Comment by sonicanatidae
3 years ago
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.
Cooperatives used to be more common than they are now. And used to be democratic.
Software consultancies is one of the markets where democratic consultancies were common enough for one to see them.
But now the world is property of a handful of corporations, so you won't see any contemporary example.
> 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.
> For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.
No, for most people it's corporations that enable our current best-in-history lifestyle. The hardest things we face are scarcities created by government policy.
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