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> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Why? Bonus question: Why should governments be allowed to get that big?

wellthisisgreat 6y ago
Yeah GP is unlikely to answer
jcranmer 6y ago
The retort to your bonus question is that the government doesn't get to "spend" its GDP. Although the counter-retort is to bring up government revenue instead, where Amazon instead slots in between Mexico and the Netherlands.
unethical_ban 6y ago
Let's start with the premise that "representative government is the union of the people" and "profit motive is not always the best incentive for action in society", and go from there.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  I dispute that premise. I'd hardly call America "unified" at the present moment; we are in such a state of disunity that many are refusing to accept election results. Pervasive as Amazon, Google, et al. may be, they are still much easier to escape than the United States government.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    There's something to be said for Facebook being the cause of America's division right now (amongst many other things obviously).
  - ryall 6y ago
    I'd hardly call America a country with a governmental system that's representative of the people
  - sbarre 6y ago
    I would argue that America is a terrible example of government and governing, and that you shouldn't be using it as a comparison in your argument. Good government is hard, but it's certainly better than a corporation that is legally obligated to put profit ahead of anything else.
    - adventured 6y ago
      Corporations are not legally obligated to put profit ahead of everything else. That's a bad myth that refuses to die. There is absolutely no substance to that claim. There is no legal obligation to maximize shareholder value.
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        I don't know of anyone claiming it's a legal obligation. It's a natural obligation, and it's worse. The shareholders want profit maximised, and with that end, decide upon the board of directors, who decide upon the CEO. If the CEO does not maximise profits, the CEO will not remain the CEO. Therefore, the CEOs of (publicly-traded) companies are obliged to maximise profits – those who do not feel such an obligation are not CEOs.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        Literally two posts above yours, the one your parent is replying to, are the words “legally obligated to put profit ahead of anything else.”
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Hmm. I could argue that technically there're sometimes contracts with investors, but that's not about public trading; they probably just didn't understand where the obligation comes from.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        To clarify: I don’t believe that companies are legally obligated to maximize profits. I do believe that there are people who claim that companies have that legal obligation, which is what you said you’d not observed.
  - adventured 6y ago
    There's nothing new about the US not being united. The Democrats dispute every election they lose, just as they did in 2016. There is nothing new about it. The US has rarely been united throughout its history in fact. It's borderline a fluke that it has survived this long as one nation. And if you think it's bad now, it's going to get dramatically worse yet. The largest groups that make up the US today, that dominate its politics and culture, have absolutely nothing in common with eachother and will grow further apart as the years pass. The rancor will get much worse. The populism will get worse. The end result is obvious and unavoidable (and I'm not talking about civil war, that's a redneck fantasy; it's tyranny, oppression, endless strife, and ever worsening dysfunction as the Feds try to contain the unspooling and get ever more paranoid).
  - atq2119 6y ago
    > Pervasive as Amazon, Google, et al. may be, they are still much easier to escape than the United States government. Like it or not, there's always going to be some powerful entity who you cannot escape because it rules the land. The only question is what shape you want that entity to have. Accountability matters, and so democracy is generally a good place to start.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lnanek2 6y ago
  What about starting with the premise that "a successful corporation offers goods or services people want for less cost than competitors" whereas a successful government organization "exhausts their budget every fiscal quarter and successfully demands more". Which is doing more good for the people? I've worked for both and know which I'd choose.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Because someone will soon realise that "a successful corporation offers goods or services people want for less cost than competitors" is a great reason to introduce slave labour to increase efficiency. Gig economy without employment rights and stopping unions is just a step towards that. Also "exhausts their budget every fiscal quarter and successfully demands more" applies just as much to corporate projects. And given we gov agencies rarely can solve the whole problem, why expect them not to exhaust their budget?
  - fuzzfactor 6y ago
    A successful corporation performs its mission smartly and reliably. This may or may not include specified behaviors, tasks, growth, marketing, sales, profits, goods, services, employees, competitors, etc. Even corporations without any shareholders are common, found in the non-profit sector, but you do need corporate officers regardless. Would it be better if there were a couple non-profit corporations with one or two million employees each the size of Amazon or Wal-Mart, to go along with what we have now?
- splistud 6y ago
  I don't see any reason to accept either of those premises. Empirical evidence says you're 0 for 2.
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    If you think profit motive, rather than ethics and benefit to society, should control prisons, the provisioning of healthcare, or the education of citizens, there is no middle for us to meet on.
    - astrange 6y ago
      The right-wing (libertarian?) belief here is usually that doing things for the benefit of society doesn't actually benefit society, because irony always wins. I don't know if this is true, but you'll only talk past each other if you don't acknowledge it.
