Political note: calls for nationalisation, in American politics, is a gift to the other side. It lets one paint the opposition as extremists without grounding in U.S. Constitutional law or the economic history of countries that regularly expropriate property.
I get the impulse. But literally any other phrasing—massive fines, criminal prosecution, open-licensing requirements, et cetera—is more productive for any aim other than blowing steam.
Perhaps you should rephrase this as "calls for nationalization run counter to my own free-market ideology" rather than a) assuming you know what everybody else thinks, and b) suggesting that conventional wisdom should dictate the bounds of acceptable discourse.
Not to mention, plenty of countries — the US included — have successfully nationalized companies and entire industries.
Its so crazy to me that some Americans label abstract ideas as evil. Communism == evil. Socialism == evil. Many welfare programs == evil. Immigrant labor == evil. High minimum wage == evil. Some languages, religions, cultures == evil. Stop subverting the English language because you're too lazy to check a thesaurus. None of those things are evil.
They are, rather, making a statement about strategy and messaging in American politics; a point which has borne out in countless political contests over the past decade alone. There is a reason why Republicans try to say "socialis(t/ism)" as often as possible. It works.
One example off the top of my head is Florida during the most recent presidential election. The Republicans beat the drums of socialism broadly and especially targeted at Cuban-Americans who immediately think of Castro. Voters who might otherwise skew towards Biden went Trump.
Again, that's one example, but the point is about _messaging_ and how the electorate in America broadly (not 100%, everywhere, etc.) responds to "socialism". (Nationalization being, of course, clearly tied to socialism.)
Whatever bad things you see with ATT and Comcast are actually a direct result of city granted monopolies which will likely be ended by Musk's Starlink sooner or later.
"city-granted monopolies", are you kidding? The monopolies exist because of non-competition arrangements between companies. A city can't have anything but a monopoly when only one company willing to run cable because they've made everybody else agree to keep off their turf.
And starlink won't save anybody. For one thing, satellite internet already exists, you can buy it from providers like Viasat, DirecTV, and Hughesnet: it's expensive and the latency is outrageous because of the speed-of-light distance to satellites.
I get that you're just reciting the propaganda talking points that you've heard from news organizations and media properties (which are all now owned by telecom monopolies thanks to all the cash they have to spare from the extremely profitable telecom business, funny how that works), but a person can hope.
Starlink latency is materially improved from traditional satellite internet providers. 20ms vs 500ms. Conflating them borders on equivocation.
This happens regardless of how extreme or radical the proposal is, so why start from a position of compromise? This is what happens when one party cries "wolf" for 40 years.
Why should it be off the table? Does the average person even give a shit about the public/private status of Intuit? I get conservatives will complain but they will (and do) literally call ANY improvement to the IRS Communism. Is the hope that if you play language games they’ll see the light?
Intuit aren't alone in this scheme. There must be people who think taxes should be complex and scary, so would be against making it easy and convenient. What I wonder though is: aren't there any such people in the rest of the developed world where filing taxes IS simple?
Yes, that solution is obvious, and has been for quite a while. The problem is that Intuit et al, through their lobbying, are blocking it. So the problem that needs solving now is how to block that lobbying.
> There must be people who think taxes should be complex and scary, so would be against making it easy and convenient. What I wonder though is: aren't there any such people in the rest of the developed world where filing taxes IS simple?
Most countries' politics are a lot more sane than the USA's, so such people aren't able to exert quite the same perverse amount of power through "lobbying" -- i.e. bribery, thinly disguised as "campaign contributions" -- as in the USA. (Oh sure, most countries have at least some of that shit, in various forms. But few, on the whole, as bad as the USA.)
Populism changes the equation. Populism blurs the left/right split.
Populists of all political persuasions can get behind nationalizing Intuit.
Exxon would be another nice target.
Corporations are legal fictions. If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out, what are you doing? Corporate death penalties are ultimately meaningless without an expropriation component.
Better: massive fines and/or pulling critical licenses. Arthur Andersen and Enron were felled through these mechanisms. They are legal. They are proven. They are precedented and they work.
If you wantonly break the law, you should not be a going concern. But "nationalization" and "corporate death penalty" are political hot potatoes. (I'm entirely sidestepping the argument as to whether that's reasonable.) If you want these companies shut down, or fearful of being shut down, credibly threatening to break them up, fine them into bankruptcy or suspend their licenses (e.g. for Intuit, their tax preparation license) is more effective.
