I'm not a fan of "big government" in principle, but one of the things I've been feeling lately is that it's pretty clear we need something big enough to push against increasingly giant mega-corporations, something whose primary goal is the welfare of the populace, and not some profit motive.

In a completely free competitive system, cheating becomes necessary to survive. This applies to almost any industry. In a weird way, you can't blame companies for cheating so much as the government for being too poorly structured/equipped to regulate effectively.

Cheating can take the form of: pollution, privacy violations, abuses of human behavior, exploitation of natural resources, corruption, etc. You'd be hard-pressed to think of a single F500 company that isn't benefiting from some form of cheating that is inadequately regulated at present.

Hell theft is the best form of business. Theres no reason to be so enamored by business as the best form of organization - it has its uses and weakenesses.

Counter to that would be to make things smaller again. Eliminate the corporation as a long term legal entity. Revert it back to what it was, a risk mitigation/investment technique for specific, short lived ventures.

This will never work.

Look, corporation etc. etc. are just tools for humanity to deal with complexity. To break it down into parts which we can manage.

IF we had larger brains we would have bigger corporations.

If we were a hive intelligence, we would have different configurations of corporations.

But we would always create a tool to expand into complexity for the efficiency gains or productivity gains we get.

In short - EVERY tool made that gives an advantage moves the system onto the next level of complexity till we fail.

If you have small corporations, then they will band together to become quasi corporations.

> ...something whose primary goal is the welfare of the populace, and not some profit motive.

It may not be a profit motive but governments' motives are sporadically focused on the public welfare at best.

That (failure to keep the public welfare in mind) is not the goal of the system though, but rather a failure case due to antagonist agents both within and outside the system.

It comes down to money in politics, where said money is a necessity to maintain an agent position within the system. This motive alone is enough to turn protagonist agents within the system into antagonist agents against the system.

Sure. But even if we removed the money, there would still be power, tribalism, fame, hatred, and all sorts of -isms to fill in the gaps and corrupt officials and regulations. I am pretty skeptical that empowering officials to regulate money doesn't just result in a new form of corruption.

I'd rather we make the government more focused and responsibilities more specific. We need to remove the incentives for throwing money into politics rather than try to play corruption whack-a-mole.

Government, for the most part, seems to actively promote giant mega-corps, particularly with all the mergers they've allowed happen over the last 30 years.

Company: "Merging this and that will benefit the customer." USGov: "Ok, good enough for me!"

You're right in that the genie will not go back to the bottle, but we have other models for aggregating social data / building networks on the horizon that don't involve a central entity (state or otherwise) so the future is likely to look very different and I'll bet very "weird" to us now.