How is an elected government with checks and balances worse than a faceless corporation?
Elected governments also aren't as free as you'd think. Two parties control 99% of US politics. Suppose I'm not a fan of trade wars; both parties are in favor of them right now.
Ah, the libertarian way.
I, earning $40,000 a year will take on the corporate giant that has a multimillion dollar legal budget and 30 full time lawyers and win... I know, I saw it in a movie once.
The law books are filled with story after story of corporations doing fully illegal shit, then using money to delay it in court for decades... then laughably getting a tiny fine that represents less than 1% of the profits.
TANSTAFL.
Yeah good luck with that buddy. I’m sorry, but you can’t do a thing to these behemoths. At least when a government bends you over it loses your vote, which sorta kinda matters to them. A corporation is incentivized to disregard your interests unless you are profitable to them, in which case they treat you like glorified livestock.
To be a bit cliched, there's a rather a lot of inattention and time that lets a child kill themselves after watching a video.
Did you know that there's has been a homeowner jailed for breaking his HOA's rules about lawn maintenance?
The chances are good that someone will go to jail.
Citation needed.
One such example happened in 2008. The man's name is "Joseph Prudente", and he was jailed because he could not pay the HOA fine for a brown lawn. Yes, there was a judge hitting Joseph Prudente with a "contempt of court" to land him in jail (with an end date of "the lawn is fixed or the fine is paid"), but his only "crime" was ever being too poor to maintain his lawn to the HOA's standards.
> “It’s a sad situation,” says [HOA] board president Bob Ryan. “But in the end, I have to say he brought it upon himself.”
As I expected, Mr. Prudente wasn't jailed for violating a HOA rule but rather for refusing to comply with a regular court order. It's a tragic situation and I sympathize with the defendant but when someone buys property in an HOA they agree to comply with the CC&R. If they subsequently lack the financial means to comply then they have the option of selling the property, or of filing bankruptcy which would at least delay most collections activities. HOAs are not charities, and poverty is not a legally valid reason for failing to meet contractual obligations.
> It's not my job to do your legal research for you and you're misrepresenting the facts of the case.
So, since it's not your job, you're happy to be ignorant of what can be found with a simple Google search? It's not looking up legal precedent or finding a section in the reams of law - it's a well reported and repeated story.
And let's be honest with each other - while by the letter of the law he was put into jail for failing to fulfill a court order, in practice he was put into jail for having a bad lawn. I'll go so far to assert that the bits in between don't really matter, since the failure to maintain the lawn lead directly to being in jail until the lawn was fixed.
So no, we don't have a de jure debtor's prison. But we do have a de facto debtor's prison.
The reality is that this case is going to spend years working through the normal appeals process. Before anyone panics or celebrates let's be patient and wait for that to run its course. Until that happens it's all speculation. Calm down.
The US legal system gives authority to judges to use contempt orders to jail people when necessary as a last resort. This is essential to make the system work because otherwise some people would just ignore orders with no consequence. Whether the underlying case is about a debt owed to an HOA or any other issue is irrelevant. And the party subject to a contempt order can always take that up with a higher court.
They don't literally, as can be seen by that guy who got roughed up by the Pinkertons for the horror of accidentally being sent a Magic card he shouldn't have been.
Nobody went to jail for that. So corporations have at least as much power over your life as the government, and you don't get to vote out corporations.
Tell me, how do I "choose a different company" with, for example, Experian, who keeps losing my private info, refuses to assign me a valid credit score despite having a robust financial history, and can legally ruin my life?
Source for that?
I found [1] which sounds like intimidation; maybe a case for assault depending on how they "frightened his wife" but nothing about potentiall battery, which "roughed up" would seem to imply. The Pinkertons do enough shady stuff that there's not a need to exaggerate what they do.
1: https://www.polygon.com/23695923/mtg-aftermath-pinkerton-rai...
By that same logic, you can 'trivially' influence a democratic government, you have no such control over a corporation.
That is a misrepresentation of the message you are replying too:
>>You can trivially choose not to associate with a corporation. You can't really do so with your government.
You won't get into legal trouble if you don't have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or use a search engine than Google, etc. Try to ignore the rules setup by your government and you will very quickly learn what having a monopoly of physical force within a given territory means. This is a huge difference between the two.
As far as influencing a government or a corporation, I suspect (for example) that a letter to the CEO of even a large corporation will generally have more impact than a letter to the POTUS. (For example, customer emails forwarded from Bezos: https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-receive-a-question-ma...). This obviously will vary from company to company and maybe the President does something similar but my guess is maybe not.
A corporation might have "power" in an economic sense. It might have market significant presence in the marketplace. That presence might pressure or influence you in certain ways that you would prefer it not, such as the fact that all of your friends and family are customers/users of that faceless corporation.
But what the corporation cannot do is put you in jail, seize your assets, prevent you from starting a business, dictate what you can or can't do with your home etc.
Government is a necessary good. I'm no anarchist. But government is far more of a potential threat to liberty than the most "powerful" corporation could ever be.
a corporation can "put me in jail" for copyright violations, accuse me of criminal conduct (happened in the UK, took them years to fix), seize my money (paypal, etc), destroy my business (amazon, google)...
But government is far more of a potential threat to liberty than the most "powerful" corporation could ever be.
you (in the US) should vote for a better government. i'll trust my government to protect my liberty over most corporations any day.
But you still think parliament actually controls the government as opposed to Whitehall, so I understand why this may be a little intellectually challenging for you.
the end result is the same.
Whitehall
1: i was talking about the US government and my own.
2: i am not from the UK
therefore your comment is entirely inappropriate.