With the corporation, I only have illusion of control, zero transparency, and often contractual binding to an entity that only has incentive to take advantage of me.

Now, as far as government working properly: surely, it often doesn't work well. For one, governments are often too large (in citizen count) for individuals to participate effectively. This often leads to powerful interests taking over. But, perhaps this is because our governmental structures were invented way too long ago to be current.

The 'private citizen' part is interesting. I would prefer to have peer-to-peer relationships that are effective and strong enough. But, that's a ways off, isn't it?

Citizen votes are non-binding. Politicians can do whatever they want once elected.

The vast majority of people don't even pay attention to what they do once in office, unless it's particularly bad.

Then once in office they don't have to face the consequences of reelection for 4-6 years.

Government transparency is getting better thanks to technology. But at the same time there are more and more 500-page bills that even the politicians don't read. And more agencies with ever growing power who operate in secrecy.

Transparency exists in corporations because they must operate in a market of both investors and customers. Both of those require visible results. In both the short and long term.

Governments are not result-driven. The negative effects of most policies often take effect long after the politican is gone.

In addition, the opportunity cost of Government backed economic and social policies are notoriously difficult to track. But arguably even if they were, based on recent political debates where things like the Fiscal cliff were not even mentioned, I doubt it would matter.

Says who? Or, more to the point, whose army? When the corporations that hold your email and bank statements refuse to be dumped, you'll need someone to break into their server rooms, wipe their hard drives, and arrest or shoot anyone who resists. I want those people to obey the law, and be under democratic control.

If I opted into using their service and agreed to their TOS that included them keeping my data. Then thats my fault.

But if they act maliciously, them having my data is hardly going to keep me from continuing to use their service.

You forget that all service providers have these TOS. You don't have a choice.

> Them having my data is hardly going to keep me from continuing to use their service.

If you've been using a Gmail account for several years, good luck closing it if you don't want to lose future emails sent to that address.

I'd much rather take my chances with democracy.

I suspect that much of the agency we feel in our dealings with both of these groups is illusory, perhaps inspired by a conditioning to approve of the broad basket of behaviors they were going to exhibit anyway. Even more imaginary, however, may be the thought that a strong embedding in a peer-regulating group will give us more agency. Humans had that arrangement for thousands of years, but most recent (last few centuries anyway) changes in society have undermined it. Society is the sum of choices we all make, and we don't seem to be returning to the village green.

For the obvious reason that governments, at least in democratic countries, are supposed to be about the people governing themselves. Governments are a means to solve cooperation problems.

Sure, this theory does not perfectly translate into practice. But it is the normative ideal of democracy. Hence your comment just comes off as snarky without really adding much to the discussion other than the point that yes, government power also must be restricted when it comes to information, just like it must be restricted in other areas of life. This is a useful point, but one that you might have made using much fewer words.

Further, the cognitive dissonance in this viewpoint is strong, in that they can see how treating any other composite entity, e.g. corporations, or a single corporation, or whatever as a monolith will be ridiculed as "you can't judge this composite entity as a whole based on a subset of it's components". Similarly when the effects of the entities they like look like the results the fear from the government, it is all OK, because some magical thinking results in not understanding what a choice really is (namely that somehow being forced to do something because it is the only choice that minimizes harm when the mechanism is not government is freedom, but when it is government it is tyranny).

It's not that government can't do good things, it's that when they screw up, they do it real bad, and fixing it, if at all possible, takes decades.

If the government can pass a sensible internet privacy and security law, then I'm all for it. It's just that the potential of times probability of a screw up that makes everything worse for everyone is very high.

Yes there are people to whom government becomes the hammer. But they are not the same set of people who say "lets not go overboard with the nails guys". (for all nails)

But that's a strawman. Companies are ultimately guided by the concern for profit - but they can only make a profit (long term) by providing a value to all their stakeholders. Of course companies can some times profit in the short term by screwing over one group of stakeholders, but generally they only get to do that once per stakeholder group.

> The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.

Hardly. Yes, it can solve the problem (it's hardly a rule that government actually solves the problems it takes on). But even the problems that can reasonably be said to be solved, there are more often than not some unintended consequences.

This is semantic wrangling. It is generally pretty easy to create corporations. It would be even easier if the "regulation is strictly forbidden" crowd had their way. As it exists now, corporations are fairly anonymous, and as such, spinning out a corporation per "screwing" is not that hard. Sure long term value per corporation is non existant, but the long-term value of the strategy is pretty straight forward. It has already been shown that investment as it exists today favors short term profit over long term value anyway. Numbers this quarter are generally the main driver.

Further, without regulation preventing the screwing over of people, why wouldn't every company choose the guaranteed profit over other methods. They could just take the profit safe from the fact that anyone not generating gobs of cash right now could be simply "competed out of the market" via mechanisms that are currently illegal as monopolistic. It isn't conjecture either - those rules are a response to companies getting rid of the competition then as soon as the specter of "a good company" isn't looming over them, they returned to screwing people over.

Yes, a very crude and usually ineffective one. So are corporations.

There is no good means to solve cooperation problems in the general case. The only way we know of that actually works is to have a group of people who are all committed to a specific goal and who all share the same factual beliefs as to how best to reach that goal. That is very rarely true, which is why cooperation problems rarely get solved very well.

That's my point: Schneier is not dictator. Network regulation would be in his interest, if he could dictate what form it would take; as a minority in a democracy, he's on the wrong end of the regulatory pointy stick.

You're right, I'm treating a democracy as competing factions, not as a cooperating monolith ("people fighting themselves" ; "people governing themselves").