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The optimal free market with no government is for corporations (collections of people) to use violent force to enforce their goals. A sufficiently powerful corp

The optimal free market with no government is for corporations (collections of people) to use violent force to enforce their goals. A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

sonicanatidae 3y ago
A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules and in a lot of cases, does. The issue is the rules themselves, which were crafted by? Corps. Corps are entirely different. They push harder and harder and harder for PROFITS and will inevitably cross lines. When crossing those lines not only has no meaningful penalty, but actually turns a profit, after the fines are subtracted, they will not only continue to do it, but push even harder. After all, there's no real consequences, so why worry?
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Authoritarian governments exist, and are more common than democratic ones. Besides, democratic corporations exist too. They are just incredibly rare.
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    Mind providing an example of a democratic corp? I've never known of one.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Cooperatives used to be more common than they are now. And used to be democratic. Software consultancies is one of the markets where democratic consultancies were common enough for one to see them. But now the world is property of a handful of corporations, so you won't see any contemporary example.
- xp84 3y ago
  > A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules The most despotic and scary governments of history would probably like a word with you. Maintaining a believable pretense of following any rules is a luxury we take for granted in many countries today, but Mao and Stalin didn't worry about the appearance of propriety. Not really arguing against your main point though, I think you're right. Just don't forget how bad totalitarian governments can be.
  - Log_out_ 3y ago
    The most totalitarian where internally structured like one cooperation.
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    You are citing outliers. A majority of the countries in the world aren't run by people like Stalin, or Pol Pot. Yes, in those instances nothing is worse than the government, but a majority of the world doesn't live in those places. For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways. No, for most people it's corporations that enable our current best-in-history lifestyle. The hardest things we face are scarcities created by government policy.
      - ikiris 3y ago
        Posted via that government internet project because the government finally forced the monopoly communications companies to allow 3rd party connections.
        Tool_of_Society 3y ago
        Indeed according to the big private businesses at the time the internet was stupid and a money losing idea. It's a common thing in American history where the US government invests in ideas/concepts that are seen as losers by the for profit industry only for those industries to swoop in and profit off the results... Stuff like that and the American national standards institute is why the USA was in the front of the technological evolution for so long. We spent money on "useless" crap that ended up paying massive dividends later and allowed for the USA to set the standards.
rootusrootus 3y ago
> A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government. Only if the government is a dictatorship. A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  looks around for an example of a functional democracy
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    How about the one that decided that a New York con man and money launderer was the right choice for president? I'm concerned that democracy as a general concept has a showstopping bug with no obvious fix. A bug that's always been there but has recently become fatally easy to exploit. Essentially, giving stupid people the same political power as smart people is mandatory in a democracy, but problematic because the former are much easier for "smart" minorities on all sides to corral into blocs. The whole system then devolves into a battle for control over the easily-led, which is equivalent to any other form of government by minority interests. Regardless of who is on top at any given time, they aren't there to represent the interests of the majority.
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
      That bug has always been "fatally" easy to exploit. Stupids having a vote isn't as misguided as it seems, as if we imagine instead the smarts simply stopped the stupids from having the vote, the smarts would neglect the needs of the stupids. The Trump election resulted on a bipartisan realignment on trade which was arguably tilted towards elite interest (access to markets, maximising GDP) over popular interest (Maximising domestic jobs and wages) before that realignment. The whole democratic vision from that time to ignore domestic low skill job losses and focus on retraining people to do new high skill jobs was something that sounded sensible to a smart person as it’s how smart people would personally react to such circumstances - but it lacked common sense and an understanding of the impact of such a plan on the common person. Democracy almost intrinsically is going to give you middle-of-the-road quality leadership. You can do better and worse than a New York con man who at least had the marketing genius required to get so famous in the first place - many dictators are nothing more than thug lords or spoilt failsons. The promise of democracy is in setting good incentives and mitigating extreme worst case scenarios through elections and means to obstruct bad leaders.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
That wouldn't be a free market. It would be some kind of oligarchic corporatism. Government is necessary to truly enable free markets. The key to understanding that is to understand what "free" truly means [0]. It isn't "do what thou wilt". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38537665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38537665
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
  A freely competitive market (as envisioned by Adam Smith) is very different from a free market (as the term is commonly used today, at least by many conservative political parties). I fully agree that without sufficient regulations markets cease to be freely competitive.
thuridas 3y ago
This reminds me of the East India Company: forcing China to buy opium even if it really harmed both its population and economy. Indian may not be too happy with all the Marathas wars and colonization. Anyway, is not a matter of which is the worse but of how can we get the best from both of them
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  The East India Company didn’t directly even ship opium to China, that was all done by private merchants. And in any case initially it wasn’t so much about opium as about free trade in general. The British would’ve been fine with selling textiles, tools and other stuff to the Chinese people who wanted to buy them. Opium was just much easier to smuggle than anything else.

