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THIS COLUMN IS ABOUT THE MOVE TOWARD A NEW WORLD ORDER

I used to try and understand Libertarian Party ideology. I felt that libertarianism was a useful counterbalance to the ever-expanding state, which was seizing more and more power at the cost of freedom and individual responsibility. In time, I saw that libertarianism only got it half right.  Big Government was not the only problem. Big Business was as well. Both those things have a single word in common, and you’ve already spotted it: ”big.”

Bigness is bad. Anything—be it a state or a corporation—can become too large to function properly. As either government or a corporations grow, it becomes less and less about their original mission and more and more about merely sustaining themselves. The expansion pushes the leadership fur­ther away from productive action, creating a vast gulf between what an entity should be doing, and what it actually is doing.

In time, the heed to sustain itself be­comes the prime goal of the entity. With government, the vision moves from public service to winning elections. With corpo­rations, it moves to quarterly reports and stock prices. We’re told that being “goal oriented” is always good, but that depends upon the goal. If your corporation’s goal is merely to ship a product in order to keep from posting a quarterly loss, regardless of whether or not the product is done or even functional, then you’re pursuing the wrong goat. Or, to be more precise, you may pur­suing the right goal in the wrong way.

As key decisions are made further and further away from the point of production, the leadership class loses all sense of mission. It becomes bloated and, muscle-bound, unable to see its own failings until it’s too late. That’s how giants fall. And in their falling, their long shadows fade, cre­ating fertile and sunlit ground-where fresh, new things can grow.