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A better metaphor would be the shops at an airport. The monopoly airport fleece the shops with high rent and in turn the shops fleece their customers with high

• simondotau 3y ago
  A better metaphor would be the shops anywhere in your country. Governments and banks charge taxes and fees and in turn, through an elaborate architecture of laws and consequences, their customers don't have to wonder if their glass of water contains rotaviruses, or if the silverware has high levels of lead, or if 0.000014 BTC is gross overpayment for a hamburger, or if people in the next town will decide to rape and pillage sometime in the next hour.
  • fennecbutt 3y ago
    For-profit corporations aren't governments. Something something America.
    • simondotau 3y ago
      Something something there's no such thing as a perfect analogy
      • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The distinction kind of matters though. Monopolies are terrible and to be avoided but if you're going to have one, e.g. because roads are a natural monopoly, then you damn well want it to be an elected body and not a for-profit corporation that will do everything it can to extract monopoly rents from everybody in its fiefdom.
        • simondotau 3y ago
          If you ever incorporate a town, you could choose to attract citizens with robust transparency laws and mandated regular elections.
    • somat 3y ago
      Yes they are, this is literally the definition of a corporation. A group of people wanted to form a government to run their "for profit endeavor" so they incorporated, that is, they received a license from their parent public interest corporation(aka "The Government") that allows them to operate under rule of law. It's corporations all the way down. corporation is really just another word for government.
      • account42 3y ago
        So in your twisted world view, who are a corporation's citizens? The customers? The surely we should demand that they get democratic voting rights, no?
        • somat 3y ago
          That is basically the definition of communism. communism is one answer to the question "Democracy is supposed to be a good thing for our public governments, why do our for for-profit endeavors not run under democratic means?" So the communist answer is "fold the manufacturing government into the rest of the government" Communism has many problems, for one they never actually restore democratic means, to the point that "peoples republic" is sort a joke term for dictatorship. but the one in scope is that running an operation from a large central government will remove the focus a business needs to work well. self-interest is a powerful force multiplier. In a for profit cooperation the voting rights holders are usually those who have invested in the operation, or them who have bought these voting rights from others. They are usually run as a sort of dictatorship, which does dis-enfranchise the workers, but works very well with small groups. But the main point was if you want to operate your endeavor as a government instead of as an individual person than it needs to incorporate. The government does not need to be democratic, and it usually is not. And consider towns, they use the same vocabulary "incorporate" when they want to form a local government.
        • simondotau 3y ago
          For the record, my analogy was to describe Apple as a government, not to describe government as a private corporation. I don't think it's in any way "twisted" to describe Apple as the government of the landscape it birthed. And of course people don't get voting rights. It's a benevolent dictatorship open to anyone who considers the terms acceptable. Wouldn't imply otherwise. I think it's absolutely the case that Sony "governs" the PlayStation ecosystem. That town is way more restrictive than Appletown, but plenty of happy people live there too.