A corporation is a business enterprise that is owned by stockholders, most of whom are not involved in running the daily affairs of the business. Corporations, rather than individual ownership of businesses, is now the dominate form of business in the U.S. Economy. As a result, power and influence are concentrated in corporations. This allows corporations to restrict competition and control large segments of economic life.

As corporations grow and the American middle class fades away, the future of the U.S. economy seems to be trending toward the rich getting even wealthier while everyone else becomes poorer. The middle class used to be the largest segment of the population, but they are swiftly dwindling. In the next couple decades, I expect to see the middle class shrinking even more as wages stagnate and people who should be coming into their own labor under the yolk of student debt payments. Those students in particular may never realize their own place in the economy. Young people who are going to school now will be paying off that debt for the rest of their lives instead of becoming independent contributors to the economy – the middle class.

Economically, globalization is about the way that economies become connected. Different regions of the world provide different services. While this sounds good, it is often exploited as a way for corporations to get cheap labor and increase their profits by not paying their workers a fair wage. Instead of paying workers in a Western country a higher wage, they pay poverty wages to workers in third world countries who have no recourse. Corporations may advance globalization at the expense of social goals like diversity, worker’s rights and environmental sustainability. For example, China specializes in the production of many clothing goods. Workers are paid very little and treated extremely poorly, but wealthy corporations in Western nations can sell the products they produce at extremely low prices and make huge profits from this labor.

The basic model of capitalist economic production is the method through which goods and services are produced and distributed. In capitalism, this means that a corporation creates goods or services and sells them for as high as price as possible in order to make a large profit. This is a sharp contrast to a socialist system of economic production where, instead of one person owning the means of production and getting rich from it, the means of production are owned collectively by society, allowing everyone to benefit. Socialism describes an economy in which the government controls the means of production; therefore, profit does not go to the owner of a corporation but, in theory, back to the government to be distributed among the people.

The pluralist model of political power views power as spread over a large number of groups with divergent values, interests and goals. An example of pluralist power would a labor union. This is a large group of people who all have their own individual views and opinions. However, as a group, a labor union can exert political power. The power elite model is almost the opposite, arguing that a small, elite group of people hold all the political power in a country. These elites can include someone as obvious as the president. Clearly, the president is a single person who holds a lot of power. However, the power elite model would argue that people like executives of large corporations are also part of this ruling power elite. They have the resources to influence people like the president and other politicians and therefore they hold a disproportionate amount of power. Finally, there is the Marxist model in which resources, and thereby power, is supposed to be distributed more evenly throughout society. You can see the Marxist model in something such as the Canadian healthcare system. It is a system that guarantees that everyone has healthcare, regardless of their economic status. In this system, rights such as healthcare are not restricted by how much capital a person has. They belong to every citizen.