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How is that any different than some fiefdom ruled over by some noble? The whole point of democracy and elective government is that you can't rely on a system l

How is that any different than some fiefdom ruled over by some noble? The whole point of democracy and elective government is that you can't rely on a system like that to be consistently good, whether it's the Duke's son squandering all the wealth and not listening to the people or a shift in management at the company. Just because sometimes there were benevolent companies that decided to contribute to their communities doesn't mean relying on that is a stable or desired outcome. Require employees be paid and treated fairly. Require companies pay their taxes. Tax employees on those fair wages. Use those taxes to pay for community needs. That's the goal. That's our responsibility as citizens of a democracy. Relinquishing these responsibilities to others because it seems easier is how we got where we are. Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones, so take away their ability to be abusive. If you relinquish your power to another, you should expect to be unhappy when their goals conflict with your own. Don't relinquish your power.

lordnacho 5y ago
> Require employees be paid and treated fairly. The problem is this isn't well defined. Somewhere maybe in the 1980s greed became good and the responsibilities of corporations shifted from being a fictional person that could benefit society to a thing that was in it for shareholders only. This is a cultural shift borne by MBAs and thinktanks, not something that can be pinned down to a specific incident. As usual sunlight is the best disinfectant. It needs to be clear who owns what and who did what, and journalists need to go and look at cases where things are not in the interest of the community. There need to be records of whose interests are represented, who owns what, and who knows who.
- danaris 5y ago
  > The problem is this isn't well defined. This is not entirely untrue, but it's not particularly supported by the rest of your post. Even if it's hard to completely define what "paid and treated fairly" mean, it's crystal clear that a very large percentage of employers today don't meet even the lowest possible bar—that being a living wage and not actively abusing the employees.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Yep, and it's not even hard to find examples of businesses that are not paying a living wage and/or are actively abusing people. Just walk into almost any restaurant or retail location. Pretty much anywhere below the highest end establishments of either kind will have both things going on.
engineer_22 5y ago
The counter argument, is that relying on benevolent government to ensure a desired outcome is just as naive. In both cases, the holders of power are people. You're just trading one person for another.
- danaris 5y ago
  You're trading one person who has no accountability to you in particular or the populace in general with a group of people who have at least some meaningful accountability. That's not an even trade.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hidudeurcool 5y ago
  - foolinaround 5y ago
    if it is a local government you directly vote for, that supports your argument. Often, it is layers of government, way over you, who have no clue of the local needs, and it gets much worse. Not only does it not know the local needs, it has no expertise in the subject area itself, and so an unelected unnamed bureaucracy rules the roost, and over time, gathers so much power, that regardless of which government comes to power, the true power rests with these bureacrats.
  - endominus 5y ago
    Or, looking at it another way, you're trading a person who has the ability to go against group consensus for the betterment of the community to a person who is highly incentivized to follow group consensus to maintain their power (in the ideal circumstances, of course; I'm ignoring the obvious failure case of corruption or other manipulations). When that group consensus aligns with your values, that could be good. When it does not - such as living as a political minority, or when the group consensus is harmful to you (take, for example, NIMBYism), that can be very bad. In both cases you will have no meaningful political representation. A Democrat voter in a very Republican county has no real voice in government affairs unless they expend an inordinate and frankly unreasonable amount of effort campaigning - and will likely suffer some social repercussions for doing so. The reason people keep coming back to the idea of autocracy - why companies are often so much more efficient than governments - is that a central decision-maker can (not always will!) more effectively direct group efforts and establish priorities. Democracy, as has been said, is the worst political system, except for all the others, but let's not lie to ourselves and ignore that in some contexts it is, in fact, strictly worse. The classic example, of course, is an army led by direct democracy. When a thing must get done, and damn the consequences, then there really is no substitute for autocracy. It's just unfortunate that the people who eventually end up as autocrats are rarely there to benefit the community. Building systems of accountability and responsibility through culture and non-systemic factors may better this (see, for example, the 85 terms of Roman dictators who did not try to seize any more power than they had been given by the Senate and in fact often returned their powers before their term was over), but culture-crafting to accomplish that is unfortunately beyond us at the moment.
