A country doesn't need authoritarianism to accomplish this. Many democratic countries have a long history of very similar behavior.
Even a company with the resources of Google found it difficult to establish their own ISP in the USA. So did local governments within the USA. Famously, Google said it could not have been founded in Britain due to their onerous copyright laws.
The incumbent merely needs enough money to shut down the competition; with money comes influence and capability. Different countries require different strategies, all of which need money. If you're in China, you join the party to crush opposition; if you're in the USA, you bribe Congressman to regulate them out of business (or just sue them); if you're in Mexico, you send your armed thugs to kill the leaders.
I've never seen a politician 'held accountable' for doing something I don't like in a democracy.
I'll pick out George W. Bush who (with massive public support) charged in to the Middle East, glassed one or two countries, set the US up for 20 years so far of ruinously expensive wars. He served two full terms. I might have seen an article sometime recently that he had taken up painting and is pretty good at it.
What level of accountability am I expecting him to be held to for that? I think those may have been some of the worst political actions taken in my lifetime. When you say "less accountable" - what do you think shows a democratic government being held accountable? I like democracy, but I don't think the government is accountable.
Corporations are actually held accountable. If they screw up, the owners can lose out massively. Executives too through incentive programs.
Corporations are only accountable if they fail to make money. Unless they're too big to fail, in which case they're accountable to no one.
It's all well and good to pick a blatant example of a politician doing evil and getting away with it; on the flip side I see politicians at the local level losing re-election for doing things their constituents don't like. In any event, I'd much prefer democratic accountability over corporate accountability when it comes to entities who have the ability to take away my freedom or deprive me of life.
Corporations absolutely are held to account. The US is holding hearings on the tech giants at the moment. Apple is in court over the App Store. Microsoft got smacked down over anti-trust. Banks and google have been fined billions of dollars.
Theres a reasonable case that these sanctions were not sufficient, but that's just an opinion. Other people's opinions differ. Sorting that our is what democracy is for, but we cant always expect it to produce the results you or I personally prefer.
We might be in furious agreement on a couple of points here. I've been choosing my words fairly carefully - I want some sort of justification of the idea that the government or anyone in it is somehow accountable for anything.
If accountability means everyone sort of shrugged and moves on over the single worst barrage of decisions I've observed in US politics in the last 30 years then either it isn't accountable or being accountable is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure the government is unaccountable by design - it does whatever the polity wants that day, and then there aren't any meaningful consequences if the idea worked out or not. Democracy represents the best thing we have, but I don't accept that it represents accountability. Good people can get voted out and replaced by better people, for example. Or term limits kick in. They represent the electorate changing its mind on what approach to try in a no-fault-implied manner.
Corporations actually have a built in accountability - if they don't have customers onboard with the idea that they are providing goods and services effectively then they disappear and their owners get hit right in the financials. I can see that in the companies I deal with - they do what I want quickly and with no fuss by and large. They are accountable to me - if I don't like the service I go elsewhere and that is their loss. I can't see it in government, and I'm not seeing anyone in this thread who has managed to lay it out for me. Most of the politicians representing me I would dearly like to replace for their many and obvious failings. They certainly aren't accountable to me, and I don't know anyone who they are accountable to or I'd spend more time trying to argue my views to that person.
Do they? The continued existence of most American telecoms and insurers would appear to prove otherwise.
Really, the issue with American politics is that presidential incumbents rarely get challenged by their own parties, and the two-party system is terrible for providing any sort of nuanced choice. Bush's legacy was truly punished in 2008, when America elected the most serious looking anti-Bush candidate running by one of the largest electoral and popular vote shares in recent history. (Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain were successfully painted as not anti-Bush enough during that campaign season.) And generally speaking American democracy doesn't outright prosecute former leaders, because generally speaking the government does not like the appearance of political retribution.
John Kerry was also not a great candidate to have run with an anti-Iraq campaign plank, and 2004 was too soon for most of the country to have soured on the war.
Corporations are legal fictions that exist for the purpose of preventing their owners from being held accountable.
