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>or we will reach the day where corporations are more powerful than national governments It's been true for decades that multinational corporations can push go
by rhizome 6y ago
>or we will reach the day where corporations are more powerful than national governments
It's been true for decades that multinational corporations can push governments around by threatening to move their HQ or manufacturing or literally any other public benefit that they provide (like jobs) to any of the other countries they operate in (and maybe even some new ones that are campaigning for their attention).
Of course it's more complex than that in practice, but in a similar way that billionaires are (or can be seen as) a systemic economic failure, so too can highly capitalized organizations manipulate their living environments for their sole benefit, to the detriment of the vast majority of people that the organization touches with their actions. Jamie Dimon and Steve Mnuchin should be in prison right now for their performances around 2008, but instead they are vaunted leaders worldwide suffering zero consequences for their widely-destructive failures. This state of affairs is obviously not a meritocracy.
Antitrust enforcement operates pretty much at the leisure of the offenders, regulatorily captured like a lot of oversight in our increasingly authoritarian world.
- technofiend 6y agoThe same dance is played out with sports teams. Oh no payer-funded stadium? Fine, we'll move the team.
- Traster 6y agoThere are two issues here though. The first issue there is that you have a negotiation between a private entity for whom costs are directly associated, negotiating with a public entity where costs are opaquely passed on to taxpayers, but for whom public benefits are often very direct. The second issue is that federalisation of taxation and spending creates a race to the bottom between state entities. The problem isn't only that some city doesn't want to throw money away on a stadium - it's that they're put in a position where another city will buy the team a new stadium. In reality this is state intervention to prop up a private business like a state buying warehouses for Amazon. It destroys the prospect of ever taxing corporations - or indeed more than that, it uses state spending to subsidize private corporations.
- jldugger 6y agoOr even just moderately sized companies nobody in their right minds is hinting at breaking up: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/05/04/476799218/episode-699-why-did-the-job-cross-the-road https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/05/04/476799218/epis... I don't think the size of the company really matters, just how hungry politicians are for votes, and how starved their government is for tax money.
- jimbob45 6y agoIf governments start cutting off markets to corporations, then corporations will accede to whichever market is the biggest (China, EU, and the US, in that order). I don’t like the system we have now but I also don’t like corporate governance being determined by market size.