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Comment by leesec | Hacker News Reader

Why would companies be democratic? That would be an extreme historical rarity

Unions are democratic, employee-run institutions which promote higher involvement of employees in the operations and logistical planning of companies. I'm not referring to Twitter becoming a Co-op, that would indeed be nearly unprecedented.

Well then Elon is openly anti-UAW and for good reasons, go listen to the reasons yourself from his own mouth.

You mean so he can't segregate his factories and have a section known as the "Plantation".

His reason is that they threaten his power. That is all.

UAW seems corrupt enough that anybody would be against it

Maybe take a more critical look at the sources for all the anti-union propaganda.

Also I expect better from someone who could be a Satanist.

You just want to exploit people.

Why would governments be democratic? That would be an extreme historical rarity

It should go without saying, but governments and companies are not the same things.

Companies are synthetic people; there are a lot them in one place and they can die.

Governments are not synthetic people; there is only one per place and the idea is that it lasts forever.

One can generally avoid working for a particular company if one wants. One cannot avoid the government.

Government is a necessary evil with a monopoly on the initiation of force, and as such a primary concern with government is restraining it. Democracy is all about restraining and also providing a (usually) non-violent pressure valve to avoid revolutions and insurrections that destabilize the entire system or threaten to cause government's restraints on the use of force to be removed.

Unrestrained government was a really significant cause of death in the early 20th century.

Private businesses have an entirely different purpose.

Governments are monopolies. Corporations have to compete, which naturally limits their power. Democracy is a way to limit government power.

Autocracy would be better for governments too, if countries were smaller and people could freely move between them.

Governments compete with each other as well, and they still have a monopoly on force in the territory they govern. The owners of corporations do not have to compete for power over the corporations they own.

> Autocracy would be better for governments too, if countries were smaller and people could freely move between them.

Not if you value democracy in and of itself.

Yes, they do compete, but changing a country isn't as easy as switching a car brand.

I don't value democracy. I value freedom and prosperity. I think democracy has become too holy to criticize.

I think the perfect world would consist of small autocratic city-states. There would be a single monarch in each city-state who chooses which laws are implemented. Laws would be on Github, everyone could suggest patches or fork them, and the monarch would just have to choose which set of laws they want to implement. Lots of people would collaborate on the laws in an open-source manner. Citizens could easily check which laws are implemented in each city-state, and choose where they want to live. I think something like this would be better than huge countries with democracy.

Nobody competes. This is stupid.

I don't even know how you have survived this far by being so ignorant.

Eh, we vote in the top people but government's are mostly run hierarchal just as companies are and shareholders vote in board members who appoint the ceo who then runs the company hierarchal so I honestly don't see that much difference.

Well one difference is that the people who work in the government bureaucracies are still citizens, and are able to vote for or against the leaders that manage them. Workers don’t have a say in who manages the company or how they do it.

> Well one difference is that the people who work in the government bureaucracies are still citizens, and are able to vote for or against the leaders that manage them.

While technically true, this seems laughably inaccurate in practice. Government bureaucracies are almost entirely composed of unelected employees.

"There are 542 federal offices: President, Vice President, 100 U.S. Senators (two from each state), 435 U.S. Representatives, four delegates to the House of Representatives from U.S. territories and the District of Columbia, and one Resident Commissioner from the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico."[0]

"Federal Civilian Employment ... Total, All Areas* 1,869,986"[1]

Yes, the latter number includes Dept of Defence civilian employees.

Examination of the situation in a state of your choosing is left as an exercise for the reader, however I suspect the ratios for state employees vs elected officeholders will be similar.

[0] https://www.fvap.gov/info/about-absentee-voting/elections#:~.... [1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docu...

Companies are pretty democratic. It's constituents are the shareholders, not the workers.

Yeah I find that big Western cos are actually micro-communisms or dictatorships. Tickles me pink to think about it.

Central planning is definitely a big thing in large companies.

Why the fuck not

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