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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people.

There are lots of recorded occasions of single governments doing this.

Governments are seen as having authorities that corporations do not, and thus are to be viewed much more skeptically as a general policy. Companies can't raid your house with machine guns, or toss you in jail for publishing an integer on your website.

It's not that corporations are trusted more; it's that the maximum possible damage by corporate evil is much, much, much, much less than the maximum possible damage by government evil. IBM participated in the holocaust, but they didn't directly cause it. That needed governmental authority. It's prudent to maintain several orders of magnitude higher suspicion and/or skepticism of government activities; corporations are basically sandboxed (e.g. no armies, for the most part) in this model.

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"There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people."

If we look at historical instances of single entities causing 10M+ deaths and oppressing millions of people, since corporations were invented, I think we will find that a corporation is driving the death and oppression more often than you might think. Jardine Matheson, Dole Pineapple, Dutch East India Trading, myriad tobacco corporations, British Petroleum, Shell Oil, for just a few famous examples are each definitely responsible for oppressing millions of people at least, and some of them are responsible for 10M+ deaths. Sure, governments generally claim a monopoly on violence, and in these cases it was a government that actually did the wet work, but they were doing the bidding of specific corporations.

> Sure, governments generally claim a monopoly on violence, and in these cases it was a government that actually did the wet work, but they were doing the bidding of specific corporations.

What about this inspires any form of faith towards governments? You've got an entity that controls/is the army and it is weak-willed enough that some company with money and a good story persuaded it to 'do the wet work' and kill or suppress millions of people.

What in this story makes you think that only corporations will direct that sort of power in a way you don't like? Are people with bad intentions only found on the boards of large corporations such as Dole Pineapple?

And even if they were why are you then defending the idea that the entity holding the knife, as it were, is the more credible and trustworthy of the two? Surely the government has some accountability for its actions?

"What in this story makes you think that only corporations will direct that sort of power in a way you don't like?"

I'm not sure how that comes from what I wrote? I was responding to the claim that corporations aren't responsible for deaths or oppression.

No, it's not "corporation" vs "government". I don't have easy answers to how to prevent this kind of behavior, and I don't trust easy answers, like "minimal government" or "strong government". Global trade and capitalism seems to be working for the most part, with some unsettling caveats.

I think the case of tobacco companies is equally damning to the free market as it is to governments. This is wholesale exploitation, profiting off the suffering and death of others. Nothing so far has stopped tobacco companies. The one thing that could stop it is expressly illegal: the art of vengeance. In effect, government betrays its citizens by protecting a regime of exploitation. It's not reasonable to completely trust either system.

“Smoking was the second leading risk factor for early death and disability worldwide in 2015. It has claimed more than 5 million lives every year since 1990.” [1]

“6 Mega Corporations Control Almost the Entire Global Cigarette Industry” [2]

25 years × 5M people / 6 corporations = 20.83M deaths per corporation (leaving out pre-1990 / post-2015 deaths).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5439023/

[2] https://www.mic.com/articles/81365/6-mega-corporations-contr...

No corporation has the force of law to make me smoke. The government however does have the ability to invade my privacy and take away my liberty via the “War on Drugs”.

Does it count when EPA allows itself to be co-opted by corporations to repeal environmental regulations and air quality standards that were already in place? That seems like all parties are actually doing less than nothing.

There are severe negative externalities to my life when corporations are allowed to pollute. HN posters usually want the government to regulate technology. What major negative externalities that affect my health in an unavoidable way does the tech industry impose?

Are you asking me, or are you begging the question and implying that such negative externalities don’t exist in the tech industry? Because I believe that they do exist. Technology amplifies reach and impact of capital and ratchet up the force multiplier. It’s not so much that the tech industry itself has outsize externalities relative to other industries. Tech allows every and any industry to enhance its operations to minimize its externalities as much as increase them. However most industries tech and otherwise that enhance their externalities do so negatively in proportion to the benefit of having done so to their productivity or profits. And that isn’t the tech industry’s fault. It’s just a tool. The aims ends and intentions determine the blame and to whom it should be assigned.

Corporations are also fairly rational beasts when it comes to incentives - they want to capture wealth, or failing that they create more wealth then capture some of the it. They are a known quantity. It is somewhat possible to anticipate what they will do. They tend towards not discriminating irrationally.

Governments are comparatively hard to read. They are by and large not motivated by anything specific and are often possessed by destructive short-term zeitgeists (how many demographics haven't been targeted as a matter of government policy at some point?). It is difficult to anticipate where the hammer will fall next.

Over the short term the only thing making the government trustworthy is inertia. Over the medium and long term they are much less trustworthy than a corporation.

> Governments are comparatively hard to read.

Maybe in the moment, because the constraints they're fighting against are large and not easily understood except through hindsight, but history shows that adversarial governments are pretty rational as well. They seek to increase their dominance, natural resources, and manufacturing capability, amongst their peers, and over ever-larger numbers of people. Just like corporations, it's all self-serving turtles, all the way down.

> There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people.

Sure. But that doesn't mean they dont have a say / influence in it. Take any social network for example, with a small change in their respective feed / discovery algorithm , it could clearly influence it.

> the maximum possible damage by corporate evil is much, much, much, much less than the maximum possible damage by government evil

In my opinion, it definitely is NOT that less. Sure governments can cause wars and all that but the corporations right now have a lot more control over the mind / general public view of things than the government.

Have you seen what Firestone has done to Liberia? Dude come on. The banana wars? Talk about not being charitable to history

They're responsible at least for the oppression of millions of people. 10 million deaths can't be directly attributed to them but they can be attributed maybe 1/10th of that. The issue is that there are a lot of corporations for which the case is pretty good that theyve left a lot of people to die and far more oppressed.

United Fruit Dutch East India Company

If we are going to use the Dutch East India company as an example of an unreliable corporation; what exactly is stopping the comparison being with the good old days of Communist China? Both of these are extreme examples of the worst of corporations and governments respectively.

Probably better to stick to currently existent companies and compare them to governments in the 21st century.

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