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The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society, while the right thinks bad government is responsible. I think we just need to understa

• dragonwriter 8y ago
  > The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society, No, we don't. > while the right thinks bad government is responsible. More “libertarians” than “the right”; they overlap but not are not equivalent. (In fact, libertarians also overlap with the left.) > absence of government just leads to less restrictions for corporations No, because corporations are creatures of government. Absence of government (or just absence of government chartering corporations) means no corporations, not unregulated corporations.
  • sandworm101 8y ago
    Absence of government chartering corporations was a thing not that long ago. It doesn't mean no big businesses, it just means a return to partnerships and personal liabilities as the primary entity. Some businesses today still operate on these older principals, notably law firms. They seem to do their evil well enough despite not being corporations. So I doubt that much would change.
    • cmurf 8y ago
      My memory is telling me there's a writeup on Goldman Sachs risk taking since becoming publicly traded, versus when it was a partnership. And the increase in risk taking becoming a corporation is a real effect.
    • int_19h 8y ago
      Are there any law firms that grow as big as transnationals?
      • sandworm101 8y ago
        Jones day. Largest parnership in the world iirc.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Absence of government chartering corporations was a thing not that long ago. Governments chartering corporations as a widespread practice is older than (and arguably key to) completing the transition to a generally capitalist economic system. > Some businesses today still operate on these older principals, notably law firms. Law firms are often professional corporations, and those that aren't are often LLCs or LLPs, which are also creatures of government newer than, and deriving in design (in part) from corporations.
  • jandrese 8y ago
    Even if they aren't a corporation in name, capitalism naturally concentrates power with the richest groups of people. Without some external factor draining wealth from the wealthiest they will eventually soak up the entire monetary system and crash it. Capitalism is a positive feedback loop, like an open mic next to an amplified speaker, and we're pushing the mic closer and closer each year. Thus far nobody has found a better institution that can act as a check on excessive concentration of wealth.
    • WalterBright 8y ago
      > soak up the entire monetary system and crash it There's no evidence of that ever happening, or even close to it. Consider the Hunt bros who attempted to corner the silver market. They paid higher and higher prices for it, then were left holding the bag when the market price for silver crashed.
      • jandrese 8y ago
        There is an argument that portions of the middle ages had exactly this problem, as the monarchies soaked up all of the wealth and the peasantry was unable make much headway economically. The so called Guilded Age in the US was also arguably heading in this direction, and was only broken up by massive wars and extremely tax happy federal governments.
        • WalterBright 8y ago
          The middle ages didn't have much of a banking system, nor did they have a fiat money system. There wasn't a system to crash. Besides, feudalism isn't capitalism. The Guilded Age saw an enormous growth in the middle class.
          • jandrese 8y ago
            And also enormous amounts of abject poverty and outright wage slavery. That's the point. The system was becoming seriously unbalanced and it took government action (and a couple of wars) to bring us to the boom times of the 50s and 60s.
• bsder 8y ago
  > The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society, while the right thinks bad government is responsible. Complete hogwash. Neither side thinks this. The left certainly doesn't think that "bad corporations" are responsible for the "ills of society". "Bad corporations" are simply one of the "ills of society". The right doesn't actually oppose "bad government" at all. They are perfectly fine with foisting bad government on everybody else as long as it comes from their "team".
  • misterprime 8y ago
    I bet I can guess which side you identify with in one try.
    • WaxProlix 8y ago
      I bet I can guess the same of you. So what? Imputing some set of values to someone doesn't make them wrong, and a failure to represent oneself as some sort of enlightened centrist, above the influence of bias, isn't in any way a mark against content.
      • jessaustin 8y ago
        It might make the comment the wrong sort of comment for HN.
• WaxProlix 8y ago
  This is such simplistic and reductive thinking and I'm tired of seeing it. We're all circling a Fallacy of the Golden Mean drain and if I never saw another "both sides" non-argument again in my life it'd be too soon. At a minimum, it obscures the fact that in the US today we have basically one 'side'; by referring to our oligarchy's two mouthpieces as separate sides we're implicitly giving them a free pass. It probably also plays into the 'two and only two sides to every story/event' narrative that gives implicit platforms to anti-vaxers, holocaust deniers, and all sorts of unpleasantness. As an edit, that came off as ranty because obviously I'm miffed but I stand by it for the most part.
  • metildaa 8y ago
    The common HN user over 1000 points is happy to downvote you, but your dead on that both major US parties are bought and operated by the major companies, with social policies being the main differentiator. Its really sad that there is no choice in American politics today outside a handful of socialist politicians at the local level. Edit: Keep the downvotes coming! The lack of responses is telling :P
• golergka 8y ago
  The difference is, nobody on the right is advocating to make corporations even bigger, while left in virtually any country works to make government bigger than it is.
  • jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Yes they are. The right works to remove regulations and checks on corporations.
    • cdiddy2 8y ago
      That's because they believe that those regulations aren't allowing smaller corporations to be able to compete
      • jakelazaroff 8y ago
        That's debatable. But also not pertinent, since the original claim was that they weren't doing it at all, without qualification.
    • golergka 8y ago
      With small companies being the primary rationale behind these measures.
  • mikeash 8y ago
    The right frequently advocates for privatizing various government services, which would make corporations bigger.
