I would also favor economic incentives promoting local, regionally-responsible businesses. Remember, the original Boycott was a man shamed into treating his employees better because his peers refused to have anything to do with him until he mended his ways–he lived in the same community that he shocked. Answerability is key. You are less likely to pollute a neighborhood that you live in, or cheat those whose faces you see every day, or create policies that will cause people whose company you enjoy to shout at you, “Why did you do that to me?” Additionally, businesses based outside of a community drain money out of town. Some goes back into the pockets of local employees, but when they’re minimum wage clerks, and the bulk of the money pays executives, stockholders, and manufacturers elsewhere, that means a whole lot of money ceases to circulate in the neighborhood anymore.

I believe that every community ought to impose a lighter tax on locally based businesses and a heavier tax on outside businesses–starting with city government, and moving on to the state level, and advancing especially to the national level of tariffs, not only on foreign companies but also on American companies who choose to go wherever they can ignore American labor laws and pollution standards, thereby giving America a bad odor to the rest of the world, while undermining the American unions, and also creating an illegal alien problem (if employers go where they can find the best deal in labor, it becomes inevitable that laborers must go where they can find the best deal in employers.) To protests that reducing out of town investment would cost jobs, I would say that the economy is a kind of ecology, where if you clear out the dinosaurs, other life forms will fill in the niches–in this case, local businesses.

Now–if only I could afford the campaign contributions to actually put this on a ballot!

I first realized this in a discussion of Socialism with a Norwegian. She spoke about how well this system worked for Norway, and I pointed out that it couldn’t possibly work in the United States because of our vaster numbers. In a small country, it is much easier for people to perceive a government as their own, made up of themselves, to see their tax dollars as payment they collectively choose to spend on services that they wish to receive, and to feel uncomfortably answerable to the neighbors if they slack on their end of the bargain, either in evading taxes or evading work.

But in the continent-sized, densely populated United States of America, Americans widely view tax dollars as [i]gone![/i]–taken out of our pockets and spent who knows where. Regardless of all the historical speeches about government of the people, by the people, and for the people, we do not consider the government to be “us” at all, but rather this great and menacing impersonal force. Social services meet suspicion and rebellion at both ends. The poor feel no shame to cheat a system that they perceive as run by those who keep them poor in the first place, while the rich feel no shame in cheating on taxes that support total strangers that they perceive as cheaters–and the more cheating goes on at either end, the more the other end feels justified in cheating.

We do not trust our government, because we feel so little influence over it. With a population such as ours, our votes feel like a drop in the ocean–a waste of time. Most of us cannot make the huge campaign contributions that can buy the ear of our so-called representatives. Sure, we can write letters to those representatives, but how much impact does it make to say, “If you don’t start representing me more accurately, I’m going to withhold my puny little one vote from you!”? (Yes, I do vote, and I do write letters to representatives. I have not seen great policy changes result from either action. The majority votes according to whoever can afford the best advertising campaign, financed by corporations who dictate policy.)

Face it–we are not a true democracy anymore. Our lives are run by corporations, and corporations are not people–they have no soul, no nationality, and no ethic beyond that of a slug that will creep wherever stimuli prod it to creep. Most corporations exist to make money, and will spit out any human sub-units who get in the way of that purpose, replacing them with others less scrupulous. They are not evil in the sense of having malice, they are simply single-minded mechanisms too big for any one person to steer.

Even without the pre-bribery of campaign contributions, our lives are almost wholly dominated by corporations rather than government. Few of us work for democratic co-ops; most of us find employment, during most of our waking hours, in businesses governed by people we never voted for, who can decide whether or not we receive livelihood based on rules we didn’t vote for, either. And then, in our increasingly limited free time, we have little say over the sources of the foods that sustain us, the artifacts that surround us, or the homes we live in. People say that we can “vote” by what we buy, but we face limits both in what selection we find offered to us, and how much buying power we have, by the corporations that run our lives.

I would love to be able to afford 100% organic food and clothing, for instance, but I cannot get past the fact that institutions beyond my control artificially inflate the cost of organic products into a luxury item for the elite. Organic farmers harvest 80% of what agribusiness farmers do, granted–but they also have half the overhead, which ought to more than compensate for that 20% shortfall, except that corporations have discovered that they can sell these products at elite prices. Nor does that 20% shortfall cause sufficient shortages to make the product dear, in a country that suffers problems trying to unload surplus grain, to the point of pushing unhealthy products like corn syrup, promoting grain-fed cattle that are far less nutritious, more pollution intensive, less humanely housed, and more difficult to maintain than pasture-fed cattle, and dumping cheap grain on other countries whose economies the corporations desire to pverwhelm and take over. As for the manufacturers of organic cotton clothing, if they really meant their professed desire to save the world, you would think that they would sell something besides sportswear, that is too expensive for blue-collar laborers, yet too informal for white-collar workers to wear on anything but weekends–hobby clothing, for hobby values.

In a world where one’s purchase is one’s vote, the poor get disenfranchised. And the disenfranchised stay poor. There is nothing democratic about it.