In a recent survey of the big Wall Street political donors who usually back the GOP, most of the big money people responded to the prospect of a Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton contest by saying “Meh. Either way’s fine.” But if Jeb decides not to run and Chris Christie doesn’t recover from Bridgegate, the financial industry will probably back Clinton in preference to the loose cannons of the Tea Party. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who held Clinton fundraisers in 2008, would reportedly be “very happy” with either Bush or Clinton.

And frankly, it’s hard to see why Wall Street would object to an establishment Democrat at all. Clinton, in a closed speech to Goldman Sachs executives last year, told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Democratic administrations are just as prone as Republicans — at least! — to packing cabinets with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup alumni. And while they talk a good game, in practice the “progressive” wing of the party is about the same. Senator Elizabeth Warren, leader of the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” recently expressed grave concern over the number of Obama administration appointees from Citigroup — right before voting to confirm Goldman Sachs veteran Stanley Fischer’s appointment to the Federal Reserve. See, Warren may rubber-stamp Wall Street control of government policy just like a DFC Democrat — but she feels really, really guilty about it.

Meanwhile, Bill Scher at The Week (“Ralph Nader wants liberals to back Rand Paul. Don’t do it,” May 1, 2014) sees corporate CEOs as much more congenial allies for liberals than libertarian civil liberties activists (he warns against Nader’s call to “side with government-hating libertarians over government-accepting corporations”). In contrast to Nader’s stated goal of “dismantling the Corporate State,” Scher argues that liberalism achieved its quiet victories through the 20th century with “some degree of corporate support,” and that the “coalition to nurture” for liberals in the future is “the CEOs.”

See, business loves the stability and certainty that comes with a state-regulated economy, along with the reassurance “that they will remain profitable.” One item in particular that makes both liberals’ and corporate CEOs’ hearts go pitty-pat is “investment in infrastructure”: the Interstate Highway System and the giant Army Corps of Engineers dams that Rachel Maddow talks about in her “great things” TV spots. Of course big business likes to “fund infrastructure.” Heavily subsidized, high-volume transportation infrastructure was what centralized the American economy in the 20th century under the control of a few dozen oligopoly corporations, and enabled big box retailers to destroy Main Street.

So if you’re looking for an “anti-corporate” party in American politics, there isn’t one.

Our betters in the Food and Drug Administration know better. They know what my teachers and peers did not, and are prepared to implement a nationwide cookie-cutter pain management plan for every single one of three hundred million Americans. In their infinite wisdom, they have decided to make hydrocodone/acetaminophen combinations — the most well-known of which is Vicodin — harder to come by and to require patients to see their doctors — and pay for an office visit, of course — every time they need a refill of these fairly mild drugs.

And mild drugs they are. Opioid pain killers are measured by how they compare to morphine taken orally. Hydrocodone is 1.5 times as potent as oral morphine, which compares very poorly to some of our modern pain killers, such as hydromorphone (Dilaudid) — five times as potent — and fentanyl, which delivered via patch on the skin is eighty times as potent as morphine. And in Vicodin, a mere 5mg of this weak tea opioid is combined with a standard, over the counter dose of acetaminophen (Tylenol) to provide a pretty mild analgesic effect.

But of course it’s not their pain relieving power that concerns our betters. The real issue is that some people use these pills to feel good, and sometimes go too far and suffer for it. No one is shoving pills down anyone’s throat. These unfortunates are taking the pills because they want to, because medicating themselves into oblivion seems like their best option. But in true progressive fashion, rather than wonder what it is about the suffocating state capitalist system that drives people to such fates, our betters in the FDA would rather plunge even more innocents into misery in the name of preventing a few of their victims from using chemicals to escape for a little while.

We can tell it’s pleasure that is the problem, as some of the most dangerous drugs on the market are available freely over the counter even to small children. Tylenol, for instance, sends 80,000 people to the emergency room every year, but it does not make anyone high, so it does not draw the interest of our Puritan masters.

