5 ms·

In the absence of big government, big corporate will become defacto government even more easily.

misja111 9y ago
I guess you mean in the absence of any government. Neither big government nor anarchy is good for democracy, but there is a whole range in between.
- rjbwork 9y ago
  Along that logic could we say that absolute private property rights nor the complete absence of exclusive use of capital goods is good for democracy, but that there is a whole range in between? It's not immediately obvious to me that either is true in terms of producing viable societies, but as these are the primary axes which determine how a society is going to function, it seems they ought to both be or neither be.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    You’re right it’s either/or at a given scale. But if you think in terms of multiscale, the difference between systems stops looking so qualitative and looks more quantitative: Either you have an absolute property law system, and a limited commons forms on top of that through land trusts, etc. Or you have an absolute communist system, and a limited free market forms on top of that, within a system of exceptions and exemptions. Technically you could implement identical 50/50 socialized/private systems in both of those schemes. In practice scale matters so which system runs which scale will affect the outcome. But the long term outcome will inevitably be “the right things are socialized and the right things are privatized”... the two systems each do experiments and make concessions when they lose. They’ll end up being quite the same, although in the short term they are quite different. And we need both to exist to run all the experiments.
mschuster91 9y ago
Actually, we see this with the social media giants live in action: they may decide to terminate your account at any time for arbitrary (or none at all) reasons for your whole life, and you have no way of legal recourse. There have been way too many stories alone on HN about people losing e.g. their entire mail archives or Youtube deleting evidence videos of war crimes, to let this situation continue for any longer. Government needs to finally recognize the importance of social media to modern society... after all, telcos are not allowed to arbitrarily cut you off (especially not for life!). Why should social media be treated differently?
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  Telcos can’t cut you off, but ISPs can. I guess dial up is potentially still an option, but internet access is much more relevant than telephone access in 2018.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > Telcos can’t cut you off, but ISPs can. Well, ISPs are replaceable (okay, they will offer different speeds). Get cut off, select another ISP (or mobile data). A telco is not easily replaceable though, as the phone number is your unique handle that often cannot be changed easily (which is why you have the right to keep your number in Europe across providers)...
    - xg15 9y ago
      > Get cut off, select another ISP (or mobile data). Comcast customers would like to have a word with you.
      - sli 9y ago
        Yeah, that particular point is technically true, but in reality it is absolutely false. Far too many people simply do not have competing options. ADSL and satellite are not really competing options if your third option is fiber. I'd say it's reasonable these days to expect regular people (especially the 18-34 demo) to actually rely on the speeds you get with fiber. ADSL and satellite, by comparison, are slow as molasses. A number of those folks could probably survive with a mobile data hotspot, but that is really not ideal for a house or apartment.
baddox 9y ago
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Government is unique because of its “social license” to govern, meaning that the vast majority of people recognize its authority to do things other people or groups cannot do (like make laws, imprison people, or collect taxes). Corporations don’t have that social license, which is why they need to cozy up with government to take advantage of that unique authority.
- kahnpro 9y ago
  Without a government they can start to take this authority themselves in much the same way that local warlords do. Gradually by force, because they have power and you don't. A small / weak government can't do anything to stop them.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Small != weak. Did the US have a large government in 1900? Certainly not by the standards of today. Yet it was still able to take on Standard Oil.
- monocasa 9y ago
  Corporations are more than happy to take on that mantle if they are able. You saw that with the East India Company's full army and navy, you saw that with company mining towns that issued their own currency and controlled every aspect of their employees lives, you saw that with the Pinkertons investigating and dispatching extrajudicial punishment, and you see that today with Nestle paramilitaries.
mindcrime 9y ago
Not necessarily. Big corporations actually depend on the State for their very existence, and leverage corruption, regulatory capture, etc., to grow larger and more powerful than they would naturally.
- rayiner 9y ago
