A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules and in a lot of cases, does. The issue is the rules themselves, which were crafted by? Corps.

Corps are entirely different. They push harder and harder and harder for PROFITS and will inevitably cross lines. When crossing those lines not only has no meaningful penalty, but actually turns a profit, after the fines are subtracted, they will not only continue to do it, but push even harder. After all, there's no real consequences, so why worry?

Authoritarian governments exist, and are more common than democratic ones.

Besides, democratic corporations exist too. They are just incredibly rare.

Mind providing an example of a democratic corp?

I've never known of one.

Cooperatives used to be more common than they are now. And used to be democratic.

Software consultancies is one of the markets where democratic consultancies were common enough for one to see them.

But now the world is property of a handful of corporations, so you won't see any contemporary example.

> A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules

The most despotic and scary governments of history would probably like a word with you. Maintaining a believable pretense of following any rules is a luxury we take for granted in many countries today, but Mao and Stalin didn't worry about the appearance of propriety.

Not really arguing against your main point though, I think you're right. Just don't forget how bad totalitarian governments can be.

You are citing outliers. A majority of the countries in the world aren't run by people like Stalin, or Pol Pot.

Yes, in those instances nothing is worse than the government, but a majority of the world doesn't live in those places. For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.

> For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.

No, for most people it's corporations that enable our current best-in-history lifestyle. The hardest things we face are scarcities created by government policy.

Posted via that government internet project because the government finally forced the monopoly communications companies to allow 3rd party connections.

Indeed according to the big private businesses at the time the internet was stupid and a money losing idea.

It's a common thing in American history where the US government invests in ideas/concepts that are seen as losers by the for profit industry only for those industries to swoop in and profit off the results...

Stuff like that and the American national standards institute is why the USA was in the front of the technological evolution for so long. We spent money on "useless" crap that ended up paying massive dividends later and allowed for the USA to set the standards.

This massively obscures all the Incredible efforts by those companies over the decades to bring us from unreliable, insecure, hyper slow, wired proof of concept to something so valuable everyone will pay for it.

Just take the L man. That's the case for every technology after it was invented

The most totalitarian where internally structured like one cooperation.

> A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

Only if the government is a dictatorship. A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.

Boards appoint executives, boards are voted in by shareholders, shareholders are determined by $, the more money you have the more votes you can buy.

Companies are, in theory, dysfunctional representative republics.

Having to BUY a vote explicitly removes any consideration of it being any form of democracy. Democracy requires suffrage as a right, not a commodity.

> Democracy requires suffrage as a right, not a commodity

There are plenty of "democracies" where suffrage depends on one having the appropriate citizenship.

Full disclosure: I have permanent residency - and pay my taxes - in a country where I'm neither allowed to stand for election nor allowed to vote...

Indeed, Democracy originated in an environment where suffrage was highly limited.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/democracy-...

I did say "dysfunctional".

But yeah, historically voting rights in many places were tied to land ownership. (And also genital arrangement)

lol,this is basically dialog from the original Robocop movie

No, they're plutocracies, in the most literal sense. The involvement of votes doesn't factor into it. The "public" in "republic" refers to the public at large. A private corporation, being privately held, is necessarily not republican in any sense.

> A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.

True, but neither will a sufficiently powerful government.

No, if you remove either corporations or governments from the equation, the remaining thing will morph and split to recreate this. Corporations aren't fixed in stone - a sufficiently powerful one may be indistinguishable from a dictatorship, but it'll also evolve the same way.

How about the one that decided that a New York con man and money launderer was the right choice for president?

I'm concerned that democracy as a general concept has a showstopping bug with no obvious fix. A bug that's always been there but has recently become fatally easy to exploit. Essentially, giving stupid people the same political power as smart people is mandatory in a democracy, but problematic because the former are much easier for "smart" minorities on all sides to corral into blocs.

The whole system then devolves into a battle for control over the easily-led, which is equivalent to any other form of government by minority interests. Regardless of who is on top at any given time, they aren't there to represent the interests of the majority.

