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Comment by gabereiser | Hacker News Reader

This is a horrible idea. Mainly because companies operate like an elected monarchy at best, dictatorship at least.

Any “company government” would look no different than a dictatorship to the outside.

In India, there are blocks of corporate housing for contractors and employees of fortune 500s. If they lost their jobs, they lose their residence. If the company lets them go, they lose their residence.

Imagine for a moment, you’re a 10x dev working on a financial platform under contract. The contract is pulled due to funding. You are benched and told “we’ll find you something else to work on”, then a few months later they let you go and you have to move.

Government is for people, corporations are for profit, those two are not compatible.

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This also dramatically increases the leverage employers have over their employees.

If you live in a company town, your kids go to the company school, your spouse will either work for the company or be dependent on the company for their business.

If you're terminated, or simply want to negotiate for better terms - the company already has you beat. The company knows that you won't go home and tell your kids they have to move and your partner that they need a new job for a 5% raise.

This isn't exactly rare in towns as is, and we absolutely shouldn't make it worse. My home town has a truly deplorable organization I still hesitate to openly criticize as I know it could result in problems for my parents.

We should welcome any opportunity for competition with county cartels.

Let them experiment, crash and burn. Or maybe they will surprise you. Let the explorers and the innovators take the first step and innovate.

If we based our execution of ideas on conventional thinking, America would have never been discovered.

The beauty of this is that no one is forcing anyone to participate in any dictatorship.

If you don't like it, don't live there. I certainly wouldn't live in a city run by "Blockchain LLC" - but I'm excited to see what other alternative forms of governance could be dreamed up. A requirement for these new local governments is that they operate on undeveloped, uninhabited land.

More generally, there are two ways that people deal with dissatisfaction - "Voice" or "Exit". When things are bad, you can either try to reform them from within, or just leave and start a new system. Democracy is the former, freedom is the latter, and both are embodied in the U.S. system of federalism. Democracy tends to work better when things are "a little bad", freedom works better when things are "very bad", and I'd argue that the level of corruption and dysfunction in today's government might argue for the latter.

>if you don’t like it, don’t live there

Is privileged thinking. There are large portions of populations that lack resources to move.

Democracy works when everyone at the table has their head about them, sadly lacking in today’s current affairs.

...and that's why freedom of movement should be a fundamental right. Which it technically is, under U.S. law [1], but there have been both economic (like housing policy) and legal [2] barriers enacted against it recently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...

[2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/right-to-free-mo...

Such a law would give competitive advantage to evil businessmen who will own these plantations. Imagine you run a sandwich shop and pay respectful salaries to your employees. Then I open a shop across the street, but use slave labor, pay next to nothing and sell sandwiches twice cheaper.

Your slave labor will all come work for my sandwich shop, because I give them better wages. Or if there's more good labor than can work for my sandwich shop, some will open their own sandwich shops, which will treat their employees worse than me but better than you, and you will go out of business.

What stops this from happening is usually land-use restrictions and regulation - if your employees can't rent storefronts, then they can't compete with you. When those have been relaxed, this is in fact what happens: all the folks dissatisfied with working for you start food trucks and you get a vibrant foodie scene.

Well, my employees are on special non-transferable visas and they can't just change jobs. In fact, it only takes me a call to department of labor to get any of them deported.

who are these american citizens with non transferable visas ?

Because foreign work visas are already restricting to a specific employer, and do not seem relevant to this conversation

As a left-libertarian, I see a lot of promise in this idea because I see it less as a company running a town, and more as replacing government and companies with a permissionless technology like TCP-IP, BGP, or SMTP or HTTP or Ethereum. Whenever that happens, new wealth and innovation is unleashed and costs go down. For example, VOIP has brought costs down tremendously versus phone companies and governments trying to break them up.

Representative democracies are the best we could have done before computers, but now we can replace institutions by autonomous networks taking care of the infrastructure.

Clay Shirky gave a great talk about “institutions vs collaboration” back in 2004 (Google it). As a left-libertarian I’d prefer gift economies and collaboration over competition, but either one would be better than the current Feudalism we have.

I’m envisioning the currency, monetary and fiscal policy, energy grid, telecommunications being run by an autonomous network determining prices. The community would democratically vote on how much UBI to give, and how much insurance to give.

In fact, I have literally been BUILDING this kind of thing with my company since 2017, and the code is all open source. This is exactly what it would look like and how it would work; Take a look and tell me what you think...

https://intercoin.org/applications

UBI: https://intercoin.org/ubi

VOTING: https://community.intercoin.org/t/intercoin-defi-votingcontr...

PS: In my experience this kind of comment gets heavily downvoted by people who say nothing. I have posted all the materials backing up my points, including HOW it would work, and even the source code for you to try. Why don’t you actually engage with the substance of the topic and add your perspective below!

I did not down-vote. I would guess that those that did in this case are doing so because your comment is about replacing current government and companies with something completely different, which is not really what the proposal in the article seems to be about. They see it as off topic.

What the article seems to be talking about is a government that is a lot like existing governments, except it is run by a company. The company would, according to the article, "carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties".

