Are corporations conspiring to take over the world?

MSNBC has an interesting article on whether corporations are taking over the planet - which makes "Globalism" the equivalent of a conspiracy to dominate the Earth.

It's an interesting article. A major point the author makes is that it is not a conspiracy. It is a bunch of unregulated international corporations which are each working for their own gain, and spreading across the world. It was a similar situation in America when corporations between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression were operating under the then prevalent Economic theory of the Free Market. The world wide depression beginning in 1872 and then the Great Depression beginning in 1929 were not the result of conspiracies. They were the result of the inadequacies of Economic knowledge and theory that existed at that time. They resulted in John M. Keynes' great theoretical presentation the "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money."

Keynesian Theory is not yet full developed. Milton Friedman said in a joint lecture with Paul Samuelson at Texas A&M that he was using Keynesian theory, but disagreed with Keynes about the relative importance of the money supply. The thing is that Keynesian economic theory is that it is applicable primarily to national economies using a single currency and under what is mostly a single set of government regulations. In the meantime, the theory of international economics applies to individual national economies operating in an unregulated space between those economies. Globalism appears to have badly blurred the distinctions between national economies and the theory of international economics.

In short, much like the U.S. economy in 1939, economic events are occurring that are not controlled by existing overall economic theory. The solution has been for corporations to retreat back to unrestricted Free Market ideas as would be expected of corporations operating within the idea of total self-interest. The absence of an accepted overall theory that balances the needs of labor, families, and less developed nations allows the corporations to ignore the problems their actions cause, while competition between global corporation forces them to try to beat each other to the most destructive actions they can take to avoid being left behind.

But the real problem of Globalism is not that it is a conspiracy among the corporations. The real problem is the total absence of an accepted global theory of economics and government agreement on how to deal with the corporations.