Capitalism Stabbed in the Back by Its Friends

A big anti-tobacco bill sailed through Congress this week, supported by Philip Morris, the godfather of Big Tobacco.

How's that, you say? Why would Philip Morris do such a thing?

For market share. And this exemplifies the dangers of government intrusion and manipulation of once free market systems. As Jonah Goldberg, of National Review, explains:

This week, Philip Morris, the biggest of the big tobacco companies, supported and won passage of an “anti-tobacco” bill that will make it easier for Philip Morris (a subsidiary of Altria) to sell cigarettes by making it harder for smaller, more innovative firms to compete. One way it will do that is by curtailing the First Amendment rights of tobacco companies, making it harder to advertise their products (including healthier alternatives to normal cigarettes). Philip Morris, maker of Marlboro and other established brands, already controls 50 percent of the market. That’s why it lobbied government to keep it that way.

The big multi-nationals now threaten to become "meta-nationals" as they combine forces with big governments around the world, providing politicians with the two things they love most: money and power.

And thus capitalism, as we have known it, dies. It is, as Goldberg writes today, just as Julius Caesar was knifed by his best friend, Brutus. Capitalism is being killed by its most successful children.

Everywhere we look we see the great and once-great beneficiaries of free markets running to the state for protection from the cruel bullying of competition. On health care, insurance companies and others repeat the mantra that they want to be “at the table rather than on the menu,” all the better to be positioned as a tax collector of the welfare state. General Motors and Chrysler have gone from being pimped-out prostitutes of the state to outright chattel more akin to the leather-bound gimp in Pulp Fiction, eager to do the bidding of the president and the UAW.

Once-proud companies like GE have become seduced by global-warming schemes because they recognize that there’s more money to be made selling white elephants to Uncle Sam than there is selling competitive products consumers want. Indeed, cap-and-trade taxes promise to deliver precisely the protectionist industrial policies the Left has dreamed of for decades, only under a “progressive” label.

Goldberg has a lot to say, and some of it I want to refer to in another post, but if you still give a damn about saving what's left of our system, you should read his article.