danbolt 6y ago
Neither have to be that big. If something's going to be so big and pervasive into people's lives though, then I'd rather be able to have a democratic say in a government than the Shinra Electric Power Company.
arcticbull 6y ago
What do you mean by "get this big"? Governments aren't defined by a market cap, but rather by the services they provide to their citizens. Consider that a private company's only goal is to enrich its shareholders, and they have no responsibility to the people or places around them. They are only accountable to their shareholders and the government. A governments responsibility is solely to its citizens who also control it by vote. The bigger your biggest companies are, the more powerful your government must become to keep them in line - to ensure they don't break the rules. If you want a small government that is able to retain order and fairness, you must also limit the size of the companies within its purview.
- basilgohar 6y ago
  That's a pretty narrow definition of a government. I hardly think that's been the case for most of history and I don't think that's actually the case in the majority of nations to date, even at the surface.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Curious what definition you would use? Beyond the obvious, monopoly on the use of force.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  Consider that politicians' only goal is to get re-elected. While the rare exception may exist, that's also true of companies. While governments are accountable in theory, that rarely holds true in practice. I don't think that a "bigger" government, id est one with more regulatory oversight, would help; rather, use the existing court system to enforce what we have. If we lack political will to enforce the existing measures, adding more will not help. A government need not be "big" to have effective court systems and pass some rules on what certain companies can and cannot do.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Monopoly rules only exist and matter because of the government. It's pretty obvious that even with them, there's a real pressure for consolidation (and that's efficiency of scale). The natural state of a company is a monopoly. Once you are a monopoly, you don't need to worry about getting "re-elected" any more than a despot does. The free society exists only in the space between these two clashing titans.
notJim 6y ago
That's not what national total wealth refers to. It refers to the wealth of all citizens. > National net wealth, also known as national net worth, is the total sum of the value of a nation's assets minus its liabilities. It refers to the total value of net wealth possessed by the citizens of a nation at a set point in time. Given that multi-national corporations exist, it seems obvious that companies will have greater wealth than nations.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  > Given that multi-national corporations exist, it seems obvious that companies will have greater wealth than nations. That doesn't follow because every non-totalitarian country has multiple corporations operating in it, in most countries a much larger number than the maximum number of countries a corporation could possibly operate in.
mullingitover 6y ago
> Bonus question: Why should governments be allowed to get that big? I would argue that most of our current problems are happening because our governments are small, ineffective, and corrupt. I would prefer big, effective, smart, and transparent governments that can take decisive action any day of the week. I'd go so far as to abolish state governments entirely and split their powers between counties and the federal government; they were made for a time when our communications were limited by the speeds of our fastest horses.
- dantheman 6y ago
  small and corrupt, so let's make them bigger and corrupt? How much do you think the government should forcefully take from its citizens to get bigger?
  - mullingitover 6y ago
    I mean, that's not what I said at all, and then I see you're breaking out the old 'taxation is theft' sawhorse. Personally I'm a 'taxation makes civilization possible' man myself, and I find that the 'taxation is theft' people rarely make meaningful contributions to society.
- splistud 6y ago
  They were made for a time when we were not so poorly educated that we trusted leadership to people so far away, with so little in common with ourselves and our way of lives. I tell you what, though. You design an effective, smart and transparent government and I'll never say a word about how big you would like it to be.
  - mullingitover 6y ago
    > They were made for a time when we were not so poorly educated that we trusted leadership to people so far away, How do we define 'far away'? I can have a face to face conversation with someone at the opposite end of the country with near-zero effort. > with so little in common with ourselves and our way of lives. I strongly disagree with this. Partisan politics try to paint people from different regions of the US as being wildly different, and I flatly reject this notion. I've lived in urban, rural, and in areas separated by thousands of miles. Americans are far more alike than different. There are the same (minor) cultural differences within the average state as between states on opposite ends of the country. > I tell you what, though. You design an effective, smart and transparent government and I'll never say a word about how big you would like it to be. I don't have all the answers, but I would start by outlawing the bribery of public officials via campaign donations, and I'd put the legislative process in version control.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Governments exist as a collective to the public to do what one individual cannot do on their own. Corporations exist to enrich shareholders and nothing more.
xherberta 6y ago
If the US hadn't dropped the ball on enforcing existing antitrust laws in the 80s and 90s, we wouldn't have to ask. Perhaps many more regular people would own productive enterprises, and wouldn't be looking to government to address inequality. Now that both corporations and government are so big and intrusive that they're somewhere between a nuisance and prohibitive toward small-scale enterprise, we should at least think about ways to sic them on each other.