sonicanatidae 3y ago

A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules and in a lot of cases, does. The issue is the rules themselves, which were crafted by? Corps. Corps are entirely different. They push harder and harder and harder for PROFITS and will inevitably cross lines. When crossing those lines not only has no meaningful penalty, but actually turns a profit, after the fines are subtracted, they will not only continue to do it, but push even harder. After all, there's no real consequences, so why worry?

marcosdumay 3y ago
Authoritarian governments exist, and are more common than democratic ones. Besides, democratic corporations exist too. They are just incredibly rare.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  Mind providing an example of a democratic corp? I've never known of one.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Cooperatives used to be more common than they are now. And used to be democratic. Software consultancies is one of the markets where democratic consultancies were common enough for one to see them. But now the world is property of a handful of corporations, so you won't see any contemporary example.
xp84 3y ago
> A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules The most despotic and scary governments of history would probably like a word with you. Maintaining a believable pretense of following any rules is a luxury we take for granted in many countries today, but Mao and Stalin didn't worry about the appearance of propriety. Not really arguing against your main point though, I think you're right. Just don't forget how bad totalitarian governments can be.
- Log_out_ 3y ago
  The most totalitarian where internally structured like one cooperation.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  You are citing outliers. A majority of the countries in the world aren't run by people like Stalin, or Pol Pot. Yes, in those instances nothing is worse than the government, but a majority of the world doesn't live in those places. For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways. No, for most people it's corporations that enable our current best-in-history lifestyle. The hardest things we face are scarcities created by government policy.
    - ikiris 3y ago
      Posted via that government internet project because the government finally forced the monopoly communications companies to allow 3rd party connections.
      - Tool_of_Society 3y ago
        Indeed according to the big private businesses at the time the internet was stupid and a money losing idea. It's a common thing in American history where the US government invests in ideas/concepts that are seen as losers by the for profit industry only for those industries to swoop in and profit off the results... Stuff like that and the American national standards institute is why the USA was in the front of the technological evolution for so long. We spent money on "useless" crap that ended up paying massive dividends later and allowed for the USA to set the standards.

rootusrootus 3y ago

> A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government. Only if the government is a dictatorship. A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.

sonicanatidae 3y ago
looks around for an example of a functional democracy
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  How about the one that decided that a New York con man and money launderer was the right choice for president? I'm concerned that democracy as a general concept has a showstopping bug with no obvious fix. A bug that's always been there but has recently become fatally easy to exploit. Essentially, giving stupid people the same political power as smart people is mandatory in a democracy, but problematic because the former are much easier for "smart" minorities on all sides to corral into blocs. The whole system then devolves into a battle for control over the easily-led, which is equivalent to any other form of government by minority interests. Regardless of who is on top at any given time, they aren't there to represent the interests of the majority.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    That bug has always been "fatally" easy to exploit. Stupids having a vote isn't as misguided as it seems, as if we imagine instead the smarts simply stopped the stupids from having the vote, the smarts would neglect the needs of the stupids. The Trump election resulted on a bipartisan realignment on trade which was arguably tilted towards elite interest (access to markets, maximising GDP) over popular interest (Maximising domestic jobs and wages) before that realignment. The whole democratic vision from that time to ignore domestic low skill job losses and focus on retraining people to do new high skill jobs was something that sounded sensible to a smart person as it’s how smart people would personally react to such circumstances - but it lacked common sense and an understanding of the impact of such a plan on the common person. Democracy almost intrinsically is going to give you middle-of-the-road quality leadership. You can do better and worse than a New York con man who at least had the marketing genius required to get so famous in the first place - many dictators are nothing more than thug lords or spoilt failsons. The promise of democracy is in setting good incentives and mitigating extreme worst case scenarios through elections and means to obstruct bad leaders.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

That wouldn't be a free market. It would be some kind of oligarchic corporatism. Government is necessary to truly enable free markets. The key to understanding that is to understand what "free" truly means [0]. It isn't "do what thou wilt". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38537665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38537665

SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
A freely competitive market (as envisioned by Adam Smith) is very different from a free market (as the term is commonly used today, at least by many conservative political parties). I fully agree that without sufficient regulations markets cease to be freely competitive.

thuridas 3y ago

This reminds me of the East India Company: forcing China to buy opium even if it really harmed both its population and economy. Indian may not be too happy with all the Marathas wars and colonization. Anyway, is not a matter of which is the worse but of how can we get the best from both of them

ffgjgf1 3y ago
The East India Company didn’t directly even ship opium to China, that was all done by private merchants. And in any case initially it wasn’t so much about opium as about free trade in general. The British would’ve been fine with selling textiles, tools and other stuff to the Chinese people who wanted to buy them. Opium was just much easier to smuggle than anything else.