phailhaus 5y ago
> Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones Which is exactly what happened in their situation! They "hoped" that the company would just remain nice out of the goodness of their hearts, and did not make sure that those benefits were built into the system. Surprise: when ownership changed hands, the gravy train was over and the people had no actual infrastructure to sustain themselves.
guelo 5y ago
It worked and was stable for decades because unions ensured a balance of power between capital and labor. NAFTA and other pro-capital regulation broke that balance and shifted the balance towards capital.
- deltree7 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Is the implication that conservatives supported NAFTA because it would reduce poverty around the world? It's probably better to assess peoples motivations as they were at the time, not by what happened. A liberal would say they were focusing on the needs of the citizens of their own country and the problem in front of them. In any case, making this a case of liberals vs conservatives is silly, and to my view reductive. As a citizen of a democracy you have power. Don't abdicate your responsibility, and thus your power, because it's easier to trust someone else handle it.
    - nmhancoc 5y ago
      There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens. They (at least used to) have considerable purchase among conservatives. As a category I think it’s also generally correct to say they’d argue for not yielding such power to any sort of decision makers, corporate or government, at all. Instead attempting to coordinate empowered individuals through coercive but distinctly non human forces like markets. Whether the libertarians are correct or not is one thing, but I don’t think they’ve been hypocritical or inconsistent in their motivations.
      - kbenson 5y ago
        > There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens. And there are liberal policy makers that look to increase protections for US citizens because they believe in negotiating from a position of moral authority, because without being able to practice what you preach you're easy to point out as hypocritical and ignore, or at a minimum it's easy to convince others to discount your position. The important thing is that neither side, as a whole, is choosing a position with the intention of hurting local or remote peoples, and to various degrees both succeed and fail on various metrics. Neither side is inconsistent or hypocritical, they're entirely consistent within their own ideology for the most part, it's just that when not within that ideology, it's easy to point at specifics and explain them in terms of someone else's ideology in a way that makes them seem inconsistent. The first thing I do when I see something lambasting a groups actions as hypocritical or stupid is to try to look into that group's own messaging on what they're doing and why. Sometimes I think their reasoning is flawed, but far more often than not there's a core of truth and consistency and truth to what they're attempting, even in those cases where I think they're working on flawed information. Before I was willing to call a large group of people hypocritical or inconsistent, I would try very hard to understand their reasoning and how that action it is being presented/sold within that group. The risk of my own biases affecting my judgement is far too high otherwise.
CPLX 5y ago
The vast majority of what makes society work is variations on the honor system. You can like it or hate it but it's better for everyone when we all agree on that.
- kbenson 5y ago
  The honor system works when there are social checks and balances that can be applied to punish socially for going against what's acceptable. The whole point is that larger entities are shielded from some of these repercussions because of their size and power, and in some cases are almost completely untouchable by this system. The legal system is there to catch extreme cases the social system can't feasible handle well enough. We don't just let murderers go and ostracize them, we incarcerate them and forcibly remove their rights. Some things are too important to allow social norms to be the ultimate arbiter of.
alexashka 5y ago
