It's not capitalism. Capitalism does not by itself guarantee competition. (Image from Clint Sprott at the University of Wisconsin. Go Badgers.)

That is does is the biggest lie told by political conservatives.

Capitalism, in fact, evolves toward monopoly, or to its cousins duopoly and oligopoly, just as ecosystems evolve toward a "climax" state that can only be re-set by catastrophe.

The only mechanism we have to protect competition against this natural tendency is government.

Only a government strong enough to stand up against the biggest enterprises can guarantee competition.

This is difficult to assure.

It's difficult to assure because money corrupts, and corporations -- not government -- are the source of money. It's your money, and unfortunately corporations are considered as people under U.S. law -- immortal people who can't be jailed.

It's also difficult because companies are lazy, just as people are lazy. (Just as these bears are lazy, from an English firm offering tours of the Canadian tundra.)

Drug companies want faster approvals, less government, and then when bad drugs get into people as a result they wind up losing far more than a bureaucracy would cost. Financial companies and industrial companies, too, wish always to reduce the level of competition, to assure leaders their sinecures and, on down the line, to guarantee workers their pensions.

Thus even in a strong democracy, corruption can easily occur. Organized labor and organized capital can end up on the same side, so "what's good for General Motors is good for the USA." Or big capital can crush government and labor both, as has happened in our time.

When this happens, the only cure is competition. This time, it's competition from other countries, and other systems.

The cure for Bushism lies in India, in China, in Japan, in Europe. The test is whether the system of business-controlled government delivers more growth than other systems. There is no such thing as absolute power, no matter how absolutist a local government may appear to be.

Competition is reduced here, it thrives there, so their economies rise relative to ours, while ours falls -- even if it is growing in absolute terms it's falling relative to others.

This will continue until Americans are either impoverished and economically crushed or until we get the message and take matters into your own political hands, creating real business competition across the board.

This is not a matter of personal belief. It is as things are. And it takes neither genius nor anger to predict the end of it. All you need do is look at history, find the patterns, catch the Clues.

The only way to get better is through having an opponent.