This is what I find bewildering about people who want to essentially dismantle government, because "freedom": where do they think the power goes?
We'll be living in a company country.
We'll be living in a company country.
As a person who considers themselves democratic, I think every citizen should be an equal shareholder in government Inc. And maybe things would be a bit better if the have-nots were bigger shareholders in other corporations, too.
Private companies competing each other to provide the best service?
Probably less binary and anywhere along that continuum. That is, it's a question of degree wherein my concerns go up the closer things get to zero.
It's difficult to discuss in earnest without somewhat painstakingly specific scenarios, but the gist of my comment was that as you shed government, its powers don't simply disappear; they're redistributed elsewhere. And, given that our government is (at least theoretically) by the people, we're really talking about relinquishing the power of the individual to corporations.
Taking it back to the topic of this thread ("Amazon factory towns"), I believe that's essentially what the country would become—wholly owned by corporations.
I don't believe in the concept of corporate personhood and I don't think corporations need more power, so I don't believe that's a good outcome.
There are cases where the government is actively limiting other entities abilities to abuse their powers. For example you want to restrict who a power company can shut off service to so they don't extort people in the middle of winter. Giving up the regulation of such utilities would simply be a power transfer (no pun intended). But this represents only a small fraction of the governments powers, and in general unregulated means exactly that.
Where is the competition when Amazon (or whoever else) is employer, landlord, bank, store and city government at the same time?