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Comment by tommynicholas | Hacker News Reader

I agree, in that it sucks that it's a literal handful, but on the flip side it's nice to know the government is set up in such a way that it isn't by default the most powerful entity in every imaginable way. The people themselves, private companies, etc have a chance to be more powerful than the government in a variety of ways.

I'm a pro-government liberal who is extremely wary of the power of global corporations, but I still take some solace in what this says about our system.

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Show me examples of corporations mass murdering people, though? Your faith in big government is completely misplaced. The truth is, you can't trust any entity with consolidated power to be forthright and favor humanity over all other considerations.

>Show me examples of corporations mass murdering people, though?

United Fruit Company in Guatemala, Shell Oil in Nigeria, BP in Iran... there are countless examples of corporations paying off people to do their dirty work for them

This is beyond stupid.

A democracy is structured to be open and conflict is embedded to force decision-making by consensus and compromise.

Corporations are structured to be closed, authoritarian structures.

We're lucky there isn't much history of corporations having state-like scale + monopoly on legitimate violence. Super lucky.

> We're lucky there isn't much history of corporations having state-like scale + monopoly on legitimate violence

If it has the latter, it is, by definition, the State. Irrespective of scale (and state-like scale is meaningless.)

> We're lucky there isn't much history of corporations having state-like scale + monopoly on legitimate violence. Super lucky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

>Show me examples of corporations mass murdering people, though?

The East India Company, Pinkerton Investigations...

The entire point of my comment was to say that while I would generally be considered a "pro-government liberal", I do NOT trust "big government" and prefer to see power be more diffuse.

What did you think my point was, I'm interested to see how I could be more clear in the future.

>on the flip side it's nice to know the government is set up in such a way that it isn't by default the most powerful entity in every imaginable way. The people themselves, private companies, etc have a chance to be more powerful than the government in a variety of ways.

That's been the case before, it's not a great thing. In the late 18th and early 19th century, a few magnates were arguably more powerful than the US government. They certainly ran the US government. A lot of the protections we have today are a response to that time period

I mentioned that I'm uncomfortable with how few companies have so much control. It's far better now than it was in the pre-Trust-busting days, for sure. However, it's trending the wrong direction.

What does it say about our system that we have relatively more corporate overlords than government overlords?

The problem is the government is supposed to keep the private sector in check for such things.

But since we've basically given up on stopping monopolies and mega-mergers the companies and now so big and control so many things they have power without competition to keep it in check.

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