Concentrating capital to achieve big projects that founders wouldn't be able to fund themselves is clearly beneficial for economic growth
Untrue; the law of partnerships, which is older than corporations, already allowed people to contribute capital to a goal and have their respective rights governed by law. The legal arrangements are different in a corporation, those differences centering around the limitation of liability—the freedom from accountability—provided to the investors.
That freedom from accountability is the central focus of the corporate form. And it's arguably an aberrant path dependency; had we had limited partnerships first, the idea of business form where no one is ultimately accountable for the liabilities of the business—rather than one to which investors could contribute with limited liability while the active principals remained fully accountable—might never have seemed like a good idea, even to the investor class.
You still don't have a legal instrument (a share) that you can freely transact and has attached rights.
It's maybe important to realize that when the amounts get bigger and the projects riskier that the personal liability becomes meaningless.
What happens if you are personally liable for a 10 million eur debt... well your life is over, but also nobody is going to actually get their money back from you cause you are not able to pay that.
I think it's quite rational for a society to say that you will lose everything you have in that business, but the investors/debtors can only pursue you up-to this point. Especially when taking on riskier projects that require lots of capital.
For example, Carly Fiorina wiped half the value of HP away but was given a massive payout to leave the company. I’ve seen estimates it was in region of $42m.
That said, the US does have term limits to at least blunt the damage when the balance of power and even impeachment don't suffice.
So you're arguing that we don't need to hold GWB to account. Fair enough, there were mitigating circumstances. But then in what sense is the government accountable for anything?
Corporations and government are both held to account through the courts, I suppose. But the government will often change the rules so it isn't accountable (eg, wiretapping scandals), so that is a weaker form of accountability than a corporation faces. Is there an actual meaty argument to the idea that governments are more accountable than corporations? Because I'm drawing blanks on the times when a government was held to account for anything in a manner that wouldn't also apply to corporate actions.
Given that record, I think there is a better argument for putting him in charge of the US healthcare system than putting the people in overseeing the healthcare system in charge of Amazon. Bezoscare written by Bezos would likely be much more effective than Obamacare written by the US Congress.
And I still don't see the argument that the US government is somehow more accountable than he is.
guess you missed 2008
So whatever accountability the government faces it isn't enough to stop someone becoming president.
I'm sticking to my point here - I don't think the government is held accountable in any meaningful way for its screw ups. not_kurt_godel's opinion needs more support on this. If the government hadn't stepped in, a lot of banks would have lost everything in 2008 - they were on the verge of being held very accountable and I'm still grouchy that they weren't. The government should not be in the business of buying worthless assets.
[0] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...
But I agree with you that the way they bailed them out did not hold them accountable, they should have "invested" in those banks by buying newly issued shares which would have completely wiped out the existing shareholders.
However, rather than the normal way to raise capital, they gave a blanket permit to the federal reserve to buy the bad debt from the banks.
The US government and the people by extension should have become the owners of those banks which they could resell the ownership again on the private market with a profit at a later point.
Ha! Is that why climate crisis is being driven by 100 companies? What's your excuse for that? Some outdated Malthusian analysis of it being the consumer's fault for not "voting with their dollar?" which is an outdated and foolish libertarian argument Marx eviscerated long ago? A system where each person has one vote will be more democratic, even if corrupt, than a corporation which is not. You talk about centralization of power as if you cannot decentralize economic control democratically, which is exactly what the socialist/Marxist prescription is (please don't bother replying that "socialism/Marxism is when the government does stuff, like owning all the business," because that's an all-too-common misconception).
We have regulations because businesses often will do whatever they can get away with and are not accountable due to how much money they can make and are ran entirely undemocratically. Child labor laws. 40 hour work week. Safety regulations. Prohibition of leaded gasoline and leaded paint. Etc. These are examples of the state enforcing some degree of accountability onto businesses and it has been for the greater good of society. Without the state doing this these corporations could get away with anything (and often do get away with pretty much anything, anyway, due to material conditions, but removing what little protections we do have under liberal democracy would make things even worse [just look whence we came]).