wellthisisgreat 6y ago

Yeah GP is unlikely to answer

jcranmer 6y ago

The retort to your bonus question is that the government doesn't get to "spend" its GDP. Although the counter-retort is to bring up government revenue instead, where Amazon instead slots in between Mexico and the Netherlands.

unethical_ban 6y ago

Let's start with the premise that "representative government is the union of the people" and "profit motive is not always the best incentive for action in society", and go from there.

da_big_ghey 6y ago
I dispute that premise. I'd hardly call America "unified" at the present moment; we are in such a state of disunity that many are refusing to accept election results. Pervasive as Amazon, Google, et al. may be, they are still much easier to escape than the United States government.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  There's something to be said for Facebook being the cause of America's division right now (amongst many other things obviously).
- ryall 6y ago
  I'd hardly call America a country with a governmental system that's representative of the people
- sbarre 6y ago
  I would argue that America is a terrible example of government and governing, and that you shouldn't be using it as a comparison in your argument. Good government is hard, but it's certainly better than a corporation that is legally obligated to put profit ahead of anything else.
  - adventured 6y ago
    Corporations are not legally obligated to put profit ahead of everything else. That's a bad myth that refuses to die. There is absolutely no substance to that claim. There is no legal obligation to maximize shareholder value.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      I don't know of anyone claiming it's a legal obligation. It's a natural obligation, and it's worse. The shareholders want profit maximised, and with that end, decide upon the board of directors, who decide upon the CEO. If the CEO does not maximise profits, the CEO will not remain the CEO. Therefore, the CEOs of (publicly-traded) companies are obliged to maximise profits – those who do not feel such an obligation are not CEOs.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Literally two posts above yours, the one your parent is replying to, are the words “legally obligated to put profit ahead of anything else.”
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Hmm. I could argue that technically there're sometimes contracts with investors, but that's not about public trading; they probably just didn't understand where the obligation comes from.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        To clarify: I don’t believe that companies are legally obligated to maximize profits. I do believe that there are people who claim that companies have that legal obligation, which is what you said you’d not observed.
- adventured 6y ago
  There's nothing new about the US not being united. The Democrats dispute every election they lose, just as they did in 2016. There is nothing new about it. The US has rarely been united throughout its history in fact. It's borderline a fluke that it has survived this long as one nation. And if you think it's bad now, it's going to get dramatically worse yet. The largest groups that make up the US today, that dominate its politics and culture, have absolutely nothing in common with eachother and will grow further apart as the years pass. The rancor will get much worse. The populism will get worse. The end result is obvious and unavoidable (and I'm not talking about civil war, that's a redneck fantasy; it's tyranny, oppression, endless strife, and ever worsening dysfunction as the Feds try to contain the unspooling and get ever more paranoid).
- atq2119 6y ago
  > Pervasive as Amazon, Google, et al. may be, they are still much easier to escape than the United States government. Like it or not, there's always going to be some powerful entity who you cannot escape because it rules the land. The only question is what shape you want that entity to have. Accountability matters, and so democracy is generally a good place to start.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lnanek2 6y ago
What about starting with the premise that "a successful corporation offers goods or services people want for less cost than competitors" whereas a successful government organization "exhausts their budget every fiscal quarter and successfully demands more". Which is doing more good for the people? I've worked for both and know which I'd choose.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Because someone will soon realise that "a successful corporation offers goods or services people want for less cost than competitors" is a great reason to introduce slave labour to increase efficiency. Gig economy without employment rights and stopping unions is just a step towards that. Also "exhausts their budget every fiscal quarter and successfully demands more" applies just as much to corporate projects. And given we gov agencies rarely can solve the whole problem, why expect them not to exhaust their budget?
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  A successful corporation performs its mission smartly and reliably. This may or may not include specified behaviors, tasks, growth, marketing, sales, profits, goods, services, employees, competitors, etc. Even corporations without any shareholders are common, found in the non-profit sector, but you do need corporate officers regardless. Would it be better if there were a couple non-profit corporations with one or two million employees each the size of Amazon or Wal-Mart, to go along with what we have now?
splistud 6y ago
I don't see any reason to accept either of those premises. Empirical evidence says you're 0 for 2.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  If you think profit motive, rather than ethics and benefit to society, should control prisons, the provisioning of healthcare, or the education of citizens, there is no middle for us to meet on.
  - astrange 6y ago
    The right-wing (libertarian?) belief here is usually that doing things for the benefit of society doesn't actually benefit society, because irony always wins. I don't know if this is true, but you'll only talk past each other if you don't acknowledge it.

