Big Government And Big Business

A company, be it a sole proprietorship or a megacorporation or anything in between, is not inescapably fated to be driven by irrationalism to practice injustice.  All the same, a company can have leaders (or workers) who are motivated by false or emotionalistic worldviews, who discriminate against people on illicit grounds, who act only in their own arbitrary, personal interests, and who would carry out all other manner of irrational, cruel, or egoistic behaviors.  Indeed, many companies seem to already be riddled with these problems.  Conservatives, with only random exceptions, actively oppose almost any attempts to control business through governmental means, insisting that "big government" is or could easily become tyrannical while supporting "big business" despite it being very similar to large governments.  The very stark contradiction of one being evil but not the other is a logical impossibility!

This kind of conservative is all too willing to eagerly favor giant businesses, at least until they say or do something that conflicts with their conservative philosophy (for instance, perhaps by releasing a statement condemning gender or racial discrimination), no matter their size, as if the same aspects of a large government that could enable it to practice tyranny unopposed would not also be present in massive corporations.  It is not true that merely being large makes a government or a business evil, as that would be a slippery slope fallacy.  That is not the point here.  Instead, the point is that for some reason, the same conservative who would despise the concept of a large government often rushes to endorse or defend large companies who have the power to commit many of the same injustices as the political state.

It is only becoming more popular to decry the way that some companies, especially companies of an extreme size, make the lives of their workers or even their clients hell, and so a conservative as obsessed with reading news articles as many of them seem to be would have had this issue thrust into their attention one way or another.  Either way, a person does not need external prompting to identify or at least avoid hypocrisy--for the latter, all one has to do is be consistent in one's worldview, and consistent with a rationalistic worldview more specifically.  A person who hates or fears "big government" and worships or loves "big business" at the same time, regardless of the actual philosophical legitimacy and moral validity of these stances, is a hypocrite.

Conservativism in its predominant, 21st century American form very blatantly features this kind of contradictory ideology, one that demonizes a governmental body for its potential abuses while submitting to and even embracing a corporate body that does or could do many of the same things.  Businesses already function as political bodies as it is, just without as much of a formal political bent as the actual government of a region, though it is also possible for a company to act as the government in a very specific kind of community: this is corporatism, something foreign to contemporary America in one sense and yet something that many large companies would almost certainly pursue if they had the opportunity.  If only they could reign as the government itself, any large business led by an egoist would likely take the very first chance to fo this.