Even in your own example of "corporate accountability," that accountability is coming from the government. Moreover, what's left of your argument is just saying "vote with your dollar," which hm:
> In 2019, families with net worths exceeding $1 million owned 79.2 percent of all the household wealth in the country. The bottom half of American families held just 1.5 percent of the wealth.
I could cite statistics like that all day. If your answer is to "vote with your dollar," then it's plain to see who has the most voting power! What's left then? To out-compete those with a dominion over material and the means of production?
Is that why the few billionaires who run the show, because they ultimately they control the material conditions, are able to control the means of production and basically make everyone bow to their demands to an extreme degree, barely curtailed only by a dwindling bourgeoisie democracy which the working class can only faintly tolerate. Why they pour tons of money into influencing electors and politicians? Also, I hope you don't give the libertarian argument "well corporations only get big an evil because the government exists!" Due to the way commodity production/the commodity form works, it is something which consolidates over time, and as we have seen some examples in history, enterprises which get large enough eventually establish their own rules and become the de facto state.
Is that why less than ten corporations own almost all the brands people are familiar with? That is not how commodity production works. The evolution of the commodity form has been one of competing commodity producers, where one will always lose out and have to sell their wage labor to the winning commodity producer and the existing commodity producers absorb the labor power, means of production, and continue expanding in a way which someone starting from 0 can not overwhelm. This is the economy of scale. You can cherry pick "disruptive" technologies all you want, but if you look at who holds most of the wealth in the world (a handful of billionaires), and their control over various industries, what I'm saying becomes extremely apparent.
Also your example doesn't even make sense--the war indeed had massive support--we're talking about democratic accountability as in doing what the people want. You're simply playing with words at this point, you're asking if we can try an elected official we elected into office for something that had popular support at the time? Does corruption in the state happen? Yes and often. But by default, corruption is the name of the game in corporations whose sole purpose is the profit-motive under dictatorial/elite rule, or at the very least, rule by profit incentive.
When you leave the devices of power out of the hands of voters, you just let the profit incentive and a shrinking minority of billionaires control things--we literally made a device that separates rich people's heads from their bodies over this (to establish liberal democracy).
The answer is not more totalitarianism, but more democratic control over the economy and government, not less.
What a load of rubbish--shame to see stuff like this on Hacker news so often, likely due to out-of-touch petite bourgeoisie (as many programmers are), lending them to reactionary bents.
It's extremely reactionary to look at the over-centralization of power and say "ah, the solution is to give more power to corporations which already dominate the material conditions!" Again the solution is to further decentralize power by making the economy and enterprises democratic (and to increase the level of democracy present in the government). You can just gather that from a basic anarchist and Marxist analysis.
The major question on my mind is, should we distribute power by a democratic vote over orgs which control a collection of resources, or should we do it by distributing ownership of resources with individual freedom to commit those resources anywhere? Is one more efficient, or less likely to centralize, than the other?
Not to mention they don’t have the threat of jail, military, police, and other coercion to use against you.
Truth is the two work hand in hand. Big corporation loves big government
Took me sometime to find a source for this. For those who are interested [1], although it was not directly from Google's Founder / CEO
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/mar/14/cameron-copyri...
That's because other companies were using their control over government to prevent it. We need a system where government actually governs and yet doesn't directly control or get influenced by companies. I have no idea what that looks like.
Notably absent of those advisory boards are non-existing future companies. It's relatively rare for regulation to kill off businesses in democracies.. at most it's to boost barriers to entry.
In China and Mexico where the rule of law is selectively applied, incumbents do kill competition outright.
The problem with authoritarianism is that not only does it have all the regulatory limiting problems of free capital democracies, but you also can't even rely on those rules, at all, because a leader can overrule them at a whim at any time.
Sort of tangentially related, this reminds me of a story (not sure if it is true, I don't even remember the source for it) that movie-making became centered in California because the creative people wanted to not be forced to follow some onerous patents of camera manufacturers or something.
Edit: Wikipedia article for Hollywood also says this:
» In the early 1900s, most motion picture patents were held by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey, and filmmakers were often sued to stop their productions. To escape this, filmmakers began moving out west to Los Angeles, where attempts to enforce Edison's patents were easier to evade.
