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I've lived near several Company Towns before. In the modern incarnation, it's not terrible. The execs could run the town, but they don't bother - they just seem

by pnathan 13y ago

I've lived near several Company Towns before. In the modern incarnation, it's not terrible. The execs could run the town, but they don't bother - they just seem to put in the right word in the right ear when things could be troublesome for them. Otherwise they don't seem to directly run the place. I am sure that any protest vs. the Company might turn out to be prosecuted surprisingly fast and aggressively. On the flip side, there's a decent amount of wealth being funneled into the town via paychecks to the workers. So the total area living standard goes up, sometimes considerably. People have opportunities they didn't have before, both work-wise and otherwise, and new things can show up based upon the company's spark. Sort of like the famous Schockley Seven. I would not qualify the towns I lived near as feudalistic. That's far too overt and encompassing. Rather, the executives/CEOs were people whose opinion might be asked on tricky policy questions, or whose opinion, when offered, was taken seriously.

pdkl95 13y ago
We're not there yet. For some time we regulated things, and some of the nastier abuses of the past were attenuated a bit. The particularly bad abuses were prevented entirely, and some of the wealth was distributed in a more equitable way. The modern version that we've seen for a while still has some of the nasty effects, such as making the town (intentionally or not) a very difficult situation to leave. Forcing decisions that are bad for and rejected by a community such "lets go fracking really close to where the drinking water comes form!" seems to be popular in modern times (and a lot of local variation). The problem, as I mentioned towards the end of the other post, is when business and government are no longer working against each other. We extract value, as citizens from the resulting equilibrium, because the nastier tendencies of either group are restrained. I'm suggesting that the NEW change, is a dramatic and sudden shift away from that regulation. You see this in Facebook and other big players such as the banks that were labeled "Too Big To Fail". Some of the traditional power-players like the coal industry simply have a bit of historical inertia to overcome. We've been the reducing government's ability to regulate for some time now, making the modern, milder, modern Company Town as you describe increasingly rarer as this progress.

by pnathan 13y ago

pdkl95 13y ago

We're not there yet. For some time we regulated things, and some of the nastier abuses of the past were attenuated a bit. The particularly bad abuses were prevented entirely, and some of the wealth was distributed in a more equitable way. The modern version that we've seen for a while still has some of the nasty effects, such as making the town (intentionally or not) a very difficult situation to leave. Forcing decisions that are bad for and rejected by a community such "lets go fracking really close to where the drinking water comes form!" seems to be popular in modern times (and a lot of local variation). The problem, as I mentioned towards the end of the other post, is when business and government are no longer working against each other. We extract value, as citizens from the resulting equilibrium, because the nastier tendencies of either group are restrained. I'm suggesting that the NEW change, is a dramatic and sudden shift away from that regulation. You see this in Facebook and other big players such as the banks that were labeled "Too Big To Fail". Some of the traditional power-players like the coal industry simply have a bit of historical inertia to overcome. We've been the reducing government's ability to regulate for some time now, making the modern, milder, modern Company Town as you describe increasingly rarer as this progress.