> Just because sometimes there were benevolent companies that decided to contribute to their communities doesn't mean relying on that is a stable or desired outcome. You are always going to rely on a few people, to do the right thing, which will become the wrong thing as life goes on, which will require a few more people, to do the right thing again, ad infinitum. That's just how this human thing works. Sometimes it's laws, other times it's breaking laws. Other times something else. It varies, there is no right answer forevermore, sorry. You can't solve hard problems of coordinating, pleasing and doing right by many people with conflicting interests by 'requiring' it. That's just childish thinking, sorry.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Who said there's a right answer forever? The whole point of what I said is to make sure you use your own power as a citizen to pass laws and elect those people you think will serve your interests best at the current time, and as soon as that's not the case, try to get rid of them. That's the point of democracy and a representative democracy, the power to keep interests aligned with the people. Often that means putting in some safe lower bounds. Laws, as you noted. You put safeguards at the bottom preventing the worst behavior. That's the whole reason there are laws preventing child labor, because people decided that some things should not be tolerated. Nothing prevents a company from still being a good employer and helping where they can, but that should not be required for our society to function. The goals of a company diverge from what is best for the people (both short term and long term) too often for that to be a good idea.
  - alexashka 5y ago
    Our difference lies in the axioms. Your axiom is democracy and what sounds like dozens of other conditions. My axiom is highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power. That's it. My position is trivially superior, for many reasons, if only because your exact position is just one of many possibilities that highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power can choose to implement.
    - 5y ago
roenxi 5y ago
The two main differences: 1) Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary. It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner. 2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule. One big observations: This is what US government spending has done in the last 2 centuries: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Government_Revenue_and_spending_GDP.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme... That is a pretty solid contender for why people are less generous. I too would be investing more money in my community if I had more control of it. There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community. It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. People took control away from businesses and the businesses stopped being in control.
- banannaise 5y ago
  > Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary Is this a joke? Nepotism is a huge problem in every step of the executive pipeline. The children of executives are often groomed to become executives themselves from basically the time they can talk.
- tr_user 5y ago
  > 2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule. take out lobbying and id agree
- andrepd 5y ago
  >It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner. Not particularly common. Social mobility is low even in developed countries, and getting lower.
- lovich 5y ago
  > It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. Do you actually believe that? That all these business owners were running their factories out of the goodness of their hearts and that they only stopped because the government took all the money they had to give out as charity? If that is the case why do we see ultra profitable businesses returning to this form instead of trying to carve out any section of their work base that they can, ex. The FAANGs turning most job positions into contractor filled roles like the janitorial staff?
legalcorrection 5y ago
Others have done a good job answering you, but I just want to add that there's a whole body of theory and scholarship that calls your mental model of this into serious doubt. It's called public choice theory and it essentially concludes that politicians, bureaucrats, and other officials are just as driven by selfish interests as anyone else, and that democratic systems typically do a very bad job at channeling that selfish energy toward the public good. Forgive me for being sentimentalist a bit, but I think that nowadays we underestimate the weight that feelings of duty, loyalty, and trust had on rulers of times past. They were raised from the day they were born to be leaders, to care deeply about their family honor, to feel obliged to their subjects. Certainly, they were ultimately fallen men like the rest of us, and hereditary succession is not great at picking the best of each generation.
- kbenson 5y ago
  My point isn't that politicians are inherently better or more trustworthy than companies, but that you have more control over them. The amount of control as a community you can exert on a company beg enough to have a large influence in a community is minimal. The amount of control a community has over an elected official that oversees that community should be large. There will be good companies and bad companies. There will be good politicians and bad politicians. One is easier to steer than the other. Duty, loyalty and trust are good to have. What do you do if the large local company that has outsized influence on the community is lacking those? What do you do if the local elected officials are lacking those? Neither is easy to deal with, but I think one is a far more manageable problem.
rglullis 5y ago