> The company would, according to the article, "carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, [...]

So, 21st century feudal fiefdoms?

like Musk wanted to set up for early Mars travelers?

I don't understand where the enfranchisement of the citizens comes from in your description. I read a bit of your page on voting, but it was about securing electronic voting. Why won't the company act as an unchecked tyranny as historically it has?

There would be no Company that owns everything

I think you are overestimating the amount of leverage companies have on their employees.

At this day and age, the contrary to unchecked tyranny is by far the norm, and the trend is clear.

In less than 100 years we have moved from sweat shops and pinkertons to foosball tables, on-site chefs, and summer fridays.

I do not see how you can interpret this trend and assume this will reverse 180 degrees, because companies want to offer even more benefits now under the company county model.

>In less than 100 years we have moved from sweat shops and pinkertons to foosball tables, on-site chefs, and summer fridays.

Sweat shops and the Pinkertons still exist, and high paying jobs had perks a hundred years ago. This isn't a trend.

In the US? Can you point to sources?

Please lets not extrapolate from outliers though.

Why does being in the US matter? How are they demonstrating that they've changed their ways if they're still exploiting their workers when given the opportunity?

Either way, though working class conditions have improved over the past century in the US, the trend does not show them willingly rolling out benefits to the workers. As a source, ask your McDonald's server about their generous benefits package.

As for Pinkerton, the company still works in the same field. Here's one example

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...

>>>> Why does being in the US matter? How are they demonstrating that they've changed their ways

it matters a great deal because competition for labor is different by country. If you have no competition, I would agree with you, its a very bad situation for the worker.

>>>>>if they're still exploiting their workers when given the opportunity?

People are not exploited because there are companies. People are only exploited if there is opportunity to exploit. At the extreme, you have slavery, which was at the root a govt directive. Opportunity is not the natural state of things in free societies. Societies decide how much opportunity to exploit they want to give the powerful. That's why people still flee China to come to the US

>>>> the trend does not show them willingly rolling out benefits to the workers. Yes, but many companies do. My only point is that the trend is pointing to a healthy society, not that society is perfect. Trader Joes, Costco etc come to mind. This is much better than it was even 20 years ago.

>>>> As for Pinkerton, the company still works in the same field. Here's one example.

Its a very bad example. I just read about it - Pinkerton at its height of power was the largest private security force world.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)#c... This only reinforces the observation that the general trend is to move away from such services, at least in the USA

> If you have no competition, I would agree with you, its a very bad situation for the worker.

Then why would you want to replace local government with a company that has a clear incentive to limit competition?

>People are only exploited if there is opportunity to exploit.

I don't think having the opportunity forgives their exploitation, but they also can actively create more opportunity.

>Trader Joes, Costco etc come to mind.

Companies completely dwarfed by Amazon and Walmart's continued exploitation. There were good factories a century ago too.

>Its a very bad example

Yes, for some reason the company you immediately associated with past corruption isn't thriving. The domestic industry hasn't declined, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_police_in_the_United_S... and the US has further embraced the idea with private contractors like Blackwater.

What better way to find out whether or not this is true than with a real experiment? This is a fantastic idea, because we could see what alternatives actually look like. If you don't want to live there, you just simply don't live there.

“If you don’t want to live there, don’t live there” - the siren song of inhumane exploitation.

“Anyone can buy OCP stock, and own a piece of our city. What could be more democratic than that?”

Robocop 2 https://youtu.be/wA_P8CaNwro

We've already done this. They were called company towns.

I realise that a lot of modern tech culture would rather re-invent the world from first principles while making 10,000 years of human mistakes at high speed in preference to acknowledging the existence of disciplines outside of STEM, but history, economics, anthropology, town planning, they're all right there with many of the answers.

And if you look at the track record for company towns - it is mixed. Not every company town exploited workers and paid in scrip. Some company towns were successful, humane endeavors that had higher standards of living and more upward mobility than the surrounding region.

Modern federal and state law already effectively prevents the worst sort of abuse that employees had to deal with in the worst company towns of the past, so I don't foresee the same kind of exploitation happening.

Can you cite an instance where this actually worked?

Jamshedpur comes to mind (from Tata).

Sun City, Arizona is also a good example.

Gurgaon ,India - but note there are private (company) areas and public areas. In fact that may offer a nice comparison, but from my understanding the seed stage was 100% company-backed.

The Woodlands, Texas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas

I think Ciudad del Este gets pretty close although thats a FTZ charter city, not exactly a "company" charter city.

When you look at these cities you need to select local comps that make sense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Here you go!

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

The experiments already happened, though. And they were a bloody mess, often literally if the residents dared talk about forming a union.

Sure, we could also try giving people arsenic to determine if it's toxic to humans.

We've done both experiments already, and we should learn from the extant data rather than repeating unethical experiments.

Why repeat a several-times-over failed experiment?

Pretty sure this has been tried time and time again over the past 150 years [0]. It didn't end well then; why would it now?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Of course this has happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

last time company towns were commonplace, America had a minor civil war (10k+ combatant pitched battles, air raids) that dragged on for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars

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