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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

Do you think the US has small government now, that's created these big corporations?

I think it's probably more accurate to say "small regulation implies big corporations". Although that has less of a ring to it. And of course it also matters which regulations, how its enforced, etc. Tons of nuance of course. However, there's this notion that "less regulation == more freedom == better for everyone", and that's clearly just bollocks, usually to the benefit of corporations.

They can both be big if the government isn't doing its job.

But you need a certain amount of government if you want a healthy regulation system with enforcement.

Even if government is doing the job they can still both be big. Look at China, big government biggish companies. Both by design of the government. Difference is that government makes sense of not giving the power away, unlike other governments do...

> Difference is that government makes sense of not giving the power away, unlike other governments do...

That is the most important point and tells you who's really ruling a country.

The free market competition inevitably has winners, that's what created big corporations. Once they're powerful enough, they can bend (lobby) the government to do what they want.

In fact any presidential candidate will need to have the approval of the richest people in the country to get anywhere, even just to pay for the campaign expenses.

That doesn't seem to be affected by the size of government.

While it may be debatable if US is small government now, the recent overturning of Chevron by the Supreme Court leaves little doubt as to which direction it is going.

Okay, but the large corporations already exist, no? Large government also equals large corporations?

US government is not large compared to most other countries. A lot of the infrastructure that are controlled by government in other countries, are under private control, or under state control in the US at best. If the government is shrunk, the already large corporations will grow even larger.

Can you cite this, please? What infrastructure do you mean?

Small government => big corporations (claim of the previous comment)

is not the same thing as

Big corporations => small goverment (the argument you're trying to disprove)

Relatively speaking, it has low corporation tax, is lax on market consolidation, and is less inclined to regulate for stuff like data privacy.

Until 2018 it had 35% corporation tax, which was high, and giant corporations happened anyway. It's now down to 21%, which is the EU average.

> is lax on market consolidation

Maybe? That doesn't seem to be particularly small government, though. It has anticompetition powers, and just hasn't used them.

> less inclined to regulate for stuff like data privacy

I don't know what the this stuff is, but the government's size wouldn't really change if they did this more. Some states already do it, and there are huge numbers of regulations to follow already. That's why drugs take years to hit the market; the FDA process is long.

All good points. I guess I was trying to isolate which aspects of US government have potentially led to powerful giants like Amazon, which can get away with some pretty horrific user experiences.

As a non-US person I have the opposite perspective. The US is almost the only place where companies can spring up and just be better than thousands of other companies, and bring me more value. Obviously that brings issues, but fundamentally for me at least I use Amazon because it's the best, even though I wish a local alternative would be better.

I'm also not from the US, and I agree that it has good startup potential. But the country seems to have issues with antitrust and multiple sectors becoming overly consolidated. Sometimes this is because one or a few companies genuinely have an outstanding product. I would say that used to be true of Amazon. But often it's because those companies have anti-competitive behaviours that help it to maintain market dominance without benefit to consumers. For example, Amazon effectively penalises sellers for offering cheaper prices elsewhere, which is the target of anti-trust cases both in the US and the EU.

It seems that in practice, co-optation reduces effective size.

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