You are talking past (way past!) the point of OP. The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. A time where societies had much higher levels of trust. OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.
- refurb 5y ago
  My opinion (having worked for one those companies the OP talks about) is it’s easy to be benevolent and generous when you face no real competition, profits grow year over year and everyone is fat and happy. You never have to lay anyone off, pay raises come regularly, no huge pressure to perform, management gets big bonuses and shareholders watch the stock rise. See the big US automakers in their hay day. But when competition heats up, other companies take you business and profit growth has to be fought for, anything and everything is on the table. The companies back then were never really loyal, they just never had the need to be ruthless, but they certainly would have been.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. Correction, a time when companies didn't have an easy and clear path to global output. > When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. I'm not sure that's ever been the norm anywhere in the world throughout history. I definitely don't think it was the reality in the Norman Rockwell like idea of what you think it was like. We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses. Things were always bad, just in different ways. Those same companies that gave to the community and were the main employers in an area also set the working wage in the area with little market competition, and faced less scrutiny from the local law enforcement (who wants to be the prosecutor or police officer responsible for hurting everyone employed there in the community). If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.[1] > OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power. I wasn't really making a countering the OP, as much as expanding on a point they noted. Those situations that were good or appeared so are unstable and there's little the local community can do to change it. But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going. 1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught-fire-least-dozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
darkerside 5y ago
The obvious difference is that the employees are free to change jobs at any time. Yes, they may need to move if there are literally no other jobs in town, but that's not an option serfs had in a fiefdom. I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. And it's hard to totally escape any form of hierarchy when you live in a society.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > The obvious difference is that the employees are free to change jobs at any time. Yes, they may need to move if there are literally no other jobs in town, but that's not an option serfs had in a fiefdom. You misunderstand my point, and possibly the discussion. If the company is large enough to be a majority employer in the area and much of the social works of the area are provided by the company, then regardless of whether you work for them you are beholden to them in some way. The local government will not want to upset the local economy by be antagonistic with them, they'll set the local pay scale based on whatever they pay as everything will be in relation to it, and there will be immense social pressure to not cause problems that would be bad for the whole community. Do the people involved have more options for getting out from under the control of a company like that in an area? Yes, but far less than I think your statement would lead people to believe. To actually get out of control you'd have to completely leave the area. That's far easier now than in the distant past, but it's not easy. > I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. I'm not saying every one of these companies was horrible, nor that every ruler was horrible. I'm saying that ceding your power to control who governs you to them leaves you at a disadvantage when inevitably a worse ruler or bad management comes into place, because nobody lives forever, and nothing is static. Put another way, what if you contracted with someone to provide all your meals and you paid them $1000/mo. Maybe you're extremely happy with the quantity and quality of the food provided initially, but eventually, years down the line, the quality has changed to sub-par and the quantity is lower than your got previously as well. You'd want to renegotiate that contract, right? Well what if it was a lifetime contract? That would be a problem, and you'd probably see that as a major red flag initially and be wary of entering a lifetime contract where the future was uncertain. That's what allowing a company to control the local economy and be the provider of social works is like. By allowing the company to take over the job of the local government, the people have ceded their power to enact change through their elected representatives, and they are stuck with whatever they get down the line. Elected representatives aren't perfect, but at least there's the option to change them or pressure them to change based on the community needs. What pressure can the community honestly exert on the company when if decides that it's so much cheaper to move the factory two states over that they have to do so?

