I happened to be reading this 1910 speech by Teddy Roosevelt today and thought his views on special interests and money and corporations in politics might strike a chord.
[O]ur government, national and state, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice—full, fair, and complete,—and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, that I most dislike, and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.
The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.
We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced.
You can read the full speech here.
dave-from-hvad says
I just came across this text from economist Paul Douglas, writing in the 1970s about the University of Chicago just after WWII:
Sound familiar?
jconway says
That’s a spot on quote from Douglas, a Salem native and fellow Maroon, diagnosing our dear alma mater’s past, present, and future diseased disposition .
I might also add that TR basically lays out a one nation conservative/Red Tory philosophy in the speech above that I find highly relevant to today”s arguments.
johntmay says
…are more accurately defined as “Orthodox Capitalists”.
bluewatch says
An orthodox capitalist believes that markets should constitute a level playing field in which all corporations compete against each other solely based upon merit. An orthodox capitalist would not want governmental favoritism extended toward any corporation or industry.
Today’s so-called conservative are more appropriately described as “crony capitalists”. They like the current system in which success in business is related to close relationships with government officials. That cozy relationship results in favoritism in tax breaks and other government actions.
jconway says
In a reason based polity we could dismiss them with the same breadth we casually dismiss other utopian dreamers like pacifists. Unfortunately, in our current polity many of them held positions of vast power over our financial institutions, I only wish the same were true of pacifists over our defense establishment.
petr says
…
I’m not sure that either term, ‘conservative’ or ‘capitalist’, has all that much meaning… much less enough to provide ‘orthodoxy’ in it. The present understanding of ‘capitalism’ had many midwives, one of whom was Karl Marx who helped to define it through his aggressive critique of it. That alone makes it suspect as coherent ideology.
Conservatives can be socially motivated also, either through a blunt fear of, or blank unwillingness to, change or because of inculcated authoritarian tendencies. But whatever the case behind it, some of them would move heaven and earth, and would, willy nilly, freely dish whatever funds (without concern to a return of profit) to get the government into your bedroom.
That is, in fact, the trouble with trying to define it: there are so many internal inconsistencies, dichotomies and tensions amongst those who would profess themselves as practitioners that it’s not possible, exactly, to contain it.
johntmay says
Tell me one ‘conservative” platform that does not funnel wealth to the capitalists and I’ll agree with you.
petr says
… but that is an outcome and neither an espousal of a philosophy nor a set of economic functions around which you can group as ‘orthodox’, which was your word. To “funnel wealth to the capitalists’ might be an outcome certain factions wish for, or even work towards with deliberation, but it is not an outcome either directly professed by conservatives or absolutely required under any definition of capitalism of which I am aware.
If you wanted to call them ‘like-minded robber barons’ then have at it. I won’t disagree. But to suggest an orthodoxy around an ill-defined economics of “capitalism” and/or an ungainly syncretism of various “conservative” ideas (and a syncretism that is both internally inconsistent and at adds with outcomes) suggests you don’t understand the problem to the depths you think you do…
This all might seem like just so much quibbling, but you are to consider: Instead of analysis of TR’s speech and what his definitions, not yours, means for us today –which, I daresay, is the hope of the OP– two separate posters have taken issue with your definitions and this thread is in danger of going off the rails into an epistemological swamp.
Maybe TR did understand the problem to a greater depth than you, is all I’m saying. So maybe we can get back on the rails if you tell us what you think of TR’s speech and it’s implications for us today?
kbusch says
Andrew Jackson’s Presidency was a sort of culmination of the idea of small, government of the sort we see espoused in Republican platforms of today. Arrayed against it was the National Republican and latter Whig idea of an energetic central government fostering the development of industry. The Civil War had the singular effect of obliterating the small government ideals of Jefferson and Jackson, and replacing them with governments that actively encouraged the expansion of railroads, of tariffs, and of industry generally.
It used to take forever to get from New York to Chicago. The railroad changed that and it made a number of agriculture profitable where transportation costs made it impossible. So we really needed that kind of investment.
So one of the things we inherited from the Gilded Age was a government owned by businesses because sponsored industries eventually ended up essentially owning parts of the government.
*
So it seems to me that both Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson were right. We needed Clay’s kind of investment and, as Jackson indicated, it would compromise democracy. Add 3/4 of a century and you get speeches like Teddy Roosevelt’s.
Three ingredients might help: (1) A bright red line between industry and electorate, (2) an actual working class movement (That’s how much of Europe got healthcare reform a century before us), and (3) an honorable stratum of civil servants. (As a country, we lack the ability to have energetic and efficient regulatory regime. It’s not an honorable profession that attracts even our second-brightest.)