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If you "own" 10 people, you call them slaves and call yourself their master, and you exploit them harshly by necessity, afraid that other slave owners will out-

by nnq 7y ago

If you "own" 10 people, you call them slaves and call yourself their master, and you exploit them harshly by necessity, afraid that other slave owners will out-compete you and you'll go bankrupt. If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit... -archy's nature is changed by scale just like everything else, we're not fractals!

dragonwriter 7y ago
> If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit... We have a couple elite power structures that rule over ~ a billion people, they don't seem all that relaxed and pseudo-anarchic. I don't see how them having a formal profit interest and being named “corporation” rather than “state” is likely to change that.
- nnq 7y ago
  Well, look at things in another way: Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning. Maybe drop the "corporations" name, just call them "global orgs", since a few of them could also be not-for-profit (but allowed to self-finance, and to maintain forces of self-defense) and handle "global responsibility" issues like oceans pollution, climate issues etc. Other would be for-profit could focus on providing communications infrastructure, people transit security services etc. In the end the total amount of power could end up even more split up, or maybe a little bit more concentrated but across different borders at different layers (mostly avoiding overlapping the borders of the state level below to the ones of the layers above), some even completely non-physical/non-geographical, maybe "bordered" by different purposefully-non-trivial-to-exchange crypto-currencies. Sorry if I wasn't clear, the core idea was not "corporations" as we know them, neither concentration of power - just that we'd need self-financing and self-defense-capable trans-national organisms that would be better fitted for providing naturally-global services like communications.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning. Doesn't work as a stable state; if you want corporations to be effectively independent of government cpntrol you can't split the powers up this way. Because those functions alone don't make something independent of the power of entities retaining the monopoly on violence, which is the defining feature of government. To make corporations independent of the power of nominal governments, they have to either be an exception to or replace the nominal governments’ monopoly on violence, making them either components of or replacements for government. And once they share or solely exercise that power, they can't be kept out of every other domain. And if there is more than one of them, they will compete.
    - nnq 7y ago
      I don't really buy the "monopoly on violence" interpretation... it's not a natural idea, maybe modern thinkers like it bc it seems to "explain" society and state. It's more of an accidental property. And it can also be kept, and would probably work even with exceptions carved out for other species or organizations. But I don't think that's how it works at all. Things are stable when people believe they are stable, that's it. Just like speculative prices in markets. Communism and socialism sort of worked for the short stretches of time that people were true believers in them - imo it failed bc it contradicted human psychology so the belief couldn't last. Capitalism is stable bc people believe in it, probably bc it matches better our competitive and aggressive psychology. If the Overton-window shifts to a place where people can start believing that "global orgs" can be stable, they will be stable. Maybe it's more complicated, maybe that place is pretty strange and far away. But I wouldn't think so, it's only needed that one proof-of-concept implementation starts to be believed as stable and beneficial, and then the pattern can be propagated through a chain reaction of people betting more and more on it and then fighting to protect the outcome they've betted on. Think the French Revolution and the ensuing toppling of most monarchies throughout Europe - that's probably the best model we have for a process like this, just that instead of toppling you'd hopefully have transformation (think modern parliamentary monarchies like the UK, which successfully transformed), and it worked out for the better in the end :)

by nnq 7y ago

dragonwriter 7y ago

> If, collectively with other 1000 board members, "own" 1 billion people, you're part of an "elite power structure", and you can do a lot of things to make the lives of those people better - you'll still want your profits, but by having a monopoly on some things you know that no rival can put you out of business so you can relax a bit... We have a couple elite power structures that rule over ~ a billion people, they don't seem all that relaxed and pseudo-anarchic. I don't see how them having a formal profit interest and being named “corporation” rather than “state” is likely to change that.

nnq 7y ago
Well, look at things in another way: Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning. Maybe drop the "corporations" name, just call them "global orgs", since a few of them could also be not-for-profit (but allowed to self-finance, and to maintain forces of self-defense) and handle "global responsibility" issues like oceans pollution, climate issues etc. Other would be for-profit could focus on providing communications infrastructure, people transit security services etc. In the end the total amount of power could end up even more split up, or maybe a little bit more concentrated but across different borders at different layers (mostly avoiding overlapping the borders of the state level below to the ones of the layers above), some even completely non-physical/non-geographical, maybe "bordered" by different purposefully-non-trivial-to-exchange crypto-currencies. Sorry if I wasn't clear, the core idea was not "corporations" as we know them, neither concentration of power - just that we'd need self-financing and self-defense-capable trans-national organisms that would be better fitted for providing naturally-global services like communications.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning. Doesn't work as a stable state; if you want corporations to be effectively independent of government cpntrol you can't split the powers up this way. Because those functions alone don't make something independent of the power of entities retaining the monopoly on violence, which is the defining feature of government. To make corporations independent of the power of nominal governments, they have to either be an exception to or replace the nominal governments’ monopoly on violence, making them either components of or replacements for government. And once they share or solely exercise that power, they can't be kept out of every other domain. And if there is more than one of them, they will compete.
  - nnq 7y ago
    I don't really buy the "monopoly on violence" interpretation... it's not a natural idea, maybe modern thinkers like it bc it seems to "explain" society and state. It's more of an accidental property. And it can also be kept, and would probably work even with exceptions carved out for other species or organizations. But I don't think that's how it works at all. Things are stable when people believe they are stable, that's it. Just like speculative prices in markets. Communism and socialism sort of worked for the short stretches of time that people were true believers in them - imo it failed bc it contradicted human psychology so the belief couldn't last. Capitalism is stable bc people believe in it, probably bc it matches better our competitive and aggressive psychology. If the Overton-window shifts to a place where people can start believing that "global orgs" can be stable, they will be stable. Maybe it's more complicated, maybe that place is pretty strange and far away. But I wouldn't think so, it's only needed that one proof-of-concept implementation starts to be believed as stable and beneficial, and then the pattern can be propagated through a chain reaction of people betting more and more on it and then fighting to protect the outcome they've betted on. Think the French Revolution and the ensuing toppling of most monarchies throughout Europe - that's probably the best model we have for a process like this, just that instead of toppling you'd hopefully have transformation (think modern parliamentary monarchies like the UK, which successfully transformed), and it worked out for the better in the end :)