Among the dangers lurking in the doctor’s office and the hospital Vicodin still does not impress — the most lethal thing that happens in our health care system is not people getting high but doctors and nurses screwing up. 98,000 of our fellow Americans die from simple mistakes every year, mistakes often made by overworked nursing staff on inadequately staffed floors run at a substantial profit by politically connected businesses and executives paying themselves absurd salaries. But this too does not exercise our progressive friends, as that most insidious of dangers — people feeling good — is not here lurking.

No, our progressive friends in the FDA and the Obama administration want to save you from the danger that you might use a chemical to feel good, might like the experience, and might want to repeat it. And they will not even blink at the thought of trampling over the care of people in pain to stop us from getting high. Suffering, after all, purifies the soul, while demon pleasures tempt us away from the puritan, progressive path.

There are several hard realities that most liberals — as opposed to those of us on the genuine Left — are constitutionally unable to admit into their “Why Mommy is a Democrat” view of the world. Among them are the following: First, any legislation they reflexively pass pursuant to a moral panic over people getting hurt will also result in people getting hurt. Second, the kind of society they desire can only be achieved through the large-scale, lawless exercise of power by the state. And third, the state is inevitably run by the kinds of people who enjoy exercising such power.

Blogger thoreau, at Unqualified Offerings (“Finally, some political blogging,” May 26, 2013), addresses the first of these points in relation to the War on Drugs:

“There are few things that piss me off more than discussing drugs with over-educated white suburban liberals ….  [T]hey want to keep locking people up in the name of ‘But what if somebody gets hurt?’  Um, what do you call the world’s largest prison population?  What do you call the war in northern Mexico?  What do you call the actions of Afghan opium lords? What do you call daily gang violence?  I’d call that ‘somebody gets hurt’, wouldn’t you? ….  I can talk all day about the violence  and injustice of the drug war but they find one study on the effects of pot on short-term memory and my whole point is considered invalid.  Because if we end this war Somebody Might Get Hurt.”

Liberals — the kinds of people who say “the government is just all of us working together” — instinctively draw back from acknowledging the realities of power. But Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling blog — the kind of Leftist we need more of — is quite happy to rub their noses in it (“What Eton Knows,” May 26, 2013).

It seems New Labourites in the UK are in shock over a question about the Macchiavellian utility of shooting protestors in the entrance exam at Eton. “What Eton Knows,” Dillow writes, is that

“Political power rests, ultimately, upon force and violence. Plan A for the ruling class is to govern by consent. But there is a plan B …. Who, whom? Lenin got it right. Power is about who does what to whom? Eton’s examiners know that their charges will be the ‘who’ and the rest of us the ‘whom.'”

Naive, well-meaning liberals — as opposed to those who simply desire to amass managerial power over society in their own hands — fail to understand that coercive power in its essence is a mechanism by which those who exercise it benefit at the expense of those over whom it is exercised. It is a weapon by which some people do things to other people. And the idea that this mechanism, this weapon, is amenable to democratic control is utterly ludicrous. As Robert Michels noted a century ago, centralized, hierarchical institutions cannot be instruments of direct rule by the many. Whatever formally democratic rules of representation they are subject to in legal theory, in practice the delegates will gain power at the expense of the delegators; the agent will exercise de facto power over the principal.

The coercive state, by its nature, is the instrument of a ruling class. Sometimes the state functionaries themselves will supplant the old ruling class and constitute a new one, as in the case of the bureaucratic oligarchy that ruled the Soviet Union. More frequently, the regulatory and welfare state will align itself with the preexisting corporate capitalist ruling class, and incorporate itself as a junior member, as in European social democracy and American New Deal liberalism.

In either case, the vast majority of society will be the ruled. And the rulers will exercise their power over us in all sorts of unpleasant ways. Once you set up an enforcement bureaucracy of cops and administrative law courts capable of shooting or imprisoning people, or seizing their assets without proving them guilty of a criminal offense, they will happily exercise this power. Dillow writes:

“In creating so many new criminal offences and bolstering the power and self-importance of the police, [New Labour] thought it was acting out of good intentions but was … merely giving them licence to bully old ladies. Good intentions are not enough.”

So if your automatic response to every moral panic is to pass another law to stop people from getting hurt, stop and think it over some more. You’re just giving the state — and the interests that control it — power to hurt people.