  That's a common view, but I don't think the evidence supports it. What "corruption" and "regulatory capture" did Amazon or Google leverage in coming to dominate multiple verticals? Instead, I think technology is the culprit. Technology pushes out the boundary where economies of scale give way to diseconomies of scale. Mom & pops can't compete with Amazon not because Amazon has a few senators in its pocket. They can't do it because Amazon's immense scale (multiple robotic warehouses, in-house shipping and logistics expertise, etc.) makes it impossible to compete on price and quality.
  - _jal 9y ago
    Capture and corruption doesn't help small startups become big[1]. They help big companies stay big. I think you're right that Google and Amazon (and others) leveraged something new - the catalog-sales and cat-video dynamo we call the internet - to get where they are. And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are. [1] You might say 'Uber' in response; I'd say the company was corrupt and failed to find sufficient exploitable government levers to succeed in those efforts, because someone else got to those levers first.
    - root_axis 9y ago
      > And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are. IMO that's not a convincing argument. Your response to two specific counter-examples is "one day you'll see that those examples actually prove my point instead of yours"
      - _jal 9y ago
        That's nice. If you'd like to convince me I'm wrong, you'll have to explain why these companies, which are subject to the same pressures as others and hire from the same pool of execs, will behave differently than the rest of the herd of large public firms. If you want to argue they'll lobby, manipulate and bribe less than average among peer-firms, well, that argument could be made. But if you want to argue that there's something special about them that means they won't play all the same games, perhaps start with explaining how Amazon's begging-for-handouts HQ tour is different than the sports stadium scam.
nickik 9y ago
We are not talking about an absence of govenremnt. A small government is perfectly able to regulated what is needed to regulate. It is an absolutle isllusion to believe that only a big government can correctly regulated cooperations. In fact, I would argue there is little corrulation either way, both big and small govenrment sometimes have effective laws. The ability to regulated derives from a monopoly on violence, not control of 50% of the economy.
- jcims 9y ago
  I think the confusion is conflating size, or maybe more precisely 'scope', with power.
  - nickik 9y ago
    Exactly. I think its false to assume that a government that directly taxes 60% of all incomes is more effective law maker then a government who taxes 10% of all income is a flase assumtion.
brobdingnagians 9y ago
As one of the other posters mentioned, big government _helps_ create big corporations. Even the legal idea of a "corporation" with the corporate veil to protect employees & those who control it from direct liability enables mega-corporations. If we simply eliminated corporate legal entities, we might have more careful business dealings. In the absence of this idea, you'd be free to take legal action against someone who harms you. It is a similar thing with the EPA and FDA, if a corporation meets their requirements, you can't sue them, even if they are polluting your town. It actually _enables_ a legal limit that they can pollute rather than strictly reducing pollution. The most effective anti-littering campaign was the Keep America Beautiful, Crying Indian campaign, not really the EPA. A lot of this has to do with culture, if people aren't okay with big corporations and corruption, then they would do something different. But on a certain level, people don't really care or believe that corporate entities somehow help the economy. Two-hundred years ago, the culture was different and people made things go a bit differently; the culture we have now generally supports corporate and governmental power.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- acdha 9y ago
  > It is a similar thing with the EPA and FDA, if a corporation meets their requirements, you can't sue them, even if they are polluting your town. Do you have a citation for that? States, cities, and individuals sue all the time. Saying you met the federal standards may be part of the defense but it’s not immunity.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Corporations are creatures of government; big corporate power is big government.
panarky 9y ago
A fish doesn't know it's in water because it never experienced anything else. Can we imagine anything other than the system we live in? I suppose we can imagine small adjustments like higher or lower taxation, more or less regulation, increasing or decreasing subsidies for different groups. But that's like slightly changing the temperature or salinity of the water we're swimming in. It doesn't help us imagine what walking through air would be like.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - Ursula Le Guin
tomohawk 9y ago
The trust busters in the early 20th century were not part of a big government. You need an effective government, not a big government to police corruption. As the government has balooned in size, trust busting has become almost non existent. Corruption these days just gets a yawn.