Of course, viewing Mr. T as an anomaly is scapegoating, a way for people to quiet their nerves, to avoid having a naive article of faith undermined. There's emotional investment here. The case is similar with Harvey Weinstein. He is guilt, absolutely, and he should be punished, but Hollywood is full of exploitation. A scapegoat doesn't have to be innocent. In fact, it's more effective when the scapegoat is guilty himself in some manner. That makes it easier to accuse him and to deflect from the filth elsewhere.

That bug has always been "fatally" easy to exploit.

Stupids having a vote isn't as misguided as it seems, as if we imagine instead the smarts simply stopped the stupids from having the vote, the smarts would neglect the needs of the stupids. The Trump election resulted on a bipartisan realignment on trade which was arguably tilted towards elite interest (access to markets, maximising GDP) over popular interest (Maximising domestic jobs and wages) before that realignment. The whole democratic vision from that time to ignore domestic low skill job losses and focus on retraining people to do new high skill jobs was something that sounded sensible to a smart person as it’s how smart people would personally react to such circumstances - but it lacked common sense and an understanding of the impact of such a plan on the common person.

Democracy almost intrinsically is going to give you middle-of-the-road quality leadership. You can do better and worse than a New York con man who at least had the marketing genius required to get so famous in the first place - many dictators are nothing more than thug lords or spoilt failsons. The promise of democracy is in setting good incentives and mitigating extreme worst case scenarios through elections and means to obstruct bad leaders.

The system was designed around the idea that people take voting seriously. Sadly, we're not there. We're in a country where 1/3rd of the population thinks a rebellion against the government is needed. Not because they are being downtrodden, not because the government is taking their food, not because of mass slaughter by the military...nope. They want a world where only whites are allowed to own property, where there are strict rules for everyone except themselves, where other people's lives and choices are subject to their big magic beliefs, which are somehow better and more accurate than the 3000 other religions on the face of the Earth...somehow.

Voting is problematic when voters are either apathetic or worse, callous, like little children mad because they were denied 3rd dessert.

You seem to have a rather one-sided view of a rather large part of the population. That being commmon is a much bigger problem for a functioning democracy.

I base my view on their literal, factual behavior, past and present.

You however, seem to have a very rosy pair of glasses on.

According to your take, there were a lot of Nazis (pick any bad group) that shouldn't have been lumped in with the rest of the Nazis, because even though their actions were the very same horrific things, viewing them as a monolith is bad? We should look into their hearts and find the real motivation? lol

You my friend, are so badly mistaken, that I honestly don't know what to say.

If the literal, factual actions of 60 million people, attempting to destroy a way of life, because a clown told them to still isn't enough to view them as the enemies they are, then I'm not the one that's lost here, friend.

That's some take.. I hope it serves you well, despite my misgivings.

Ideally we want a democracy to be representative (in the statistical sense) and resistant to regulatory capture and low-information voting. Maybe it wouldn't work in practice, but it seems like we already have a system that attempts to tackle precisely these however flawed it may be: jury duty. Perhaps it could be applied to things like voting.

That wouldn't be a free market. It would be some kind of oligarchic corporatism. Government is necessary to truly enable free markets. The key to understanding that is to understand what "free" truly means [0]. It isn't "do what thou wilt".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38537665

A freely competitive market (as envisioned by Adam Smith) is very different from a free market (as the term is commonly used today, at least by many conservative political parties). I fully agree that without sufficient regulations markets cease to be freely competitive.

This reminds me of the East India Company: forcing China to buy opium even if it really harmed both its population and economy.

Indian may not be too happy with all the Marathas wars and colonization.

Anyway, is not a matter of which is the worse but of how can we get the best from both of them

The East India Company didn’t directly even ship opium to China, that was all done by private merchants.

And in any case initially it wasn’t so much about opium as about free trade in general. The British would’ve been fine with selling textiles, tools and other stuff to the Chinese people who wanted to buy them. Opium was just much easier to smuggle than anything else.