It's about power and wealth, and that's been a factor in human societies since we were covered with hair.

I have repeatedly emphasized that the government/private backscratching is a mutual effect that both sides see as beneficial to themselves. (that it may not be beneficial to anyone else is beside the point). You keep trying to exonerate the government and blame the private sector.

You give a government power over economic activity, the historical norm, not the exception, and the results are inevitable. This is nothing that wasn't happening long before America, and long before anyone ever heard of either capitalism or Marxism. In the old days it was companies and kings parceling out the New World, or merchant princes with the power to make laws and throw people in prison.

The United States was founded on the principle that there are certain limited things that governments are instituted for, and that the rest should be left to free men.

A noble idea, but we were unable to maintain it. Too many people, all with the best intentions, decided that the power of the State needed to be broader, deeper, and far more intrusive. How else to create perfection on Earth when human society is so naturally chaotic?

So we wound up where we are now. There is currently no conceivable human activity that is considered totally beyond the power of the Federal Government, and naturally, this is an attractive tool for both politicians and corporations alike.

Your constant attempts to put all the blame on one side are inane. The vision of pitiful, cowering little "lefties" being manhandled and forced into corruption by evil corporate giants is hilarious. The government, regardless of party, can wreck any industry in the nation on a whim. What kind of power compares to that? Did you watch the Microsoft hearings? Who had the power in that room? It wasn't the politicians who had any concern about their jobs at the time.

But I guess you pretty much have to blame the corporations to justify the myth that the only reason we have corruption at all is because the State just doesn't have ENOUGH power over the private sector. If the government is identified as part of the problem, liberalism's view of more government as the ultimate solution to everything pretty much blows up in their face.

You know, if that myth were correct, those societies which have no private companies at all, and where everything is run by the State, would be paradises.