I guess you mean in the absence of any government. Neither big government nor anarchy is good for democracy, but there is a whole range in between.

rjbwork 9y ago
Along that logic could we say that absolute private property rights nor the complete absence of exclusive use of capital goods is good for democracy, but that there is a whole range in between? It's not immediately obvious to me that either is true in terms of producing viable societies, but as these are the primary axes which determine how a society is going to function, it seems they ought to both be or neither be.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  You’re right it’s either/or at a given scale. But if you think in terms of multiscale, the difference between systems stops looking so qualitative and looks more quantitative: Either you have an absolute property law system, and a limited commons forms on top of that through land trusts, etc. Or you have an absolute communist system, and a limited free market forms on top of that, within a system of exceptions and exemptions. Technically you could implement identical 50/50 socialized/private systems in both of those schemes. In practice scale matters so which system runs which scale will affect the outcome. But the long term outcome will inevitably be “the right things are socialized and the right things are privatized”... the two systems each do experiments and make concessions when they lose. They’ll end up being quite the same, although in the short term they are quite different. And we need both to exist to run all the experiments.

mschuster91 9y ago

Actually, we see this with the social media giants live in action: they may decide to terminate your account at any time for arbitrary (or none at all) reasons for your whole life, and you have no way of legal recourse. There have been way too many stories alone on HN about people losing e.g. their entire mail archives or Youtube deleting evidence videos of war crimes, to let this situation continue for any longer. Government needs to finally recognize the importance of social media to modern society... after all, telcos are not allowed to arbitrarily cut you off (especially not for life!). Why should social media be treated differently?

seanp2k2 9y ago
Telcos can’t cut you off, but ISPs can. I guess dial up is potentially still an option, but internet access is much more relevant than telephone access in 2018.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > Telcos can’t cut you off, but ISPs can. Well, ISPs are replaceable (okay, they will offer different speeds). Get cut off, select another ISP (or mobile data). A telco is not easily replaceable though, as the phone number is your unique handle that often cannot be changed easily (which is why you have the right to keep your number in Europe across providers)...
  - xg15 9y ago
    > Get cut off, select another ISP (or mobile data). Comcast customers would like to have a word with you.
    - sli 9y ago
      Yeah, that particular point is technically true, but in reality it is absolutely false. Far too many people simply do not have competing options. ADSL and satellite are not really competing options if your third option is fiber. I'd say it's reasonable these days to expect regular people (especially the 18-34 demo) to actually rely on the speeds you get with fiber. ADSL and satellite, by comparison, are slow as molasses. A number of those folks could probably survive with a mobile data hotspot, but that is really not ideal for a house or apartment.

baddox 9y ago

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Government is unique because of its “social license” to govern, meaning that the vast majority of people recognize its authority to do things other people or groups cannot do (like make laws, imprison people, or collect taxes). Corporations don’t have that social license, which is why they need to cozy up with government to take advantage of that unique authority.

kahnpro 9y ago
Without a government they can start to take this authority themselves in much the same way that local warlords do. Gradually by force, because they have power and you don't. A small / weak government can't do anything to stop them.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Small != weak. Did the US have a large government in 1900? Certainly not by the standards of today. Yet it was still able to take on Standard Oil.
monocasa 9y ago
Corporations are more than happy to take on that mantle if they are able. You saw that with the East India Company's full army and navy, you saw that with company mining towns that issued their own currency and controlled every aspect of their employees lives, you saw that with the Pinkertons investigating and dispatching extrajudicial punishment, and you see that today with Nestle paramilitaries.

mindcrime 9y ago

Not necessarily. Big corporations actually depend on the State for their very existence, and leverage corruption, regulatory capture, etc., to grow larger and more powerful than they would naturally.

