open foreign markets - but it has become even more perverse since he wrote that book, because the corporations now benefit by producing stuff abroad for the Americans to buy. Obama's current mission to extend free market agreements around the globe are not for the benefit of Americans but for the benefit of multi national corporations that no longer even pretend any loyalty to America.
If you want to prevent vested interests from extracting unfair advantage from the American state, then it is not laissez faire but mercantilism that you are preaching, unless - as we all suspect - you just don't know what the words even mean. Certainly that inability to understand the complexity of the issues was Locke's major failing. His patron, Lord Shaftsbury, was a far more intelligent and competent economist and political theorist.