Comment by piloto_ciego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piloto_ciego | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t know that this is true.

At very least they both share immense responsibility for causing individual harm. Sure the government may start a war, but that war can’t happen without bombs and bullets, and in America at least those factories aren’t run by the government. There is an intermediate step oftentimes, but I don’t think that necessarily disconnects companies from responsibility.

If you work at a guided bomb factory you may not be the person dropping it, but you are responsible for the destruction it causes in a small way.

Also, if global warming kills us all then it is likely that the oil companies bear some responsibility for it right?

Government sucks - I agree with that statement, but we shouldn’t act like corporations are appreciably less responsible.

They are worse together. Achieving some fine balance of corporations may seem somewhat utopian but we are pretty far from utopia in the current day.

Building a mega corporation without big government/s I would argue is basically impossible. And local level governance is more likely and potent without big government. Again though, all of that is quite hard to achieve / see how to achieve when people with existing power enjoy the status quo control more of the levers than the masses, including the ones used to influence the masses.

The market responds to need.

If nobody were able to socialise the cost of going in a foreign country and killing people, there would be no war.

If the government didn't steal my money against my will on threat of incarceration, there is no way in hell I'd spend my money on bullets to kill someone's son in another country.

>I don’t know that this is true.

In the 20th century governments slaughtered wholesale around 100 million of their own citizens (China, Russia, Cambodia), let alone those of other countries they killed in war. There's no measure by which the market comes anywhere near that amount of murder.

The market (german industrialists in case of Hitler, military-industrial complex in case of USA, East India Company in case of GB if you want to go deeper in history) has its quite significant share. Ignoring that is being willfully ideologically blind.

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