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Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

Free markets are sustained by governments free of bribery and corruption. Otherwise you get monopolies and oligopolies as in the Gilded Age and arguably now.

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Where is the government that has a history free of bribery and corruption?

None, of course, that is true of any organization of incentive-driven autonomous agents, such as humans. However, governments are not explicitly designed to make money, whereas corporations are literally explicitly designed to make as much money as possible. Money equals power to some extent, so corporations cannot be as useful as governments if you're optimizing for the wellbeing of citizenry.

Governments are far from optimized for the well being of all it’s citizens. It’s optimized for the majority. Just like the “War on Drugs” turned into “treating it like a disease” when drugs started hitting “rural” America.

France passed a law to make the Burkini illegal - targeting Muslims. This isn’t just the US.

Of course, you can't please everyone. The distinction is, at least governments try to. Corporations do not, by design, as they are only incentivized to collect money and funnel it to the top X% of the company, not even the company as a whole which includes workers.

Corporations work by providing a product or service that customers believe to be worth more than the dollars and cents they're paying for it. It's inherently consensual. The only way a corporation begins to generate revenue is literally by attempting to please as many customers as possible.

Yes, but the problem is not when the corporation is small, but when it is large. With increased power, it can reach the levels of a nation-state in affecting people, and it is unchangeable as there is no mechanism, unlike voting, to change its behavior. You may say that the customer is always right and so will choose a different product, but this can only be done with a free market, which does not exist currently, and can only exist with strong governments free of monetary influence, as I said before. Sure, pockets of free market, competitive behavior exist, but for large corporations, they are near oligopolies, and people can't switch to another provider. See healthcare, colleges, ISPs, and so on.

Either way, one should be wary of large organizations, regardless of their type such as governmental or corporate.

the government trying to please the majority is fine if you’re not a religious or racial minority and if you are straight. The US was trying to “please” religious conservatives when they passed laws against miscegenation just like the French were when they tried to pass laws against the burkini.

Correct. They were the majority then (social attitudes were the majority then at least) and they aren't now. But the government changed along with those interests, because there was a mechanism for it to change, through voting. Again, a government can't please everyone.

I’m sure all of the minorities that had to wait a century living under Jim Crow and all of the gay couples and interracial couples who were being persecuted by the government should have taken solace in the fact that the “moral majority” were pleased....

I am not understanding your point. Yes, that's literally exactly what happened. I pass no moral value judgments as to whether or not the rule of majority is good. I am merely explaining it descriptively as what happens in democratic republican governments thus far. We can also have a dictatorship where no change happens as well.

Put another way, it doesn't matter whether they were pleased or not, the system is set up to make their interests more apparent than others.

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