• roywiggins 8y ago
  The mainstream liberal opinion is that corporations should a) be regulated by a sufficiently funded independent government agency, b) pay taxes, and c) be required to limit contributions or at least disclose campaign expenditures The only people advocating the destruction of corporations are actual anarchists and anarcho-communists. A large chunk of the right believes in the wholesale destruction of government agencies- they don't think EPA should even exist. But the equivalent opinion on the left has no political power at all. The leftiest member of Congress is not calling for a Worker's Revolution.
  • tdhoot 8y ago
    The equivalent opinion of "disband one agency" is not a "Worker's Revolution", it's "disband one corporation/industry", and there are plenty of those opinions on the left (tech monopolies, oil/gas, defense contractors, etc.) The equivalent argument to a Worker's Revolution on the right would be the disbanding of the Federal government or a reduction to independence-day levels. That opinion does not exist in Congress either.
    • hobs 8y ago
      I'd disagree given "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." is the most famous Grover Norquist quote, and he spent a good portion of his life towards doing this very thing.
    • roywiggins 8y ago
      Saying corporations should be broken up is not the same as saying there should be no corporations. The former is just old-fashioned antitrust and yeah, definitely has some sway on the left. A split-up Google just makes bunch of corporations; abolishing tech corporations entirely and taking them over as a public utility or worker's cooperative is what I'm getting at. "This particular corporation is too big" is a mainstream-but-lefty opinion; "this corporation should be expropriated and owned by the public" is not a mainstream opinion. Steve Bannon is on record as wanting to dismantle the "administrative state", he held the ear of the President for a while. The head of the CFPB doesn't think the CFPB should exist. Paul Ryan wants to privatise Social Security. "Shrink government enough to drown it in a bathtub" is a Grover Norquist quote. They may not want to roll back the entire government to Independence Day but they do want to take it back to the 19th century if it means they can cut taxes. They don't just want less regulation; they want the feds to get out of the business of regulating industry at all.
• SquishyPanda23 8y ago
  I think you are more right than wrong, although it's obviously an intentional simplification. There are two subtleties that I think are interesting to point out. One is that the left tends to argue more for things that increase market competition, such as busting up monopolies. I see the right arguing more frequently that anti-competitive practices are justified because limiting them impinges on the freedom of the monopolies. The other is that portions of the libertarian right are less against governments than they are against the ability of a democracy to limit the power of the wealthy. This is why some classic libertarians like Hayek and Friedman supported right-wing dictatorships in non-US countries. Now obviously, they would say they believe this for a reason (market efficiencies, etc), but I think this is a pretty clear conflict of interest that can lead to motivated reasoning.
• CPLX 8y ago
  There is no voice with any real institutional power in American politics that is seriously opposed to corporate hegemony. There’s no labor party. That fact is unusual and anomalous in modern political systems and is causing massive instability and unpredictability of outcomes.
  • narag 8y ago
    That fact is unusual... Not at all. European socialist parties have been migrating to a, as a previous commenter put it, "cultural" agenda: feminism, LGTB, eco... some of the issues are favorable or neutral to workers, but some others, like inmigration policies are actually harming, or at least perceived as such. The result is that these parties are sinking and their votes going to both extremes of the political spectrum.
• AlexandrB 8y ago
  > The left thinks bad corporations are responsible for the ills of society, while the right thinks bad government is responsible. This is both a strawman and entirely irrelevant. What's more informative is what both sides do once in power. The Democrats are quite happy to cut taxes, subsidize all kinds of corporate incentives (see Amazon in NY), and have not actively taken an antitrust stance since the 90s. Meanwhile, the Republicans are quite happy to have a HUGE government, as long as most of those expenditures are in the military and not in social programs. Neither party is particularly anti-corporate. The Democrats are certainly more willing to reign in corporate power, but this is purely in the marginal sense. Consider that copyright extensions over the last 50 years have enjoyed broad, bi-partisan support. As have pro-corporate trade deals like the TPP. The most stark policy differences between the left and the right in the United States are in the realm of social and cultural issues: abortion, LGBTQ rights, guns. There is no mainstream party that has a substantially adversarial relationship with corporate power.
  • smt88 8y ago
    Things weren't always this way. The US used to have a true labor party. I think the pendulum is already starting to swing back.
    • matt4077 8y ago
      You're ignoring a whole lot of differences between the current and previous administration. There's a slightly outdated summary at https://www.govdocs.com/webinar-recap-trump-administration-and-its-effects-on-labor-and-employment-law/ https://www.govdocs.com/webinar-recap-trump-administration-a.... Among the highlights are minimum wage increases, OSHA enforcement, transparency requirements for government contractors and a whole lot more. Appointments to the Labour Board, as well as to the courts, could have rather significant impact on precedent. As but one issue that will be central in the near future is the treatment of Uber drivers and similar, and their classification as contractors/employees. A two-seats swing on the Supreme Court is almost guaranteed to have changed the outcome of that trial when it eventually reaches the court. As to the "social issues" mentioned by OP, it makes me a bit uneasy to see them commonly referred to as separate from labor law. Workplace anti-discrimination law is obviously labor law as well. It may not affect you or me. But neither does the minimum wage. When the latter is considered "labor law" and the former isn't, I wonder what the reason for this sort of "othering" can be.
• edoo 8y ago
  There is no real difference between the left and right at the high levels of government. We live under crony capitalism, the worst mixture of bad government being run by bad corporations.