some people are losing (individuals, small business, startups, entrepreneurs), and some people are gaining (bureaucrats, regulatory bodies, well-established big companies, people willing to sacrifice liberty for security)
>> Business create jobs, wealth, improve our lifestyles, and grow our economy.
To some extent, sure, but we have gotten into a nasty habit of allowing businesses to privatize profits while socializing losses. And the losses have been absolutely massive.
> Wealthy individuals and companies (aka those with most of the money) have a vested interest in having their transactions not easily tracked by the government.
Many may think or assert that, especially based on the trendy anti-government dogma, but I disagree. They have a vested interest in a fair and enforced taxation system. Otherwise they lose effective government and its services, both of which are absolutely essential to their safety and prosperity.
> Few people consider that corporations could be a bigger risk than the government, so they limit government power and leave corporations less regulated.
> A corporation can't arrest me, shoot me, confiscate my property, or otherwise tell me what to do outside any voluntary contract with them.
I think that while corporations may be more likely to have risk, the risk may not be as big as if it were done by a government. So, high chance of risk but maybe lower damage vs low chance and higher damage may end up being a wash and may explain why some people fear the government more than corporations.
>>Corporations may become as great a threat to personal freedom and liberty than the government.
Quick rhetorical question: Who do you think is funding that government?
The corporations (and the class of people at the top of them) have always been the greatest threat to freedom, at least in America where there was never a king.
> governments & politicians, not companies & entrepreneurs
In some countries the separation is unclear. Take ai for instance - regulation demands come from corporations to governments rather than the other way around. And thats happening in basically everything we do. Like in communism, the masses are employed in these massive enterprises that benefit from government money and friendly regulation, but regulation flows from corporations to governments while money flow the other way around (see bailouts and friendly policies). Furthermore politicians use corporations to influence our daily lives and to monitor our behaviour such that they know how to exploit our fears in order to gain and maintain power (see Cambridge analytica).
As such corporations are a tool of oppression, anti capitalism and anti freedom. Therefore you have to squeeze them out in order to be able to return to democratic capitalism.
> 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.
> In the face of such organized and concentrated competition, what's so sad about some private businesses falling short?
I think the sad thing they were talking about is those businesses not getting the support they needed, because of an incompetent lack of strategic vision on the part of their governments'. It's like sending your army to a gunfight only armed with knives.
> It's long past due for society to fear Big Corp instead of Big Government
You should fear both. Big Anything will eventually abuse their position of power after leadership changes hands enough times. And who is going to help you tame Big Government when they hold all the keys?
> The freer a society is, the less control and influence bureaucracies and gatekeepers have
which is why governments and corporations continue to expand and add more and more rules, regulations, verifications, safety checks, privacy violations etc... they have a vested interest in restricting, rather than promoting, freedom.
> These patterns, if true, are seem important regarding the ideal scales of both business and government. And I fear the U.S. public is insufficiently aware of them, as we seem to be on the verge of a historic increase in the scale and depth of government management of society.
Maybe what hit me harder was the last line and the presumption that 1) it is a historic increase in the scale and depth of government management of society and 2) that we are also not seeing a large amount of corporate centralization. Maybe I perceive more corporate centralization than government centralization, as platforms have hundreds of millions or billions of users across 100+ countries, and I recall my 2005 political science class talking about the rising influence of multinational companies over nation-state governments.
> When corporations trump nation-states, we're all screwed.
These days, I'm rather afraid that we've already reached that point - at least in the western world, most governments seem to have just become the corporations, infiltrated to the point of indistinguishability. I hope there's a way back, but I'm not particularly optimistic about it.
> Penalizing all companies and then only bailing out some is picking winners and losers.
Without going into the semantics of the word, I will point out that yes, that is the role of the government. They provide incentives for certain behaviors, and lack of incentives (or even disincentives) for others.
> What matters is lawfulness and what remains lawful
To expand on that idea - if something is both lawful and profitable, you have to have an almost absolute consensus amongst the people capable of doing it that it should not be done. Otherwise, potentially even if 1 person thinks it is fine, then they will be the one to do it.
Typically this is the main strength of the economic system - jobs that people don't want to do get allocated to the person who has the least problem with doing it.
The threat here was never the development of the technology - it is obvious that it is coming - the issue here is government demand. A corporation can only do so much with my face that annoys me - the government on the other hand can make life really miserable.
who's "we"?
some people are losing (individuals, small business, startups, entrepreneurs), and some people are gaining (bureaucrats, regulatory bodies, well-established big companies, people willing to sacrifice liberty for security)
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