lordnacho 5y ago

> Require employees be paid and treated fairly. The problem is this isn't well defined. Somewhere maybe in the 1980s greed became good and the responsibilities of corporations shifted from being a fictional person that could benefit society to a thing that was in it for shareholders only. This is a cultural shift borne by MBAs and thinktanks, not something that can be pinned down to a specific incident. As usual sunlight is the best disinfectant. It needs to be clear who owns what and who did what, and journalists need to go and look at cases where things are not in the interest of the community. There need to be records of whose interests are represented, who owns what, and who knows who.

danaris 5y ago
> The problem is this isn't well defined. This is not entirely untrue, but it's not particularly supported by the rest of your post. Even if it's hard to completely define what "paid and treated fairly" mean, it's crystal clear that a very large percentage of employers today don't meet even the lowest possible bar—that being a living wage and not actively abusing the employees.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Yep, and it's not even hard to find examples of businesses that are not paying a living wage and/or are actively abusing people. Just walk into almost any restaurant or retail location. Pretty much anywhere below the highest end establishments of either kind will have both things going on.

engineer_22 5y ago

The counter argument, is that relying on benevolent government to ensure a desired outcome is just as naive. In both cases, the holders of power are people. You're just trading one person for another.

danaris 5y ago
You're trading one person who has no accountability to you in particular or the populace in general with a group of people who have at least some meaningful accountability. That's not an even trade.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hidudeurcool 5y ago
- foolinaround 5y ago
  if it is a local government you directly vote for, that supports your argument. Often, it is layers of government, way over you, who have no clue of the local needs, and it gets much worse. Not only does it not know the local needs, it has no expertise in the subject area itself, and so an unelected unnamed bureaucracy rules the roost, and over time, gathers so much power, that regardless of which government comes to power, the true power rests with these bureacrats.
- endominus 5y ago
  Or, looking at it another way, you're trading a person who has the ability to go against group consensus for the betterment of the community to a person who is highly incentivized to follow group consensus to maintain their power (in the ideal circumstances, of course; I'm ignoring the obvious failure case of corruption or other manipulations). When that group consensus aligns with your values, that could be good. When it does not - such as living as a political minority, or when the group consensus is harmful to you (take, for example, NIMBYism), that can be very bad. In both cases you will have no meaningful political representation. A Democrat voter in a very Republican county has no real voice in government affairs unless they expend an inordinate and frankly unreasonable amount of effort campaigning - and will likely suffer some social repercussions for doing so. The reason people keep coming back to the idea of autocracy - why companies are often so much more efficient than governments - is that a central decision-maker can (not always will!) more effectively direct group efforts and establish priorities. Democracy, as has been said, is the worst political system, except for all the others, but let's not lie to ourselves and ignore that in some contexts it is, in fact, strictly worse. The classic example, of course, is an army led by direct democracy. When a thing must get done, and damn the consequences, then there really is no substitute for autocracy. It's just unfortunate that the people who eventually end up as autocrats are rarely there to benefit the community. Building systems of accountability and responsibility through culture and non-systemic factors may better this (see, for example, the 85 terms of Roman dictators who did not try to seize any more power than they had been given by the Senate and in fact often returned their powers before their term was over), but culture-crafting to accomplish that is unfortunately beyond us at the moment.

phailhaus 5y ago

> Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones Which is exactly what happened in their situation! They "hoped" that the company would just remain nice out of the goodness of their hearts, and did not make sure that those benefits were built into the system. Surprise: when ownership changed hands, the gravy train was over and the people had no actual infrastructure to sustain themselves.

guelo 5y ago

It worked and was stable for decades because unions ensured a balance of power between capital and labor. NAFTA and other pro-capital regulation broke that balance and shifted the balance towards capital.

deltree7 5y ago
[flagged]
- kbenson 5y ago
  Is the implication that conservatives supported NAFTA because it would reduce poverty around the world? It's probably better to assess peoples motivations as they were at the time, not by what happened. A liberal would say they were focusing on the needs of the citizens of their own country and the problem in front of them. In any case, making this a case of liberals vs conservatives is silly, and to my view reductive. As a citizen of a democracy you have power. Don't abdicate your responsibility, and thus your power, because it's easier to trust someone else handle it.
  - nmhancoc 5y ago
    There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens. They (at least used to) have considerable purchase among conservatives. As a category I think it’s also generally correct to say they’d argue for not yielding such power to any sort of decision makers, corporate or government, at all. Instead attempting to coordinate empowered individuals through coercive but distinctly non human forces like markets. Whether the libertarians are correct or not is one thing, but I don’t think they’ve been hypocritical or inconsistent in their motivations.
    - kbenson 5y ago
      > There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens. And there are liberal policy makers that look to increase protections for US citizens because they believe in negotiating from a position of moral authority, because without being able to practice what you preach you're easy to point out as hypocritical and ignore, or at a minimum it's easy to convince others to discount your position. The important thing is that neither side, as a whole, is choosing a position with the intention of hurting local or remote peoples, and to various degrees both succeed and fail on various metrics. Neither side is inconsistent or hypocritical, they're entirely consistent within their own ideology for the most part, it's just that when not within that ideology, it's easy to point at specifics and explain them in terms of someone else's ideology in a way that makes them seem inconsistent. The first thing I do when I see something lambasting a groups actions as hypocritical or stupid is to try to look into that group's own messaging on what they're doing and why. Sometimes I think their reasoning is flawed, but far more often than not there's a core of truth and consistency and truth to what they're attempting, even in those cases where I think they're working on flawed information. Before I was willing to call a large group of people hypocritical or inconsistent, I would try very hard to understand their reasoning and how that action it is being presented/sold within that group. The risk of my own biases affecting my judgement is far too high otherwise.

