There are many people who state that they don't want the government telling them how to think. And yet these same people are perfectly happy to let non-government entities such as Christian Right, Texas Oil, Jehovah's Witnesses and right-wing talk radio tell them what to think. Their thought and behavior is controlled by external power to the same extent as it would be if it had been the government doing it; and this power is inferior in its vision and integrity to that of the government and vastly inferior to that of science.
Why is it inferior? Because the governments in the West are checked and balanced and made to be accountable to the voter; whereas there is no such checks and balance and accountability on private entities such as the above. And while the government-funded science has produced the knowledge that has been necessary for creation of private-sector prosperity, these entities have produced no usable knowledge except in the art of the con. They spread ridiculous conspiracy theories, make fraudulent denunciations of scientific methodology, and tell outright lies as a matter of policy, with no accountability, check or balance being imposed upon them. And that makes these entities far inferior to the government, which is subject to such checks and balances and accountability, and vastly inferior to science which is subject to still greater checks for what it can produce.
It takes a lot to make and support a claim in science. It takes very little to do so on radio talk shows or in evangelist TV. A scientist who claims that AIDS is God's way of controlling the homosexual population or that 9-11 was God's punishment for America would lose his job; yet the Christian Right continually makes these and other fraudulent claims and passes them off as divine righteousness or the word of God. In doing so it profanes all Christian principle and integrity and turns Christianity into a tool of deception. And when Christian Right, as the author of these deceptions, claims to preach ethics and values, it deceives people to an even greater extent - an extent that would be unthinkable if it came either from the government or from academic science.
With the deniers of global warming, we see again ridiculous conspiracy theories and blatant deceptions going to war against real knowledge. Simply to put, there is no chance that global warming would be any kind of a hoax or a conspiracy; it was known to both Soviet and American scientists as early as 1950s, at the time that America and the Soviet Union were blood enemies. Blood enemies do not conspire with one another, and there is no chance that tens of thousands of the world's best minds, using highest standards of scientific integrity, over decades of study, would be under control of such an impossible conspiracy.
We see similar irresponsible conspiracy theories all around. Whether it is the Marxists claiming that property class exists to exploit workers or objectivists claiming that philosophers exist to extort from the producer, in both cases we see paranoia taking the place of knowledge. Extorting from anyone has been the farthest from the minds of Socrates, Lao Tsu, Spinosa, Nietzche or any other real philosopher. As for business, it is there to make money, which it can do in any number of ways, including by hiring people who otherwise would be starving and paying them money that is a pittance for us but that allows them to greatly improve their condition relative to where they would be otherwise. And science, whose integrity both the Christian Right and the global warming deniers impugn, it is at the root of all technology, which means that it is at the root of all prosperity; and attacking it militates against what made one's prosperity possible in the first place.
That government is capable of corruption, everyone knows. But not nearly enough people understand that non-government entities are also capable of fraud and corruption; and that, unlike the government, these entities are not subject to accountability, check and balance, which means that their capacity for deception is far greater than that of the government and massively greater than that of science. It is therefore of paramount significance to see these entities for the fraud that they perpetrate and to confront them about the fraud that they perpetrate. This is the case with the Christian Right, with deniers of global warming, and with any number of other liar media outlets that we see in the world today.