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I’m a libertarian type, but I think any company that is large enough to sway government policy is a danger to society and should be broken up until their influe

I’m a libertarian type, but I think any company that is large enough to sway government policy is a danger to society and should be broken up until their influence is indistinguishable from noise. No idea how to effectively execute that idea, though.

CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
My thinking is that companies can grow that large due to the capital assets under their command. Taking some inspiration from geo-libertarian thinking the key would be to figure out if, and how, those capital assets can be made into a commons rather than privately owned.
pessimizer 5y ago
Sadly, the breaking up companies does very little to the political influence of the people who own them, other than giving them a lot of different names to speak in the same voice. You break up companies, I think, in order to make room for innovative competitors, and to make corruption more difficult by making the lines of communication lengthier (and forcing them to stretch between companies.) When it comes to politics, industries aren't afraid to "unionize" amongst themselves and speak with a pretty singular voice. Most of their interests will always be identical. Those massive accumulations of power aren't actually located in supercorporations or ideal groups of competing companies making up an industry, but in individuals. The problem is that there's such an wealth/income disparity that small groups of people are going to be more powerful than larger groups of people by orders of magnitude, and that they're naturally going to use that power to increase that disparity. Their ideal world has the people who have accumulated the most ruling the rest through a system of benevolence and patronage. That's what libertarianism is. edit: The breakup of Standard Oil made Rockefeller far more wealthy and influential than he was pre-breakup.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > the political influence of the people who own them We have this concept called progressive taxation that's supposed to help with that. (Not it's actually used in practice, but it is a known thing.)

CuriousSkeptic 5y ago

My thinking is that companies can grow that large due to the capital assets under their command. Taking some inspiration from geo-libertarian thinking the key would be to figure out if, and how, those capital assets can be made into a commons rather than privately owned.

pessimizer 5y ago

Sadly, the breaking up companies does very little to the political influence of the people who own them, other than giving them a lot of different names to speak in the same voice. You break up companies, I think, in order to make room for innovative competitors, and to make corruption more difficult by making the lines of communication lengthier (and forcing them to stretch between companies.) When it comes to politics, industries aren't afraid to "unionize" amongst themselves and speak with a pretty singular voice. Most of their interests will always be identical. Those massive accumulations of power aren't actually located in supercorporations or ideal groups of competing companies making up an industry, but in individuals. The problem is that there's such an wealth/income disparity that small groups of people are going to be more powerful than larger groups of people by orders of magnitude, and that they're naturally going to use that power to increase that disparity. Their ideal world has the people who have accumulated the most ruling the rest through a system of benevolence and patronage. That's what libertarianism is. edit: The breakup of Standard Oil made Rockefeller far more wealthy and influential than he was pre-breakup.

a1369209993 5y ago
> the political influence of the people who own them We have this concept called progressive taxation that's supposed to help with that. (Not it's actually used in practice, but it is a known thing.)