Hacker News Reader

Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

> A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

Only if the government is a dictatorship. A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.

View on HN

Boards appoint executives, boards are voted in by shareholders, shareholders are determined by $, the more money you have the more votes you can buy.

Companies are, in theory, dysfunctional representative republics.

Having to BUY a vote explicitly removes any consideration of it being any form of democracy. Democracy requires suffrage as a right, not a commodity.

> Democracy requires suffrage as a right, not a commodity

There are plenty of "democracies" where suffrage depends on one having the appropriate citizenship.

Full disclosure: I have permanent residency - and pay my taxes - in a country where I'm neither allowed to stand for election nor allowed to vote...

Indeed, Democracy originated in an environment where suffrage was highly limited.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/democracy-...

I did say "dysfunctional".

But yeah, historically voting rights in many places were tied to land ownership. (And also genital arrangement)

No, they're plutocracies, in the most literal sense. The involvement of votes doesn't factor into it. The "public" in "republic" refers to the public at large. A private corporation, being privately held, is necessarily not republican in any sense.

lol,this is basically dialog from the original Robocop movie

> A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.

True, but neither will a sufficiently powerful government.

looks around for an example of a functional democracy

How about the one that decided that a New York con man and money launderer was the right choice for president?

I'm concerned that democracy as a general concept has a showstopping bug with no obvious fix. A bug that's always been there but has recently become fatally easy to exploit. Essentially, giving stupid people the same political power as smart people is mandatory in a democracy, but problematic because the former are much easier for "smart" minorities on all sides to corral into blocs.

The whole system then devolves into a battle for control over the easily-led, which is equivalent to any other form of government by minority interests. Regardless of who is on top at any given time, they aren't there to represent the interests of the majority.

The system was designed around the idea that people take voting seriously. Sadly, we're not there. We're in a country where 1/3rd of the population thinks a rebellion against the government is needed. Not because they are being downtrodden, not because the government is taking their food, not because of mass slaughter by the military...nope. They want a world where only whites are allowed to own property, where there are strict rules for everyone except themselves, where other people's lives and choices are subject to their big magic beliefs, which are somehow better and more accurate than the 3000 other religions on the face of the Earth...somehow.

Voting is problematic when voters are either apathetic or worse, callous, like little children mad because they were denied 3rd dessert.

You seem to have a rather one-sided view of a rather large part of the population. That being commmon is a much bigger problem for a functioning democracy.

I base my view on their literal, factual behavior, past and present.

You however, seem to have a very rosy pair of glasses on.

According to your take, there were a lot of Nazis (pick any bad group) that shouldn't have been lumped in with the rest of the Nazis, because even though their actions were the very same horrific things, viewing them as a monolith is bad? We should look into their hearts and find the real motivation? lol

You my friend, are so badly mistaken, that I honestly don't know what to say.

If the literal, factual actions of 60 million people, attempting to destroy a way of life, because a clown told them to still isn't enough to view them as the enemies they are, then I'm not the one that's lost here, friend.

That's some take.. I hope it serves you well, despite my misgivings.

That bug has always been "fatally" easy to exploit.

Stupids having a vote isn't as misguided as it seems, as if we imagine instead the smarts simply stopped the stupids from having the vote, the smarts would neglect the needs of the stupids. The Trump election resulted on a bipartisan realignment on trade which was arguably tilted towards elite interest (access to markets, maximising GDP) over popular interest (Maximising domestic jobs and wages) before that realignment. The whole democratic vision from that time to ignore domestic low skill job losses and focus on retraining people to do new high skill jobs was something that sounded sensible to a smart person as it’s how smart people would personally react to such circumstances - but it lacked common sense and an understanding of the impact of such a plan on the common person.

Democracy almost intrinsically is going to give you middle-of-the-road quality leadership. You can do better and worse than a New York con man who at least had the marketing genius required to get so famous in the first place - many dictators are nothing more than thug lords or spoilt failsons. The promise of democracy is in setting good incentives and mitigating extreme worst case scenarios through elections and means to obstruct bad leaders.

Of course, viewing Mr. T as an anomaly is scapegoating, a way for people to quiet their nerves, to avoid having a naive article of faith undermined. There's emotional investment here. The case is similar with Harvey Weinstein. He is guilt, absolutely, and he should be punished, but Hollywood is full of exploitation. A scapegoat doesn't have to be innocent. In fact, it's more effective when the scapegoat is guilty himself in some manner. That makes it easier to accuse him and to deflect from the filth elsewhere.

Ideally we want a democracy to be representative (in the statistical sense) and resistant to regulatory capture and low-information voting. Maybe it wouldn't work in practice, but it seems like we already have a system that attempts to tackle precisely these however flawed it may be: jury duty. Perhaps it could be applied to things like voting.

No, if you remove either corporations or governments from the equation, the remaining thing will morph and split to recreate this. Corporations aren't fixed in stone - a sufficiently powerful one may be indistinguishable from a dictatorship, but it'll also evolve the same way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com