Comment by SAI_Peregrinus
3 years ago
The optimal free market with no government is for corporations (collections of people) to use violent force to enforce their goals. A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
3 years ago
The optimal free market with no government is for corporations (collections of people) to use violent force to enforce their goals. A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules and in a lot of cases, does. The issue is the rules themselves, which were crafted by? Corps.
Corps are entirely different. They push harder and harder and harder for PROFITS and will inevitably cross lines. When crossing those lines not only has no meaningful penalty, but actually turns a profit, after the fines are subtracted, they will not only continue to do it, but push even harder. After all, there's no real consequences, so why worry?
Authoritarian governments exist, and are more common than democratic ones.
Besides, democratic corporations exist too. They are just incredibly rare.
Mind providing an example of a democratic corp?
I've never known of one.
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> A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules
The most despotic and scary governments of history would probably like a word with you. Maintaining a believable pretense of following any rules is a luxury we take for granted in many countries today, but Mao and Stalin didn't worry about the appearance of propriety.
Not really arguing against your main point though, I think you're right. Just don't forget how bad totalitarian governments can be.
The most totalitarian where internally structured like one cooperation.
You are citing outliers. A majority of the countries in the world aren't run by people like Stalin, or Pol Pot.
Yes, in those instances nothing is worse than the government, but a majority of the world doesn't live in those places. For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.
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> A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
Only if the government is a dictatorship. A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.
Boards appoint executives, boards are voted in by shareholders, shareholders are determined by $, the more money you have the more votes you can buy.
Companies are, in theory, dysfunctional representative republics.
Having to BUY a vote explicitly removes any consideration of it being any form of democracy. Democracy requires suffrage as a right, not a commodity.
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No, they're plutocracies, in the most literal sense. The involvement of votes doesn't factor into it. The "public" in "republic" refers to the public at large. A private corporation, being privately held, is necessarily not republican in any sense.
lol,this is basically dialog from the original Robocop movie
> A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.
True, but neither will a sufficiently powerful government.
looks around for an example of a functional democracy
How about the one that decided that a New York con man and money launderer was the right choice for president?
I'm concerned that democracy as a general concept has a showstopping bug with no obvious fix. A bug that's always been there but has recently become fatally easy to exploit. Essentially, giving stupid people the same political power as smart people is mandatory in a democracy, but problematic because the former are much easier for "smart" minorities on all sides to corral into blocs.
The whole system then devolves into a battle for control over the easily-led, which is equivalent to any other form of government by minority interests. Regardless of who is on top at any given time, they aren't there to represent the interests of the majority.
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No, if you remove either corporations or governments from the equation, the remaining thing will morph and split to recreate this. Corporations aren't fixed in stone - a sufficiently powerful one may be indistinguishable from a dictatorship, but it'll also evolve the same way.
That wouldn't be a free market. It would be some kind of oligarchic corporatism. Government is necessary to truly enable free markets. The key to understanding that is to understand what "free" truly means [0]. It isn't "do what thou wilt".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38537665
A freely competitive market (as envisioned by Adam Smith) is very different from a free market (as the term is commonly used today, at least by many conservative political parties). I fully agree that without sufficient regulations markets cease to be freely competitive.
This reminds me of the East India Company: forcing China to buy opium even if it really harmed both its population and economy.
Indian may not be too happy with all the Marathas wars and colonization.
Anyway, is not a matter of which is the worse but of how can we get the best from both of them
The East India Company didn’t directly even ship opium to China, that was all done by private merchants.
And in any case initially it wasn’t so much about opium as about free trade in general. The British would’ve been fine with selling textiles, tools and other stuff to the Chinese people who wanted to buy them. Opium was just much easier to smuggle than anything else.