America Must Lead the International Regulation of Multinational Corporations

In every world empire, there has been a concentration of state wealth and a transfer of that wealth from one great empire to the next e.g. Egypt to Rome; but it wasn’t until the emergence of the industrial revolution and the invention of the Charter Company that private entities gained wealth comparable to nation states. Now with the revolution of the MNC, the power of Corporate Nations has surpassed that of most States. Neither Hayek nor Friedman adequately addressed how classic liberalism would optimize a world where states bow to corporations and MNCs increasingly become international oligarchs.

Jump forward a hundred years and what role will states have? In the beginnings of the industrial revolution, charter companies had standing mercenary armies comparable and sometimes larger than the states that authorized their charters. In the Iraq war, Blackwater seemed to silently engulf Iraq with its private mercenary activities. How will the mercenary forces of the oligarchs compare on an international scale 100 years from now with the mercenary forces of the charter companies a hundred years ago?

It is true that America’s Federal Reserve has significant culpability in its role of allowing our Congress to irresponsibly expand the debt, but much of that debt was driven by and inextricably tied to a trade deficit caused by an emerging international wave of MNCs and a lack of understanding by industrialized nations’ trade negotiators of their eventual encompassing impact on nations. Given our macroeconomic naiveté, we had the choice to continue borrowing or to accept a slow but real decline in average home purchasing power. For some reason, the Fed was happy to support the former option.

Some conspiracists point to forces external to the U.S. as having responsibility for and benefit from the Fed’s irresponsibility. These central banking forces are more tightly controlled in a state financed imperial China and must continue to be if China is to rise as perhaps one of only a handful of states possible of maintaining parity with the MNC empires of tomorrow. For its 4000 year social isolationist protection, China will eventually seek policies to repel MNC dominance. If western industrialized nations are to survive, we must also collectively seek a strategy for containing MNCs within an international boundary of regulation.