Kevin Williamson of National Review Online labels U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren a “corporatist.”
“Corporatism” is one of the most misunderstood words in the political vocabulary. American progressives use it to indicate the domination of the state by business interests, when in fact it means something closer to the opposite: the subordination of commerce and industry to political mandates. …
… [T]he corporazioni of the Italian fascist model were not the profit-oriented private concerns we now call “corporations.” They were something closer to consultative associations, in which the interests of business owners, workers and workers’ organizations, and the Italian state were, in theory, all represented. The concept, which is a variation on socialist central planning, was that privately owned businesses were entitled to a profit, but not too much profit; that the workers were entitled to as much compensation and to such working conditions as were consistent with the overall health of the Italian economy and state; and that the state was entitled to coordinate these calculations and negotiate the related interests, and also entitled to have its interests trump those of either the business owners or the workers. …
… Senator Warren’s agenda is fundamentally corporatist. It would impose federal charters on businesses with more than $1 billion in revenue and empower the federal government to dictate to those firms the composition of their boards of directors, their compensation practices, the details of their internal corporate governance, their personnel policies, the scope and content of their political speech, and much more. She calls the legislation she is proposing the “Accountable Capitalism Act.”
