Dollar Voting

In the days of the big corporate trusts, such as John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, men were concentrating so much power in their own hands that they were rivaling the power of the federal government. They could make decisions that affected the lives of so many people that they were the equivalent of elected representatives. Even to the point of influencing the laws of the land, whether through straight lobbying or through bribery and other illegal means.

The men who controlled those trusts were voted in by America by virtue of what products and services we bought. Those men were also very aggressive individuals who pushed hard to get the money and power that they wanted, but Americans were complicit in the whole affair. Innocently so, but we were part of it all.

These days, we still have problems with large corporations that hold immense power. We keep buying their products and services, and they keep getting more and more money. That money is used to impact society. Given that a company's claimed first responsibility is towards its shareholders, that suggests that being a financially successful company is the top priority. Therefore, the impact on society is going to be colored by that priority.

In contrast, companies that are dominated by a single individual tend to operate along the lines of the ethics of that individual. Ted Turner is liberally-minded, so his media company is liberally-minded. Warren Buffett is mid-western straightforward, so his conglomerate is straightforward.

No matter the formation of the company or its reason for its behavior, all companies have an agenda that they are pursuing, and that agenda will have an impact on the society in which they operate. As shown by the years of the corporate trusts, that impact can rival or exceed the impact of the elected officials. This is where dollar voting comes in.

Each time we spend money, we are empowering someone to pursue their agenda. In fact, when you get your paycheck, you are being empowered to pursue your agenda. The issue comes in when individuals hold so much power that their agenda can be realized. Yet nobody ever voted for that agenda. Except through their purchases.

Consider J.K. Rowling's wealth. She has around a billion dollars as a result of writing the extraordinarily successful Harry Potter series. She possesses enough personal power to effect significant change in society. She can give massive amounts of money to any number of companies, charities and organizations that can accomplish any number of things. But nobody voted for her. Except when they bought the books, saw the movies, etc. Her ability to write books has endowed her with the power to affect social change.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are taking the money that they accumulated from their businesses and they're starting social programs for education and the treatment of Aids. This isn't a couple million dollars of social programs. This is tens of billions of dollars of social programs. And we voted for those programs when we bought our toothpaste and our PCs. We voted in Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Bill of Duties

When our country was founded, some very smart men realized that an important thing needed to be written down: what are the rights that citizens of the new nation possess? The Bill of Rights was born. At the time of its composition, being an American was a very new phenomenon, the nation being only a few years old. The Revolutionary War was rooted in a dissatisfaction with the treatment of the colonists by the British government, and we can see that dissatisfaction reflected in the Bill of Rights, which has a lengthy list of things that a government can't do to its citizens. It's a fine list.

Unfortunately for America, it is a list that is rooted in a reaction to the problems of that time, and there is an implicit assumption that the prevailing social order would remain. That is, America was full of people who were working hard to develop the land, explore, engage in commerce and raise families. People worked for a living, and the gap between the richest and the poorest was fairly narrow, relative to today. Most everyone was still close to the land. The industrial revolution simply hadn't arrived yet. Family was a critical part of life. It was the way it had been for hundreds of years and as far as the founding fathers were concerned, it was going to continue that way.

As a result, the founding fathers felt safe in their metaphorical pushing-away of the known evils of their beloved British Empire. If life had continued close to the land and to family, everything would likely have worked out. Unfortunately, the industrial revolution was soon to arrive.

Most everything that changes causes challenges to the existing social order. Some revel in the changes, while other are terrified by them. Usually, the young embrace the new, because both the old way and the new way are equally 'new'. When the industrial revolution arrived, the world reeled with the changes. Cities expanded and become centers of production of goods. Efficiency of machinery meant that fewer farmers were needed in the fields, and so on. It was a lot of changes, and the existing social order flexed in response to the changes.

This is where the Bill of Rights comes back into the picture. When all those changes were taking place, whether originating in the industrial revolution or in any of a number of other ways, the prevailing social structures constituted the fences and borders that decided how the society would react. The Bill of Rights is one such fence. More accurately, it is the removal of some fences and borders that used to be in place. Governments used to tell people what they could and could not talk about, or what sorts of religious expression were permitted, etc. Those are some serious fences. The Bill of Rights knocked them down.

I know that I wouldn't want to live in a society where the government dictated what I could say in public. I likely couldn't write these articles in the free association style that I use. I'd probably have to have a lawyer look them over to make sure that I wasn't saying anything I shouldn't.

That said, there are limits to all things. It's not legal to threaten the President of the United States. You can't say stuff like that. You also can't slander people or commit libel. So there are at least SOME limits on freedom of speech, contrary to the claims of the Bill of Rights (it does say "no law" after all).

Why do we have these laws? Because it is in the best interest of the nation to have them. Said another way, there is no value to the community to let people threaten the President, nor to commit libel or to slander another person. Those are reflections of the duties of the citizens of the United States.

That brings me to the topic of the article: Bill of Duties. The Bill of Rights opened up new territory of freedom, but without any statement on how much is too much. A Bill of Duties would be a balancing statement to help us figure out where the limits are.

For example, what if the Bill of Duties said that we had a duty to use our skills for the betterment of the community? Smart people would then spend time trying to figure out what "betterment" boiled down to, making laws that were in support of that goal of betterment.

What if the Bill of Duties said that we had a duty to aid in the upbringing of children in our community? Laws would be passed to ensure that many more teachers, mentors and instructors would be available to our children. Those teachers would be mindful of their duties towards those children and would also instill that ethic in those children. They would be dutiful to the children who are younger still.

It would be an interesting experience to collect a bunch of our best and brightest minds, assemble a Bill of Duties, and see where that might lead this country - no matter the curveballs that were thrown at it. We need to be more than just the land of the free. We need to be the land of the dutiful.