Conflict of Interest

There are no paid firefighting services. It makes sense on the surface to have them; whoever puts out the fire gets paid for doing so. Different Companies compete to get there the fastest and put out the fire the quickest, with the least amount of damage. A perfect example of the free market choosing the best solution, no?

Now, the best thing for the populace is to have as few fires as possible and have them put out quickly when they happen. The competing fire companies quickly discover that they need fires for their bottom line. Do you think their idea of a good month is now the same as that of the populace whom they are protecting? Only a naively hopeful person would think so. No, enterprising companies would quickly learn to start their own fires, then put them out.

Therefore, firefighting is a state-supported activity because free-market capitalism plainly doesn’t work here. The insatiable need for growth in a neo-classical capitalist economy such as ours makes it a poor fit for firefighting, where the means to growth for the fire company is extremely destructive to everything else.

Similarly, if one works in the stock market in any capacity, one is forbidden from trading individually. This makes sense too, because the needs of that person would dictate that they manipulate the market to give them advantage. Again, the interests of the involved parties would not function well in a completely open system. It would encourage behavior damaging to society; therefore, in some cases, those where it makes sense, involvement in free markets is curtailed.

So why are government officials allowed to invest in energy and military companies?

Their behavior necessarily follows that of the aforementioned firefighters. In the case of military companies, is it any surprise that the U.S. fights in several countries at once all the time? Is it any surprise that, somehow, magically, the U.S. sells over half of the armaments to other countries every year? Our leaders are all invested up to their eyeballs in these companies; given the example of the firemen above, are you getting a little suspicious of all the wars and causes we seem to have to fight for? Every time the military market is in a slump or the enormous U.S. military budget looks to be reduced, a new need for all this hardware magically appears and always for justified reasons, no?

Investment in energy companies creates the same problems. Is it any wonder that they can continue to pollute despite regulation? Is it any wonder that energy never gets too expensive and the bottom line of these companies is never affected? How hard would it be to sign legislation into effect that would cause your own investment holdings to drop by 50%? Yeah, really hard. That’s why it rarely happens. And, in the case that the legislation is inevitable, how hard would it be not to sell your stake, given the insider knowledge? You couldn’t not tell your own son, could you?

Better not to force these moral quandaries on our already-shaky politicians. We should have leaders whose personal interests are as much divorced from national interests as possible. Instead, we have the exact opposite, and we have the exact result you would expect, given an objective view of the situation. Cheney and George Bush Senior are heavily invested in the military industry, so when, in 1991, the military budget was threatened, what with no looming Soviet enemy to fight anymore, Iraq’s smear campaign was quickly ramped up and a war saved those investements. It happens too often to be coincidence. And George Junior managed to sell all his stock in Harken Energy, whose sole interests were in Iraq, right before the war.

Again, very convenient—and totally unavoidable, given human nature. Just look at the members of the Carlyle Group, one of the biggest defense contractors in the world. (company’s actual people page has most members former cabinet officers under Bush Sr.) Dick Cheney has been involved in the upper echelons of U.S. government since the dawn of time (as have Powell and Rumsfeld, in varying capacities) and he used to be President of Halliburton, an energy and defense company; one of the biggest contractors in the world, it should come as no surprise at this point.

If you look up, you’ll see the class structure here. There is a class of people who are maintaining their status using your tax dollars (a favorite is to offer a loan package to another country, which must then be spent on services provided by certain companies, like Halliburton or the Carlyle group. This is called money-laundering in other circles). They sell you on their products, then use your money to purchase those products from themselves, all the while making global situations that will necessitate their products (usually weapons). However, for all the buying power of our massive tax system, we have no national health care, no real safety (for all the weapons we buy) and no decent social net for retirement or unemployment. However, do you think this other class has these problems? No, most of the higher levels of the U.S. government has its own social security system (salaries paid in perpetuity on retirement) and its own medical system (again, even after retirement).

If they don’t have to live like us, they won’t make our lives better. If they benefit from war and from energy sources that ruin the planet, they will continue to make war and will continue to ruin the planet. We have to remove this conflict of interest or it will never get better.