rayiner 9y ago
That's a common view, but I don't think the evidence supports it. What "corruption" and "regulatory capture" did Amazon or Google leverage in coming to dominate multiple verticals? Instead, I think technology is the culprit. Technology pushes out the boundary where economies of scale give way to diseconomies of scale. Mom & pops can't compete with Amazon not because Amazon has a few senators in its pocket. They can't do it because Amazon's immense scale (multiple robotic warehouses, in-house shipping and logistics expertise, etc.) makes it impossible to compete on price and quality.
- _jal 9y ago
  Capture and corruption doesn't help small startups become big[1]. They help big companies stay big. I think you're right that Google and Amazon (and others) leveraged something new - the catalog-sales and cat-video dynamo we call the internet - to get where they are. And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are. [1] You might say 'Uber' in response; I'd say the company was corrupt and failed to find sufficient exploitable government levers to succeed in those efforts, because someone else got to those levers first.
  - root_axis 9y ago
    > And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are. IMO that's not a convincing argument. Your response to two specific counter-examples is "one day you'll see that those examples actually prove my point instead of yours"
    - _jal 9y ago
      That's nice. If you'd like to convince me I'm wrong, you'll have to explain why these companies, which are subject to the same pressures as others and hire from the same pool of execs, will behave differently than the rest of the herd of large public firms. If you want to argue they'll lobby, manipulate and bribe less than average among peer-firms, well, that argument could be made. But if you want to argue that there's something special about them that means they won't play all the same games, perhaps start with explaining how Amazon's begging-for-handouts HQ tour is different than the sports stadium scam.

nickik 9y ago

We are not talking about an absence of govenremnt. A small government is perfectly able to regulated what is needed to regulate. It is an absolutle isllusion to believe that only a big government can correctly regulated cooperations. In fact, I would argue there is little corrulation either way, both big and small govenrment sometimes have effective laws. The ability to regulated derives from a monopoly on violence, not control of 50% of the economy.

jcims 9y ago
I think the confusion is conflating size, or maybe more precisely 'scope', with power.
- nickik 9y ago
  Exactly. I think its false to assume that a government that directly taxes 60% of all incomes is more effective law maker then a government who taxes 10% of all income is a flase assumtion.

brobdingnagians 9y ago

As one of the other posters mentioned, big government _helps_ create big corporations. Even the legal idea of a "corporation" with the corporate veil to protect employees & those who control it from direct liability enables mega-corporations. If we simply eliminated corporate legal entities, we might have more careful business dealings. In the absence of this idea, you'd be free to take legal action against someone who harms you. It is a similar thing with the EPA and FDA, if a corporation meets their requirements, you can't sue them, even if they are polluting your town. It actually _enables_ a legal limit that they can pollute rather than strictly reducing pollution. The most effective anti-littering campaign was the Keep America Beautiful, Crying Indian campaign, not really the EPA. A lot of this has to do with culture, if people aren't okay with big corporations and corruption, then they would do something different. But on a certain level, people don't really care or believe that corporate entities somehow help the economy. Two-hundred years ago, the culture was different and people made things go a bit differently; the culture we have now generally supports corporate and governmental power.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
acdha 9y ago
> It is a similar thing with the EPA and FDA, if a corporation meets their requirements, you can't sue them, even if they are polluting your town. Do you have a citation for that? States, cities, and individuals sue all the time. Saying you met the federal standards may be part of the defense but it’s not immunity.

dragonwriter 9y ago

Corporations are creatures of government; big corporate power is big government.

panarky 9y ago

A fish doesn't know it's in water because it never experienced anything else. Can we imagine anything other than the system we live in? I suppose we can imagine small adjustments like higher or lower taxation, more or less regulation, increasing or decreasing subsidies for different groups. But that's like slightly changing the temperature or salinity of the water we're swimming in. It doesn't help us imagine what walking through air would be like.

ryandrake 9y ago
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - Ursula Le Guin

tomohawk 9y ago

The trust busters in the early 20th century were not part of a big government. You need an effective government, not a big government to police corruption. As the government has balooned in size, trust busting has become almost non existent. Corruption these days just gets a yawn.