Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

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Well, look at things in another way:

Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning.

Maybe drop the "corporations" name, just call them "global orgs", since a few of them could also be not-for-profit (but allowed to self-finance, and to maintain forces of self-defense) and handle "global responsibility" issues like oceans pollution, climate issues etc. Other would be for-profit could focus on providing communications infrastructure, people transit security services etc.

In the end the total amount of power could end up even more split up, or maybe a little bit more concentrated but across different borders at different layers (mostly avoiding overlapping the borders of the state level below to the ones of the layers above), some even completely non-physical/non-geographical, maybe "bordered" by different purposefully-non-trivial-to-exchange crypto-currencies.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, the core idea was not "corporations" as we know them, neither concentration of power - just that we'd need self-financing and self-defense-capable trans-national organisms that would be better fitted for providing naturally-global services like communications.

> Take the current structures, but split the "commerce, mobility & transportation" part off of it. Now take these split off-parts and re-assemble them together, not taking borders into considerations, and also have some of them be fully global spanning.

Doesn't work as a stable state; if you want corporations to be effectively independent of government cpntrol you can't split the powers up this way. Because those functions alone don't make something independent of the power of entities retaining the monopoly on violence, which is the defining feature of government.

To make corporations independent of the power of nominal governments, they have to either be an exception to or replace the nominal governments’ monopoly on violence, making them either components of or replacements for government. And once they share or solely exercise that power, they can't be kept out of every other domain. And if there is more than one of them, they will compete.

I don't really buy the "monopoly on violence" interpretation... it's not a natural idea, maybe modern thinkers like it bc it seems to "explain" society and state. It's more of an accidental property. And it can also be kept, and would probably work even with exceptions carved out for other species or organizations.

But I don't think that's how it works at all. Things are stable when people believe they are stable, that's it. Just like speculative prices in markets. Communism and socialism sort of worked for the short stretches of time that people were true believers in them - imo it failed bc it contradicted human psychology so the belief couldn't last. Capitalism is stable bc people believe in it, probably bc it matches better our competitive and aggressive psychology.

If the Overton-window shifts to a place where people can start believing that "global orgs" can be stable, they will be stable. Maybe it's more complicated, maybe that place is pretty strange and far away. But I wouldn't think so, it's only needed that one proof-of-concept implementation starts to be believed as stable and beneficial, and then the pattern can be propagated through a chain reaction of people betting more and more on it and then fighting to protect the outcome they've betted on.

Think the French Revolution and the ensuing toppling of most monarchies throughout Europe - that's probably the best model we have for a process like this, just that instead of toppling you'd hopefully have transformation (think modern parliamentary monarchies like the UK, which successfully transformed), and it worked out for the better in the end :)

> I don't really buy the "monopoly on violence" interpretation... it's not a natural idea, maybe modern thinkers like it bc it seems to "explain" society and stat

I think that there is ample historical evidence that (1) the set of institutions together exercising a monopoly on legitimate force tend to merge into a single institution and, (2) that institution or set of institutions (even without yet having merged) tends to exercise broad compulsory power without any stable limits on domain.

> Communism and socialism sort of worked for the short stretches of time that people were true believers in them

When did socialism (as distinct from Communism) stop working? Heck, Communism (even specifically the branch rooted in Leninism) is as alive as capitalism. (That is, there remain systems that identify themselves that way that still exist, despite being radically different from the original form.)

> Capitalism is stable bc people believe in it

Capitalism is not stable (the thing now called capitalism is not very much like the thing initially called capitalism, which lasted about a century after being named.) Capitalism is mistaken for stable because people have developed feelings around the name, and just keep calling whatever the dominant economic model of the developed West is “capitalism”.

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