The citation is http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3871.html
What you really need to avoid these issues is ways to distribute power. Anti trust, democracy, checks and balances, etc where lots of people to agree
The systems are not equivalent. Trying to say one is better is short sighted and self defeating.
The US if it does not deal with monopolies is headed to a worst of all possible worlds.
Democracies are not perfect and are always evolving
You have to thank disinformation and mass brainwashing for that. The fact that there is virtually no opposition in China says how far they have gone to control people.
Eg. The lack of opposition to the idea that water is wet does not imply that water is in fact dry and everyone is just brain washed
There's no world in which no opposition actually exists when there is a little bit of freedom. You can observe it even in small groups where people can express themselves: you won't have a single convergence of opinions on every topic.
Attack their argument on its own merits.
You cannot have productive discussion with people who have no access to different sources of information. The CCP completely controlling education, media and the Internet makes most people in China in a very bad position to access facts versus pure State propaganda. Add to that a strong social pressure to conform and punishment for divergence and yes, you have mass brainwashing going on.
Now, do you not think that we have any relevant prevailing biases, created by our education, media, history, culture, economic system, and government? [1] Ones that are so deeply ingrained in our society, that we don't even notice them?
If we were to apply your rubric, that would make arguments between people from different cultures completely unproductive - with each person hailing from each culture being able to dismiss the other's out of hand.
The argument you are dismissing as brainwashing seems pretty straightforward to me. It's entirely possible, even reasonable for economic stability to be a goal worth pursuing for government. You may find it anathema, but that viewpoint isn't particularly privileged, in the global space of ideas.
[1] That's a rhetorical question - of course we do. They are incredibly obvious to anyone who's lived in a few different countries.
The difference is the key though. In the West we know that we are brainwashed at some level, because we can observe it happening around us with people who share different viewpoints or cultures.
However, in a country where there's only one discourse that is accepted, you can mistake your own brainwashing for the actual truth because nothing is out there to make you think otherwise.
We are all brainwashed to an extent. Knowing that can at least prepare you to bring a good scrub and soap on your washings.
The CCP values absolute, total, ubiquitous and unquestioned control.
Challenging their authority with the mere comparison of Xi to 'Winnie the Pooh' will incite censure.
Not all authoritarianism, for instance Singapore is great for business. Totalitarianism maybe?
The problem with authoritarianism is transfer of power.
You can get an enlightened ruler once in a while (the expected value of competence is still a lot lower than in a democracy). But long run it devolves like other despotic countries
There was a TV interview in mid-00s in which the airhead interviewing LHL was really curious about how mad he must have been that Goh had led Singapore for a few years before he took over, and he grew more and more embarrassed as he assured her repeatedly that no, it hadn't been any sort of insult. Hilarious.
Lee Hsien Loong has been trying to soften his image since he took office.
Two examples: the press ceasing use of military ranks for all politicians (I remember him being addressed as Brigadier-General (Ret.) before), and his wearing of soft pink business shirts whenever he has to make an address.
So although Lee Kuan Yew left office 30 years ago, his influence has been present ever since.
For existing business, not new one
Now, if you mean technology instability, completely agreed. That's where innovation comes from.
I think Uber's a perfect example. Taxi regulations either have been stable or essentially unenforced for decades in most places. This gave them the opening. However, everyone getting a smartphone in 2010-2011 is what really blew the doors open.
Those are generally good for new businesses too. Who wants to start a new business when someone comes by and changes all the rules suddenly?
> War is good for business
I think this may be true but I would like to see a better argument for it. It is not hard to find businesses that have been successful specifically due to authoritarian State patronage (e.g. Huawei in China, Chaebols in South Korea).
Authoritarianism is bad because it enables party cadre to outright steal businesses (expropriation) and protect incumbents.
The case you want me to argue authoritarianism is bad for business is where the state is buying goods or services and picks a winner by providing state patronage.
The short answer here is that when the state picks winners, they are screwing themselves because the incentive to innovate disappears in companies that managed to attain "regulatory capture".
