You just want to trade a monopoly on violence for a market of violence, and for some reason you believe that would make you safer. But you're making the common mistake of assuming that corporations won't simply fill the power vacuum themselves in the absence of a government capable of stopping them.

Government power is the only thing stopping corporations from exercising violence against you or take away your rights. Look at the way corporations operated in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when they had company towns and private armies coercing votes and killing strikers, or corporations' support for coups and cartels in foreign markets, or just the East India Trading Company, which was a de facto superpower of its time.

100% this.

I heard it said that the only things Americans know about is World war Two and they don't know that much about that. It's a sobering thought.

To your point, if anyone wants to see the effects of unchecked corporate power, just look at the 19th century and the robber barons. most notably, look at the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency [1].

"Detective agency" is an inocuous sounding name but at its peak the Pinkertons outnumbered the US Army. Pinkertons were frequently used as striker breakers and to quash any form of labor movement. They did so with the blessing of the US government.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

While you and the parent are totally correct about the dynamics of power vacuums, I think it's also relevant to note that the robber-baron stuff wasn't exactly happening in some kind of Hobbesian state of nature - it's right there at the end of your quote: "They did so with the blessing of the US government". This was an environment where centralized authority was weakened to the point that private armies were worthwhile, yet still strong enough to engage in selective enforcement on behalf of corporate powers. Hence, the dynamic where you'd get beaten up by the Pinkertons and then arrested for fighting back. This sort of halfway environment is the worst possible case: in a more total vacuum, opposing corporate power via collective action is more viable; in a society with a stronger grip on a monopoly on violence, corporate abuses are (theoretically) restrained.

While untrammeled corporate power and untrammeled government power are both scary, the effective fusion of the two via state capture is the real nightmare. I think that sort of halfway environment, where there's enough state to be worth capturing but not enough to be an effective counterweight, is the default in a lot of the particularly cursed post-colonial nations - Angola and Burma spring to mind - where traditional means of social organization were sublimated into the colonial state, leaving a vacuum when the colonial state itself began to molder.

The government is the only entity that can use violence legally, but it's also the only entity that cares about whether something is legal. Any idiot with a baseball bat can break your kneecaps for doing something they don't want. If you have a strong government, the threat that they will use force deters the vast majority of would-be kneecap breakers, and gives you some recourse against the few that remain.

The idea that corporations are escapable is merely a product of living your whole life in a society where governments are strong and reliable. If google started sending out henchmen to break peoples kneecaps, it wouldn't take long for them to be shut down and any of their leadership involved to be arrested, and the idea that kneecapping me is worth that risk to Google is laughable. But realistically google knows no borders, they have direct access to an ungodly amount of information, and the cost of hiring an armed thug would be infinitesimally small compared to their operating budget - if hurting me ever does become a priority for them where could I possibly escape to?

You go to some third world countries with sufficiently weak governments, you'll see plenty of corporations who have no difficulty taking people's rights away.

Large corporations are enabled by big government, not limited by government. Monopolies do not withstand competitive forces for the long run, unless propped up by government privilege. This symbiotic relationship creates cronyism

Exactly. The government will declare certain companies as too big to fail then bail them out. We need to let failure happen otherwise we are rewarding corruption.

It's not like if a company fails all their capital just disappears. Another company can emerge or another successful company can grow. If an airline fails, the places and infrastructure don't magically disappear.

The government gave the airlines a ton of money during covid so they could keep their staff and be ready to go when people start flying again. Instead the companies took that money, bought back stocks, gave executives bonuses, and encouraged early retirement. So now of course airlines have a staff shortage. But, hey, at least they made a ton of money, right?

I'm not saying the government should have done nothing when they forced businesses to lose revenue. But just giving the money directly to those at the top is the worst possible idea. We shouldn't just be giving out the people's money to the rich and get nothing in return.