Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

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> > A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few

> Giving control to the government is rather explicitly giving control to the few

There's no clear distinction between the government and corporations.

It's an open secret in politics that government jobs are a revolving door to/from industry.

Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs at the very corporations they benefited while in office.

They don't have to be outright bribed while in office (though it's not unknown for that to happen), but they know they'll be handsomely rewarded once they leave.

That's not to mention them or their family members investing in companies they know will benefit from their actions while in office.

So if you're against concentration of power in the hands of government then you should also be against concentration of power in the hands of corporations, and vice-versa.

> Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs

This can explained by some benign reasons: both political and management jobs require similar skillsets, like leadership, charisma, speaking publicly and so on. So it makes sense that same people could do both. Furthermore, if a political position involves regulating a certain industry, a person taking it has to have expertise in that industry, which further makes it more approachable for people from the industry.

Not enough people realize this. I was reading Obama's memoir recently and he mentioned this exact concept during the financial crisis, where everyone wanted him to publicly skewer the big banks and talk trash on their CEOs. The problem is, those same big banks are (1) the ones he's trying to convince to re-invest back into the market and stimulate the economy and (2) probably the ones most knowledgable on how to rebuild and fix the financial sector. It's not corruption any more than the NFL hiring Peyton Manning as commissioner would be "corruption"

It becomes corruption when government regulators do things favorable to an industry and then shortly after take cushy positions in said industry. Regulatory capture is a very real thing and, IMO, a much bigger reason for modern problems of governance than "government bad" or "corporations bad".

> (2) probably the ones most knowledgable on how to rebuild and fix the financial sector

They're only knowledgeable about how to "fix" the financial sector back to business as usual, essentially doubling down on the problematic paradigm that will blow up at a later date. That's a large chunk of the corruption - highly biased policies normalized as unquestionable objective advice.

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