There is also a significant incentive for big companies to merge or bid on government contracts as a joint-venture (e.g. Airbus, United Launch Alliance) because they can form a price cartel.
That the state does not break up these cartels and goes along with it is because politicians are generally not too savvy and most likely a good amount of corruption is involved.
Anti-trust laws are used to protect consumers and businesses, but ironically I haven't seen them used to protect the government as a customer.
If somebody has the wealth to buy this company, they already have considerable power
Well, it is - although the extent to which this should extend from humans to corporations is debatable. Otherwise you end up with situations like Philip Morris suing Australia over their anti-smoking policy.
Obviously not a fan of PM but if there's rules there's gotta be a way to enforce them, from both sides.
Great idea, but it is untenable because it would rule out taxes. And if it didn't, then the authoritarians would claim they were levying a tax.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization#Etymology
[2] https://nickledanddimed.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/nazi.png
The problem before the Nazis arrived to power was deflation (1) not inflation.
(1) - https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3838
Equinor (Statoil) and Gazprom seem to have produced results that can only be described as precisely the opposite of being run into the ground.
Lately the US doesn’t seem like a good place for businesses to become “too successful” in either. See the banning of TikTok and all the ruckus about forcing Apple to open the App Store or breaking Google up etc.
Economic growth and well being of the majority are not necessarily the same thing.
But it's also good for business when the business's owner belongs to a ruling clique or is very close to it or, at least, always cooperates with it.
The problem is... what if you are not? Even worse, what if this monopoly business is a crucial supplier for other businesses?
Now these government guys can extract all the profits from their clients because there is no other choice.
2020-06-21: A Trump rally in Tulsa is reportedly trolled by people on Tik Tok.
2020-08-06: Executive order issued banning Tik Tok in November unless it can be sold to American stakeholders.
2020-09-14: Oracle is reportedly in the lead to acquire Tik Tok.
2020-11-12: Department of Commerce puts stay on the executive order.
There's a lot of talk about national security issues and whatnot, but the timing between Trump losing face and Tik Tok almost being acquired by American interests is just too convenient to ignore.
The stability of contract law is essential to a well functioning market and the actions of this administration are just plain gross.
I am happy to agree with you that the president should have also restricted power abroad in let's say something like an overarching trade agreement that puts checks and balances on individual states.
This is true, but there are also plenty of cases where big businesses have propped up authoritarian regimes because they fear someone else more. The best historical example for this is Hitler; his rise was heavily supported by big and small businesses that feared left wing groups would cut into their profits[0]. This is part of why Hitler was able to rise despite never commanding an overwhelming majority.
0 - To be somewhat fair to the big businesses, there were actual communists running around Germany trying to get a revolution going there too, and that would be very bad for business too.
In interwar Germany, there were also old imperialists who didn't value democracy too high that were more than willing to ally with Hitler.
It wasn't just businesses, it was also the church who rightly feared prosecution from the communists.
There were very few pro-democracy parties in interwar Germany and NSDAP was the only one with a huge militia that would be able to defend against a communist revolution.
The army was too small because of the treaty of versailles.
You could argue that businesses picked the least-worst option among a plate of very bad options.
Accumulate enough power and you are an "authority"
Therefore a system that facilitates business ("capitalism" or whatever) is implicitly authoritarian.
Right?
Power can be a side-effect because you make A LOT of money and people are generally happy to do things for money, but generally businesses are not political and are dependent on their political environment.
Specifically the "return money to the shareholders" part can be affected by weak rule of law and weak property laws
China has a huge population and is destined to have a huge economy, however they are still playing catch up with the west.
GDP/capita US: 65k usd
GDP/capita Russia: 11.2k usd
GDP/capita China: 9.7k usd
It remains to be seen to what extent China will be able to restrain it's party cadre from sabotaging growth in the next decade
There is also the "creative destruction problem" where an innovative company is beating an incumbent, but the incumbent happens to be partially owned by party cadre and leverages its power to shut down the innovator.
In my humble opinion, the security and protection of property under the rule of law should be a human right as it's the core driver of economic growth.