It's not like corporations really have a better track record. Quite a few of the colonisation efforts were done by corporations or under private management (not "nations"). Corporations hid and obscured facts about asbestos, smoking, climate change, etc. for decades. Various corporations are not exactly well known for their excellent treatment of people in various less well-off regions (Shell in Nigeria, Dole in South-Africa, etc.), abuse of monopoly positions has a long history, and when corporations really screw things up it's up to the nations to provide some sort of relief (1930s, 2008, housing crisis in various countries).

"Illegal not to subscribe to the state TV channel" seem like small fries.

>It's not like corporations really have a better track record.

The governments of Russia, Germany and China killed over a hundred million of their own people last century, no corporation comes anything near that.

The capitalist colonization of North America, complete with genocide and chattel slavery, deserves at least honorable mention. Also the East India Company, and the Irish famines orchestrated by British landowners, and many more.

Just because the companies doing the murder are more numerous and regularly go out of business, doesn’t mean that capitalism’s hands are free of blood.

Many of those governments had help. It's not the Nazis killed millions with their bare hands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben#Zyklon_B

> In my country it is illegal not to subscribe to the state TV channel.

This is, frankly, a very silly thing to get hung up on.

First of all, I assume you mean you have to make some payment that goes to that channel, not that you're forced to watch it.

Second, this means you're essentially passing a presumably small tax that is earmarked for that channel.

In other words, it's not any different from all the other taxes: paying them is part of life in society, and you're never going to agree with all their uses.

I bet there are far bigger items in your government's budget that you disagree with.

> In my country it is illegal not to subscribe to the state TV channel.

Just curious: 1) What country 2) Do you have to pay?

Certainly not the U.K, many people don’t pay for a license fee, there’s no law saying you have to. Everyone pays elevated prices for itv even though we don’t watch it though as the funding comes from tesco, sainsburys, etc increasing prices to pay for it.

a lot of European counties pay for state tv from a tax on things like electricity, but saying “it’s illegal not to pay tax” is an odd statement.

1) I'd rather not say, although you can probably figure out from my post history if you really want to know

2) Yes

Arguably, this could be the UK to some degree, given that if you have a TV, you're expected to pay for a "TV license", the funds of which go entirely to the state run broadcaster.

It's not mandatory to get a TV license, but they will harass you and strongly imply you're a fraud if you don't get one. You can fill in a declaration stating that you don't need one to make the harassment go away for a year. I refused to do so out of principle and eventually I got a letter saying they "opened an investigation" in to me, but I never heard more about it. shrug.

Actually, (if I guessed your country right) since 2019 it is replaced by a "general public service fee", which is a tax that is earmarked for public service uses.

You might not like where your taxes go, but at least you can vote for that to change. In a company you have no such freedom unless you have the financial ability to buy stock.

> Consider all the horrors that large nations have inflicted on this world.

The British East India company was a corporation when it took over large parts of India.

> The British East India company was a corporation when it took over large parts of India.

Corporations are chartered by governments and reflect the chartering government’s values (which may be laissez-faire, but in the case of the British East India Company—and it's state-granted monopoly, violations of which were punishable by indefinite term of imprisonment—were decidedly not.)