CPLX 5y ago

The vast majority of what makes society work is variations on the honor system. You can like it or hate it but it's better for everyone when we all agree on that.

kbenson 5y ago
The honor system works when there are social checks and balances that can be applied to punish socially for going against what's acceptable. The whole point is that larger entities are shielded from some of these repercussions because of their size and power, and in some cases are almost completely untouchable by this system. The legal system is there to catch extreme cases the social system can't feasible handle well enough. We don't just let murderers go and ostracize them, we incarcerate them and forcibly remove their rights. Some things are too important to allow social norms to be the ultimate arbiter of.

alexashka 5y ago

> Just because sometimes there were benevolent companies that decided to contribute to their communities doesn't mean relying on that is a stable or desired outcome. You are always going to rely on a few people, to do the right thing, which will become the wrong thing as life goes on, which will require a few more people, to do the right thing again, ad infinitum. That's just how this human thing works. Sometimes it's laws, other times it's breaking laws. Other times something else. It varies, there is no right answer forevermore, sorry. You can't solve hard problems of coordinating, pleasing and doing right by many people with conflicting interests by 'requiring' it. That's just childish thinking, sorry.

kbenson 5y ago
Who said there's a right answer forever? The whole point of what I said is to make sure you use your own power as a citizen to pass laws and elect those people you think will serve your interests best at the current time, and as soon as that's not the case, try to get rid of them. That's the point of democracy and a representative democracy, the power to keep interests aligned with the people. Often that means putting in some safe lower bounds. Laws, as you noted. You put safeguards at the bottom preventing the worst behavior. That's the whole reason there are laws preventing child labor, because people decided that some things should not be tolerated. Nothing prevents a company from still being a good employer and helping where they can, but that should not be required for our society to function. The goals of a company diverge from what is best for the people (both short term and long term) too often for that to be a good idea.
- alexashka 5y ago
  Our difference lies in the axioms. Your axiom is democracy and what sounds like dozens of other conditions. My axiom is highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power. That's it. My position is trivially superior, for many reasons, if only because your exact position is just one of many possibilities that highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power can choose to implement.
  - 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago

The two main differences: 1) Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary. It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner. 2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule. One big observations: This is what US government spending has done in the last 2 centuries: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Government_Revenue_and_spending_GDP.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme... That is a pretty solid contender for why people are less generous. I too would be investing more money in my community if I had more control of it. There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community. It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. People took control away from businesses and the businesses stopped being in control.

banannaise 5y ago
> Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary Is this a joke? Nepotism is a huge problem in every step of the executive pipeline. The children of executives are often groomed to become executives themselves from basically the time they can talk.
tr_user 5y ago
> 2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule. take out lobbying and id agree
andrepd 5y ago
>It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner. Not particularly common. Social mobility is low even in developed countries, and getting lower.
lovich 5y ago
> It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. Do you actually believe that? That all these business owners were running their factories out of the goodness of their hearts and that they only stopped because the government took all the money they had to give out as charity? If that is the case why do we see ultra profitable businesses returning to this form instead of trying to carve out any section of their work base that they can, ex. The FAANGs turning most job positions into contractor filled roles like the janitorial staff?

legalcorrection 5y ago

Others have done a good job answering you, but I just want to add that there's a whole body of theory and scholarship that calls your mental model of this into serious doubt. It's called public choice theory and it essentially concludes that politicians, bureaucrats, and other officials are just as driven by selfish interests as anyone else, and that democratic systems typically do a very bad job at channeling that selfish energy toward the public good. Forgive me for being sentimentalist a bit, but I think that nowadays we underestimate the weight that feelings of duty, loyalty, and trust had on rulers of times past. They were raised from the day they were born to be leaders, to care deeply about their family honor, to feel obliged to their subjects. Certainly, they were ultimately fallen men like the rest of us, and hereditary succession is not great at picking the best of each generation.

