Leftist fallacies: corporate influence on public policy

Joey Brown|April 14, 2016

Without immediately diving into the merits of Georgia’s bygone, Indiana-style religious freedom bill, there is something intellectually deceptive about the Left’s position on corporate influence on public policy.

On the one hand, dozens of Bernie Sanders supporters, in their #democracyspring movement — alluding to, one supposes, the exceedingly anti-democratic Arab Spring — can denounce the notion that elections cost money.

Remarkably, they do so while simultaneously applauding Apple (which is corporate), Disney (which is corporate, too) and the NFL (if you guessed corporate, you’d be right) for their decision to boycott Georgia in response to its religious freedom bill.

The lesson here: corporate power is good, provided that it’s used to protect the revolution. There is no real movement to “keep money out of politics,” only to keep the wrong sorts of speech out of the public arena.

It’s why Sanders can ask for money on his website before one can even see the issues he cares about — or, really, is able to even expound upon to an intellectual degree transcending that of a progressive-ish college freshman’s introduction to American politics essay, given his embarrassing interview with the New York Daily News.

He doesn’t seem believe it is antithetical to his own practices to decry the fact that Clinton receives money from the “fossil fuel industry,” while completely ignoring the possibility that, maybe, a large percentage of those donations came from individual employees of that industry, who aren’t compelled to act on their employer’s behalf.

Yes, it’s possible to like a candidate who isn’t Sanders without being a corporate shill.

It’s why, as I’ve noted before, unions have free reign to — this is no exaggeration — steal money from their workers in non right-to-work states and donate it, year after year, to Democrats.

And it’s why small businesses and insurance companies who express apprehension over the Affordable Care Act’s financially prohibitive provisions are accused of harboring a conservative bias (perish the thought!).

One must assume, then, that fretting over frightfully negative assets, such as a high-risk pool of patients with the dubious assurance of preventative subsidies, is a habit to which only right-wing nuts are inclined, casting doubt on the Left’s so-called pragmatism.

Conversely, one might safely extol Apple’s virtues of inclusiveness in opposing Georgia’s minor steps toward preserving the conscience of its religious citizens — of which there are many, and to whom that conscience is cardinal to their identity — while they conduct business in Saudi Arabia, which isn’t very nice to gays, to whom the House of Saud affords significantly less liberty than Georgia.

Georgia’s erstwhile law would have allowed its religious citizens to — at the cost of their own financial security, because the freedom to discriminate means the freedom to piss money away — in the common example, refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings.

On the Arabian Peninsula, few would bother to refuse to cater gay weddings when it’s simply easier to butcher anyone who would dare consider having one.

What’s odd about Georgia’s religious freedom bill and Saudi Arabia’s death penalty for homosexuals policy is that the former was produced by democratic means, and the latter by what, in Sanders’ parlance, is an oligarchy — and yet Apple implicitly endorsed the greater of two evils.

Of course, the Arab Spring wasn’t the wellspring of liberty President Barack Obama predicted it would be, not least in Saudi Arabia. It certainly wouldn’t take a genius to predict that the #democracyspring won’t be either.