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Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Your musing poses an interesting question. But I'm writing just against the bit where you say we should default to accepting the zero-sum perspective given a lack of understanding of physics.

The evidence against the zero-sum perspective of wealth is overwhelming.

You can go and harvest the wheat. Or, you can let the wheat rot, and spend your day digging a hole and filling it in. Same energy spent. One creates value, the other doesn't.

You can light the gas under your stove, or you can set your curtains on fire. One destroys value at speed, the other doesn't.

You can sew something with a needle and thread. Or you can use a hand-wound sewing machine you inherited from a relative. Same outcome, one is far more energy-expensive than the other.

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Indeed. This is the essential difference between capitalism and corporatism (sometimes called crony capitalism). Corporatism is insidious. It enables established players to control markets by manipulating regulations through political favors and disabling competitors through predatory positioning or pricing. It's very unfortunate that many people (including myself in the past) throw out the entire history of prosperity building that capitalism has enabled by conflating it with corporatism. Much of the sentiment driving the distaste for disruptive innovation thinking it will cause a race to the bottom directly supports incumbent large corporations and corporatism. It's easy to fall prey to this, because the narrative can easily have compelling stories of the human harm caused by technical innovation.

Right - there's a tendency to see bad things that are done in crony capitalism, and then - in reaction to that - to entrench at the zero-sum fallacy.

I'm interested in this topic - what to do about corporations. Something I think about: if we don't have corporations what replaces them? How do you implement business that require commitments that are larger than family?

For example. Consider a digital social network that was oriented around commercial arrangements. You could form complex contracts in a group, and produce a reputation system formed from sets of people. There would be a deposit system, and an opt-in judiciary for dispute resolution. Could this - a digital upgrade of the icelandic commonwealth - be a more powerful mechanism than The Corporation?

There's a big difficulty in wanting to get rid of corporations, and that is that they emerged from a process of true evolution. The Dutch and then English East-India companies allowed humans to do things that had just not been viable previously. In fact, they were so successful that they could have obsoleted nation states. Certainly the East India company could have, and was reined in only because its shareholders and employees continued to show deference to the crown. Nation-states got scared at that point, and imposed significant political controls - corporations are not allowed to maintain standing armies. So I think it's important to appreciate what powerful tools they are. Any discussion about getting rid of them needs to consider - how do you implement large-scale projects in a hypothetical world without corporations?

Well, I'm not really against corporations per se. I work for one I quite enjoy and whose aims I think are good and in the general interest.

The challenge, as I see it, is to have governments with a spine, but governments not so big that they stifle freedom or crowd out opportunities. Governments need to be powerful enough to overrule the biggest corporations so that corporations can exist without the cronyism. Power alone is insufficient though because even a powerful government is peopled by individuals who can sometimes be bought cheaply.

The East India Company is a somewhat terrifying example of what is possible with unbound power for corporations. It's an equally bad and unsubtle endpoint as an all government central economy. Diversity of thought and composition, as in many places, yields better results than homogeneity.

I think corporations are necessary for large-scale, long-term commercial endeavours. Certain classes of services to both individuals and businesses need continuity and corporations are well-suited to providing that kind of continuity.

Where we are today forgives incumbent large corporations too much and (certainly in Canada) makes it far too difficult for entrepreneurs to start small businesses.

IMHO this corporatism thing is just 'No true scotsman' for capitalism. If the right is able to do that, then the left should be allowed to get back talking about communism and socialism again, since none of the problems that happened were in the original thing thought. Also, no true scotsman is too a compelling narrative. I mean, I'm not here to bash you, but since I started looking into this topics more closely, this type of argument doesn't seem much coherent anymore, without state intervention 'the system' would have crumbled a long time ago. IDK it just sounds like ideology.

Slavery, colonization and wars enabled a lot of prosperity building too, and also a lot of technological innovation.

but both actions require energy. in one case value was created in the other case no value was created.

there is no case where value is created and no energy was spent.

thus wealth is limited by energy.

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