danbolt 6y ago

Neither have to be that big. If something's going to be so big and pervasive into people's lives though, then I'd rather be able to have a democratic say in a government than the Shinra Electric Power Company.

arcticbull 6y ago

What do you mean by "get this big"? Governments aren't defined by a market cap, but rather by the services they provide to their citizens. Consider that a private company's only goal is to enrich its shareholders, and they have no responsibility to the people or places around them. They are only accountable to their shareholders and the government. A governments responsibility is solely to its citizens who also control it by vote. The bigger your biggest companies are, the more powerful your government must become to keep them in line - to ensure they don't break the rules. If you want a small government that is able to retain order and fairness, you must also limit the size of the companies within its purview.

basilgohar 6y ago
That's a pretty narrow definition of a government. I hardly think that's been the case for most of history and I don't think that's actually the case in the majority of nations to date, even at the surface.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Curious what definition you would use? Beyond the obvious, monopoly on the use of force.
da_big_ghey 6y ago
Consider that politicians' only goal is to get re-elected. While the rare exception may exist, that's also true of companies. While governments are accountable in theory, that rarely holds true in practice. I don't think that a "bigger" government, id est one with more regulatory oversight, would help; rather, use the existing court system to enforce what we have. If we lack political will to enforce the existing measures, adding more will not help. A government need not be "big" to have effective court systems and pass some rules on what certain companies can and cannot do.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Monopoly rules only exist and matter because of the government. It's pretty obvious that even with them, there's a real pressure for consolidation (and that's efficiency of scale). The natural state of a company is a monopoly. Once you are a monopoly, you don't need to worry about getting "re-elected" any more than a despot does. The free society exists only in the space between these two clashing titans.

notJim 6y ago

That's not what national total wealth refers to. It refers to the wealth of all citizens. > National net wealth, also known as national net worth, is the total sum of the value of a nation's assets minus its liabilities. It refers to the total value of net wealth possessed by the citizens of a nation at a set point in time. Given that multi-national corporations exist, it seems obvious that companies will have greater wealth than nations.

TheCoelacanth 6y ago
> Given that multi-national corporations exist, it seems obvious that companies will have greater wealth than nations. That doesn't follow because every non-totalitarian country has multiple corporations operating in it, in most countries a much larger number than the maximum number of countries a corporation could possibly operate in.

mullingitover 6y ago

> Bonus question: Why should governments be allowed to get that big? I would argue that most of our current problems are happening because our governments are small, ineffective, and corrupt. I would prefer big, effective, smart, and transparent governments that can take decisive action any day of the week. I'd go so far as to abolish state governments entirely and split their powers between counties and the federal government; they were made for a time when our communications were limited by the speeds of our fastest horses.

dantheman 6y ago
small and corrupt, so let's make them bigger and corrupt? How much do you think the government should forcefully take from its citizens to get bigger?
- mullingitover 6y ago
  I mean, that's not what I said at all, and then I see you're breaking out the old 'taxation is theft' sawhorse. Personally I'm a 'taxation makes civilization possible' man myself, and I find that the 'taxation is theft' people rarely make meaningful contributions to society.
splistud 6y ago
They were made for a time when we were not so poorly educated that we trusted leadership to people so far away, with so little in common with ourselves and our way of lives. I tell you what, though. You design an effective, smart and transparent government and I'll never say a word about how big you would like it to be.
- mullingitover 6y ago
  > They were made for a time when we were not so poorly educated that we trusted leadership to people so far away, How do we define 'far away'? I can have a face to face conversation with someone at the opposite end of the country with near-zero effort. > with so little in common with ourselves and our way of lives. I strongly disagree with this. Partisan politics try to paint people from different regions of the US as being wildly different, and I flatly reject this notion. I've lived in urban, rural, and in areas separated by thousands of miles. Americans are far more alike than different. There are the same (minor) cultural differences within the average state as between states on opposite ends of the country. > I tell you what, though. You design an effective, smart and transparent government and I'll never say a word about how big you would like it to be. I don't have all the answers, but I would start by outlawing the bribery of public officials via campaign donations, and I'd put the legislative process in version control.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

Governments exist as a collective to the public to do what one individual cannot do on their own. Corporations exist to enrich shareholders and nothing more.

xherberta 6y ago

If the US hadn't dropped the ball on enforcing existing antitrust laws in the 80s and 90s, we wouldn't have to ask. Perhaps many more regular people would own productive enterprises, and wouldn't be looking to government to address inequality. Now that both corporations and government are so big and intrusive that they're somewhere between a nuisance and prohibitive toward small-scale enterprise, we should at least think about ways to sic them on each other.