Large Corporations Begin to See Their Interests in Populism

It's taken a long time, but huge corporations have begun to recognize their future of low taxes and less regulation is not secure in the hands of religious and social conservatives. When Trump suckered religious conservatives, including anti abortion and gays, into his orbit corporate CEO's started looking for the door. A group of them met on ZOOM this past weekend to stop the erosion of voting rights now being attempted by states across the country.

I spent my career as a college prof in economics. The discipline of economics has always had a hard time fitting into the academic world. It started with Adam Smith in 1776 where he used the market to explain how everyone, employers and employees, were made better off all seeking their own self interest. This was contrary to most of what might have been called economics back then. Mostly how well off anyone was was thought to be due to the benevolence of gods.

Markets and conservative thinking were thought to be the solution to everything until the depression of the 1930's. Then Keynes became famous for advocating that government, not the market, was the solution to that particular problem. Economics became thought of as a liberal discipline. But it never was completely liberal or conservative. There have always been certain kinds of problems that required government and others that were best dealt with by individuals and businesses trying to better themselves by buying and selling in markets. Economics did not teach students how to make a living in business, that was done by Colleges of Business. And, while most of it was about the behavior of humans, it did not fit in well with either the social sciences or humanities.

Now we are seeing something like what the first economist, Adam Smith, saw. Large corporations see their own self interest served by larger numbers of people selecting candidates and parties to govern. They don't favor a government so small it is ineffective, a distribution of income so unequal it doesn't provide trained employees nor customers who can buy their products and racial minorities frozen out as in their interests. It is not traditional liberal thinking but it is not conservative anti government thinking either. 

Politics dominated by how many anti abortion judges are on the Supreme Court no longer fits the needs of world-wide corporations.