I could go on and on, but I would rather face down one tyrant than an army of them. But the way things are going, we might be facing both soon.

Democratic governments have some form of accountability to those elected, if none other than periodic elections. If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.

Companies do not have such constraints and operate strictly in self-interest.

I understand companies act within their own self interest. But the problem is when we provide government with enormous power it becomes within the self interest of companies to influence government rather than provide value to society.

Now expand your model to one where the government, politicans and citizens aren't monoliths.

> who controls the politicians is a profitable game for big corporations

It's a pertinent game for everyone. That's the point of democracy. It's still a profitable game in a dictatorship. It's just that while democracy gives a peanut-gallery seat to even the most disinterested citizen, autocracies hoard those seats for the deserving.

“State control” isn’t a monolithic lever. You can have a theoretically powerful but weak state if power is properly shattered. This is the lost art of designing democracies. (Not just throwing elections at every problem.)

With companies I have options to not engage at all. I don’t have that option with the government.

We see this with the government - how often does the government ever remove laws? Or reduce size? Very rarely.

It seems to me that if the goal is to ensure one is not coerced, whether by business or government is not to try and create mechanisms to ensure coercion is only benevolent, but rather to ensure they never have the power to coerce people in the first place.

Influence and power follows a power distribution. This is an age old problem.