> Corporations are legal fictions.
Then they shouldn't have the same rights as real people. If they're just fictions, then it stands to reason that at least when they behave so egregiously that their fictional life has to be ended, their worth and value also turns out to be fictional.
> If you're wiping out shareholders and creditors, who do the assets go to? If you aren't wiping them out, what are you doing? Corporate death penalties are ultimately meaningless without an expropriation component.
Exactly. And since the whole point of a limited-liability stock company is that a single entrepreneur shan't be liable with all he owns, but each shareholder only with the value of his investment, then it is precisely that investment that will turn out to have no value: After creditors are paid off, any remaining value goes to the state, which is the entity that hitherto, through the contract and other laws it maintains, has upheld the fiction that this kitty of money is a separate thing capable of exerting a legal will and intent; for this particular kitty, that fiction has now come to an end.
As for "wiping out" shareholders (not creditors, as per the above)... Yes and no, and above all: So what? As mentioned, their investment is exactly what they are willing to risk; that's the whole idea. Three points on this:
1) They could just as well lose it all if the company goes bankrupt some other way, so pretending that this is some new and unique possible outcome is disingenuous.
2) If they're "wiped out" because they've put all their life savings into any one company, the poor bastards should have looked up "diversifying". Again, not unique to this.
3) Wow, great -- finally some incentive for shareholder activism, to try and rein in old / appoint better new boards and CXOs and curb some of the evil shit corporations do, eh?
> Better: massive fines and/or pulling critical licenses. Arthur Andersen and Enron were felled through these mechanisms. They are legal. They are proven. They are precedented and they work.
Bullpucky. Two corporations, out of the myriad that had deserved it, that's ridiculously ineffective.
> If you wantonly break the law, you should not be a going concern.
Exactly. Then the fiction should end.
> But "nationalization" and "corporate death penalty" are political hot potatoes. (I'm entirely sidestepping the argument as to whether that's reasonable.)
Maybe they're such hot potatoes precisely because people, like you here now, keep sidestepping the argument.
> If you want these companies shut down, or fearful of being shut down, credibly threatening to break them up, fine them into bankruptcy or suspend their licenses (e.g. for Intuit, their tax preparation license) is more effective.
Sure, that too... But it seems imbalanced to limit yourself to only that, as long as you still have the death penalty for real people.
(And, hey, if you're fine with "fin[ing] them into bankruptcy" -- what happened, all of a sudden, to those poor shareholders and creditors; is wiping them out suddenly OK now?)
Corporate death penalties reinvent the wheel for zero benefit. It gets, at best, to the same place as fines or revocation. It adds the needless step of creating an unprecedented and politically-charged term with major constitutional flaws in respect of the taking of private property. If I’m a lobbyist trying to gut antitrust and the threat of those stronger measures I just mentioned, corporate death penalties are an almost all-too-perfect red herring. It severs the left from the centre-left so cleanly that I’m about 10% sure it came out of the right.
If you like the idea of ending companies for bad things, skip fabricated steps and push for specific crimes being punishable with fines equal to a substantial fraction of enterprise value and/or license revocations. You would have to do that anyway with any corporate death penalty rules. Go straight for the kill.
Unless, of course, the aim is rabble rousing. In that case, fight for corporate death penalties. It’s effective at turning out certain voting blocks.
> [corporations] shouldn't have the same rights as real people
Corporations don’t have the same rights as natural persons.
They have many of them, but those are mostly severable through legislation. Incorporation does have broad support. Taking the evil lobbyist from the previous example, if she sees a list of ten corporate reforms she doesn’t like, adding ending corporate personhood to the list guarantees opposition from small business to multinationals, NGOs and unions to trade associations.
This is an extremist view and basically advocating theft. I do not think IRS has competence to build and run a complex software system.
> Their company activities over the last few decades are so flagrantly, indisputably bad for the country
That is debatable.
> There's literally no upside, none at all. They have intentionally sabotaged tax filing and leeched off the people by corruptly inserting themselves as middlemen
They have not inserted themselves anywhere. You are free to use CPA or do all the paperwork yourself and save yourself $70 bucks.
It's hard for me to believe they are the source of the problem, particularly with such a shabby fourth estate.
I thought the citizens are the federal electorate?
[0]https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...