Culture is the ultimate self-regulator. Everything is downstream from it. Politics, laws, values, behaviours. Unfortunately, many (most) of the socialist policies you advocate for, while purporting to help people in need, in fact degrade culture by giving the man the proverbial fish and reducing self-regulation. This requires government intervention. More government intervention requires bigger government. Bigger government reduces efficiency and increases the likelihood of corruption. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
I also think you focus too much on the negative aspects of corporations in your own backyard while missing the bigger picture. Make it too hard to operate in your backyard and they will operate in someone else’s, i.e. China’s. Then you have no control over them at all while you’ve just contributed to unleashing the unholy alliance of government and big business. Only this time it’s not your government and not your culture, and your suffering will be even greater because you’re no longer a stakeholder and they care even less about you. For all the corporate cronyism you observe in the US and (mostly fairly) criticise, imagine if that cronyism were in China where your criticism means even less than it does now. Be careful what you wish for.
Admittedly, it's a fine line. I'm not against capitalism. We've talked about it before in the past. I just support taxes that can be invested into society to help cover the damage of capitalism's dynamic growth.
China is the big question of the next age - and it really seems like it will determine what happens with corporations going forward. On one end, it honestly perplexes me. If the rule was that government regulation and taxes cause corporations to flee to China, then eventually you'd think they would flee China too - since they manage almost every aspect of what corporations can do there far more than the US does. They demand ownership of most of their proprietary tech as well and use it to prop up local Chinese companion companies. It honestly makes me wonder if the US could actually demand infinitely more from corporations, because they would do virtually anything to have access to our market - as they do with China. But we'll probably never get the answer to that and it'll stay theoretical.
Some people theorize that eventually wages in China will rise with their middle class and rising consumer market. When the wages get high enough, manufacturing would move to Africa. Then 30 years later, Africa would be the new market that every corporation runs into - the last untapped market. Then everyone would have transitioned into a consumer society, instead of a manufacturing society, and maybe robots would do all the manufacturing by then.
And I don't like government waste or inefficiency either. I think the main things you really need to invest in for people are health care access, and education. Education gives people tools to be self-reliant, which you would agree is a positive thing, and that becomes more needed as tech advances. In the 1950s, someone could get out of high school and work in a local factory and earn enough to raise a family with a stay at home wife, vacation once a year, own a house, and retire. That is not the case anymore, and the harder basic survivability becomes in our economy, the more we have to invest in education or people will sink. It's not that I like government bloat, but the economy changed.
The only other things I'd support are sensible regulations on stuff like food quality, construction standards, environmental standards, and basic non-partisan stuff bureaucrats manage.
Anyway, good discussion. I agree with most of what you said.
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