kbenson 5y ago
My point isn't that politicians are inherently better or more trustworthy than companies, but that you have more control over them. The amount of control as a community you can exert on a company beg enough to have a large influence in a community is minimal. The amount of control a community has over an elected official that oversees that community should be large. There will be good companies and bad companies. There will be good politicians and bad politicians. One is easier to steer than the other. Duty, loyalty and trust are good to have. What do you do if the large local company that has outsized influence on the community is lacking those? What do you do if the local elected officials are lacking those? Neither is easy to deal with, but I think one is a far more manageable problem.

rglullis 5y ago

You are talking past (way past!) the point of OP. The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. A time where societies had much higher levels of trust. OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.

refurb 5y ago
My opinion (having worked for one those companies the OP talks about) is it’s easy to be benevolent and generous when you face no real competition, profits grow year over year and everyone is fat and happy. You never have to lay anyone off, pay raises come regularly, no huge pressure to perform, management gets big bonuses and shareholders watch the stock rise. See the big US automakers in their hay day. But when competition heats up, other companies take you business and profit growth has to be fought for, anything and everything is on the table. The companies back then were never really loyal, they just never had the need to be ruthless, but they certainly would have been.
kbenson 5y ago
> The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. Correction, a time when companies didn't have an easy and clear path to global output. > When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. I'm not sure that's ever been the norm anywhere in the world throughout history. I definitely don't think it was the reality in the Norman Rockwell like idea of what you think it was like. We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses. Things were always bad, just in different ways. Those same companies that gave to the community and were the main employers in an area also set the working wage in the area with little market competition, and faced less scrutiny from the local law enforcement (who wants to be the prosecutor or police officer responsible for hurting everyone employed there in the community). If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.[1] > OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power. I wasn't really making a countering the OP, as much as expanding on a point they noted. Those situations that were good or appeared so are unstable and there's little the local community can do to change it. But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going. 1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught-fire-least-dozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...

darkerside 5y ago

The obvious difference is that the employees are free to change jobs at any time. Yes, they may need to move if there are literally no other jobs in town, but that's not an option serfs had in a fiefdom. I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. And it's hard to totally escape any form of hierarchy when you live in a society.

kbenson 5y ago
> The obvious difference is that the employees are free to change jobs at any time. Yes, they may need to move if there are literally no other jobs in town, but that's not an option serfs had in a fiefdom. You misunderstand my point, and possibly the discussion. If the company is large enough to be a majority employer in the area and much of the social works of the area are provided by the company, then regardless of whether you work for them you are beholden to them in some way. The local government will not want to upset the local economy by be antagonistic with them, they'll set the local pay scale based on whatever they pay as everything will be in relation to it, and there will be immense social pressure to not cause problems that would be bad for the whole community. Do the people involved have more options for getting out from under the control of a company like that in an area? Yes, but far less than I think your statement would lead people to believe. To actually get out of control you'd have to completely leave the area. That's far easier now than in the distant past, but it's not easy. > I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. I'm not saying every one of these companies was horrible, nor that every ruler was horrible. I'm saying that ceding your power to control who governs you to them leaves you at a disadvantage when inevitably a worse ruler or bad management comes into place, because nobody lives forever, and nothing is static. Put another way, what if you contracted with someone to provide all your meals and you paid them $1000/mo. Maybe you're extremely happy with the quantity and quality of the food provided initially, but eventually, years down the line, the quality has changed to sub-par and the quantity is lower than your got previously as well. You'd want to renegotiate that contract, right? Well what if it was a lifetime contract? That would be a problem, and you'd probably see that as a major red flag initially and be wary of entering a lifetime contract where the future was uncertain. That's what allowing a company to control the local economy and be the provider of social works is like. By allowing the company to take over the job of the local government, the people have ceded their power to enact change through their elected representatives, and they are stuck with whatever they get down the line. Elected representatives aren't perfect, but at least there's the option to change them or pressure them to change based on the community needs. What pressure can the community honestly exert on the company when if decides that it's so much cheaper to move the factory two states over that they have to do so?