Incorporation is just governments franchising. Before you have a massive central administration, you use "tax farmers" to collect revenue. Before you have the technical ability for a total centralization of surveillance and control, you have corporations.

so we can infer from this that you believe there's some kind of central government conspirators that never change and are always pushing ahead with the exact same very specific plan?

Only if monopolies are allowed to flourish, because, that's what the government basically is - a monopoly on all services for which there's no private counterparts.

does that not seem at all contrived to you?

government is an organisation of humans within a geographical region that work for the benefit of all the other humans within that region. it's as simple as that. it's the exception not the rule for there to be no private competition; unless you live in Cuba, in which case you're describing communism, not government

Just to clarify, communism is a specific type of government. (but yeah i assume you're saying its not government in general)

Like capitalists don't aspire to be monopolists. You'll do so too if you become successful.

Monopolies are a fact of Capitalism. One of the roles of government is to provide a counter balance to that.

You could always go for a US federalism type deal (but made more extreme), where you try and make the Federal government as minimal as possible and cities/towns as in in control as possible. Then there would be competition between cities for tax payers, with the ability to move limiting monopoly.

But that would probably be a negative for the same reason that bigger companies inevitably swallow smaller companies without government intervention: in the modern day economies of scale are everything. 10 companies that make 10,000 of something will generally lose to 1 company that makes 100,000. Monopolies will inevitably flourish without a strong government controlling them. (And moreover, in a globally connected world, if you kill all your monopolies it’s very possible another state that allowed their’s to flourish will have companies that can outcompete yours)

I’m not exactly going anywhere with this, I don’t have a great answer to what the best option is. You can try and force there to be 2-3 companies in every sphere…but that’s barely competition. You can try and regulate the massive companies…but almost inevitably large cash-rich employers end up with sway over the government. You can try for lots of local competition and shut out foreign companies…and lose out on the many benefits of free trade. You can try and cut a balance between all of the concerns, but it seems that whenever government tries for nuance it ends up creating a very expensive bureaucracy.

Somehow comments like these are left to stand, so here's a counterpoint.

Amazon has emerged as an oligarch that will be broken up like the Bell system, Standard Oil, rail monopolies, and others before it - provided it and other oligarchs haven't fully compromised the government who hosts it. If Amazon, and the other FAANGs operating predatory surveiilance bureaucracies continue to exist in their current form in 4-5 years, we will know for sure the US is irrepairably compromised and once again, a generation will need to reckon with whether their self determination and survival is worth accepting sacrifices for.

Late stage capitalism is indeed dystopian, but if we call it early stage socialism somehow we're conspiracy theorists. The failure mode of the principled civilization created by the founders of the US reverts to the eurasian continential cultures and systems its citizens escaped. Those were pretty brutal, so much so that their own colonists revolted against them and achieved independence, and that's why american values are important to teach.

Every human endeavour fails without maintenance and upkeep. Being on the side of the forces of failure isn't the right side of history, it's forfeiting your humanity to the currents of inevitability.

If we're going to let tedious, low-effort tropes about "capitalism" stand, consider this one rebutted.

>if we call [late stage capitalism] early stage socialism somehow we're conspiracy theorists

sounds good to me. over time the world's wealth accumulates with the already wealthy. this makes sense, it's much easier to make money if you already have money. under the current system, inequality inexorably, unsustainably grows

last time we were here it took a pandemic, a massive depression and two world wars for serious change to occur. and even then it only lasted 30 years or so, until the Thatchers and Reagans rolled it all back. and here we are now. late stage capitalism once again. what will be the final domino before change this time? nuclear war? some kind of AI disaster? hyperinflation? Covid clearly wasn't enough.

it seems like kind of the people that would typically be concerning themselves with this kind of societal correction have been successfully distracted by bullshit culture wars