Governments have killed more people than any other institution. Corporations have largely made our lives better.
The company was only nationalised in 1858 and until then effectively colonised india until then
Government granted monopoly.
Just off the top of my head; holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge are at least 10x the East India companies death toll. We should probably add in war casualties too - at a minimum WW1 and WW2. I think I could list off probably 10 more with about 5 more minutes of work.
People can be terrible. More direct power usually means more terrible.
Gov’ts usually have the most direct power.
East India company was an odd case because they were granted defacto delegated gov’t power over a region that was full of ‘others’.
Considering the factors involved, it’s amazing they weren’t worse. Like the French Congo [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Congo].
This is literally why economics is called "the dismal science". Slaveowners called economists that when the economists told them to stop doing slavery.
But the modern status quo is so massively skewed toward government that the benefits from mitigating the worst cases of competition are vastly eclipsed by the detriments of monopolistic centralization.
So we shouldn't cheer on private corporations that developers technology that could allow them to replace the government, that is really really scary if they actually succeeds in doing it.
The fact that governments used contrived symbolic rituals to get arbitrary subsets of arbitrary aggregations of people to express nominal approval of their behavior does nothing whatsoever to alter either the empirical nature or the ethical implicatoins of its monopoly.
> Corporations aren't democratic
Good -- this means that it's harder for them to appeal to vague symbolism to convince people that their actions are inherently legitimate, which in turn means that they are under greater scrutiny to justify their actions, each on its own merits.
> if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.
Large vested interests are already extremely adept at co-opting nominally "democratic" government and using the very monopoly you're trying to justify as a way of obtaining top-down power that they'd never be able to acquire on their own -- they have zero interest in overthrowing anything.
Regulatory capture is the principal mechanism of corruption in the modern world, and it's astonishing to me that people keep arguing for expanding the reach of the regulatory state in order to reduce the dominance of large corporations, when the actual effect is always to amplify it.
This isn’t a feature of humans, but basic system dynamics / economics / etc.
A group gets more power and leverage that power to gain more power. Inevitable. Coordinated action is the only way to prevent it. And coordinated action is government.
Stopping this accumulation of power takes very little, its undoing the accumulation of power that is costly.
I don't consider myself an anarchist, partly be cause the term has been repurposed so many times now that it doesn't have a clear meaning.
The belief in magical harmony is unrealistic regardless of the model that's supposed to create it, whether its anarchism or federalism.
Uh oh, what if he spent $50 buying muscle?
USA didn't exist pre-colonial times, it started as a colony. Do you mean the British Empire? That one did way worse, yeah, but USA isn't the British Empire.
Both governments and corporations kill people (look up annual tobacco deaths, for just one fun example).
Interestingly schizophrenic people almost universally smoke, and it's thought this is because it's a better treatment than the actual drugs we give them, though that's not proven.
No, that's quite backwards. Individual behavior is effectively the only thing that objectively exists, as "society" is just an emergent pattern of aggregated individual behavior. Individuals' choices are limited by their own particular capacities, and "society" factors into that only in the sense that the choices of other individuals in the same bounded context, in aggregate, can function as environmental constraints. So a more accurate statement is "every individual has full freedom of choice, but external constraints including the behavior of others may limit one's ability to fully execute the choices one has made".
Given that the act of smoking entails deliberately choosing to purchase a product, light it on fire, and actively inhale the fumes -- all behaviors which are necessarily the result of purposeful intention -- and given that within any social context one will find some people who smoke but a great many who do not, along with many who have chosen to quit (despite the external influences and incentives being largely constant), it seems impossible to attribute smoking to anything other than conscious individual choice.
I once asked family member why they smoke, and the response was "because I love it". I had, and could have, no retort to that -- if another person consciously chooses to make the risk/reward tradeoff in favor of short-term pleasure rather than longer-term health, then there's no further argument to be had, and the only demand that any other party could make is that they not be exposed to negative externalities resulting from that choice.
Corporations also enable government actions by developing the tech and tools/weapons needed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/09/apple-a...
Why don't you ask the people who were slaving in United Fruit plantations how much corporations improved their lives? Or East India Company colony subjects?
Corporations benefit those who benefit from them, often at the expense of everyone else/extraction of the commons.
All that while fossil fuel companies receive 7000B$ of annual subsidies, and spend billions yearly to fuel disinformation.