Someone contacted me this weekend asking this question about the Boston Tea Party: "I read your platform. The inevitable result of the obtainment of your goals would be a situation where corporate power goes unchecked. Is this something that your group is comfortable with?"

I thought many of you might be interested in hearing my reply about this important issue. Here is part of it:

Corporate power is checked by the consumer. The customer votes with his money. He has the real power. Consumers rule in an anarcho-capitalist society, where consumer advocacy organizations and corporate watchdog groups ensure quality control and ethical business practices. We have seen many examples in the last two decades of how consumer demand can handle both those issues. We have also seen many examples of the failures of government regulation.

Soup manufacturers have all been changing their recipes in the last year because consumers stopped buying soups containing MSG. A few years before, the same thing happened with trans fat. The next wave will be companies advertising products without high fructose corn syrup (Pepsi is already marketing several natural sugar products). Major corporations are also emphasizing new products that are environmentally friendly. Consumers can look for stickers from environmental groups that certify products meeting environmental standards. Private organizations strictly regulated organic foods long before weaker USDA regulations came out. These are just a few examples among many of consumers successfully making their own regulations.

I personally put more trust in private organizations to monitor and regulate corporations than the government. Corporations lobby for the very legislation that regulates them. Regulations put restrictions so the company can not hurt you as badly, while private organizations often hold them to the higher standard of not hurting you at all. As an example of the failures of government regulation, look at how the FDA approved aspartame and has ignored warnings about its health risks for more than a decade. The FDA continues to allow toxic thimerosal and formaldehyde to be included in vaccines that inject directly into millions of peoples' bloodstreams. The government even granted amnesty to the companies putting these toxins into H1N1 vaccines. We can't rely on the government. We can only protect ourselves.

That brings me to my final point about consumer control: government regulation lets down the guard of consumers. They think the government will protect them and don't bother to look into things for themselves. We saw an example of that in how the SEC failed to catch Bernie Maddoff and other Wall Street scammers. The people who lost that money had assumed the SEC would protect them. In a free market system, corporate power would actually be more checked than it is now. Corporations would be regulated by the consumer, who decides for himself what is acceptable and votes with his money.

In 2007, I interviewed John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He used his economic expertise to help the military-industrial complex to expand America's empire in the third world through economic and political manipulation. Through his experiences, he witnessed first hand some of the worst work a corporation could do. Since publishing his book and going public against his former employers, he has devoted his life to exposing the system he served. He insists that informed, active consumers–rather than government regulation–are the solution to the problems we face in the current Corporatist system of governance.

I encourage you to check out Perkins' web site and books. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is also a great resource to learn about how natural economic forces can be more effective than government force.