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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.

So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)

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Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.

> Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent.

Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point

> Private companies are accountable to no one

clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).

Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.

>For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.

Which seems to just devolve to "the lizards listen to whoever/whatever has money" at the high levels where the number of voters is very high.

Some governments restrict the extent to which "lizards" can use their money to gain air time, etc.

Lizards must not obstructed in any way! Consume! Obey!

Corporations are still subject to law and ultimately under the control of the government. The current set of rules just gives them a fair amount of freedom to operate.

This only makes sense in a spherical-cow-in-vacuum world where government and business are somehow barred from communicating with one another. In reality, the "current set of rules" in many countries is a result of companies relentlessly trying to and succeeding in finding ways of influencing government. Political advertisements, campaign funding, lobbying, corruption, underhanded favoritism, countless other methods that are an amazing RoI for any business large enough to engage in it. Large enough corporations are resembling governments more and more in terms of value and power, and they use all of that power to endlessly try to bend the rest of society into serving their profit motive.

It seems to me none of this is as clear cut as it seems. Government entities may hold shares in private companies, companies may act on voter's demands by accepting government grants. For some companies, government contracts are actually a main revenue stream - shareholders can jump up and down, if their supporters are voted out they will falter.

The unit of power in stock corporations is dollars, while in democracies it is personhood. In the former, one person can acquire multiple units, while in the latter they cannot. There is an obvious difference.

> while in democracies it is personhood

Suffrage*. Not personhood.

1. Not all companies are publicly traded, and they don't have to be

2. The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money. The value of your 'vote' is proportional to how much money you have. This isn't a democracy or some sort of equal system that will converge on serving people, it will converge on serving money. I'm genuinely baffled at how "you get one vote per person" and "your value and voting power is directly tied to your net worth" are in any way comparable. You and I have zero effective power over them, and always will.

> The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money.

It is not, eg. Zuck didn't control Facebook because he was a priori rich, he became rich because he controlled Facebook in a successful way. He gained those shares and that control with his skill and labor (and maybe one symbolic dollar or something).

The problem is, when the majority is held by pension funds, ETFs and Blackrock... there isn't much governance in practice, particularly from the low-fee purely passive ETFs. And since government run pension schemes are on their way to the gutter in favor of stonk market private pensions, the share of such dumb passive capital will only grow.

No, a corp is only accountable to their board and the LARGEST shareholder. A single person can control an otherwise publicly traded company. Zuckerberg, for example. And not everyone can afford to spend their earnings owning companies. So what you get with a democracy is that power is spread out by default rather than concentrated in a single element. Default enfranchisement rather than the polar opposite. One at least nods politely at the idea of upward social mobility in passing while the other eschews all pretense as to the status of its party invitation.

Corporations only have any accountability in so far as the law of the nation-state they're incorporated in grants it.

Corporations only exist as a legal construct of other entities. Absent government, they wouldn't be corporations since there'd be no law to create them.

If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used. Perhaps in the 21st century that has changed, but for me that falls under the "extraordinary claims" category with the corresponding evidence requirements.

> If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used.

In some metrics (such as GDP), yes. And in other metrics (such as wealth inequality and health care), the answer is less clear-cut.

The Soviet bloc did not have better healthcare than the West lol. Soviet life expectancy never crossed above 70 years.

The West encompasses a wide gradient of private vs. state control over resources, and there are states which aren't typically considered Soviet or Western (e.g. Nordic states.)

The structure of giant corporations today is like those centralized societies that were so inefficient in your example. The mandates to put AI in everything are one example of out of touch leadership throwing money and effort blindly towards things of dubious value. The sycophantic managers, afraid that they will be eliminated for insufficient fervor for the board’s latest fascination, will seize upon anything to prove themselves loyal and useful to those above them.

By moving the locus of control, whether it be considered the ceo or shareholders, so far from the actual business and implementing mandates based on whatever the current fancy is and meaningless targets of growth on such a giant scale you get the same sort of excesses.

The current system is marked by irrationality and uninformed and ill considered decision making. With smaller organizations and actual business competition they would be held to account by their competitors or just by running out of money before something catastrophic for the greater economy happened.

This is an excellent point. Thank you for posting it.

Large monopolistic mega-corporations do tend to have the same issues that one would see in the old 20th century planned economies like the Soviet Union.

Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).

It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.

That is an incredibly broad claim. There are a ton of examples of failed/failing states that basically have no government control over anything.

I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.)

On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.

> I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.)

You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.

You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.

> You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.

In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote.

You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.

Even if you think there's no qualitative difference between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea, but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative difference: In practice democratic voting power is much more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder voting power.

Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote.

> You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.

Maybe - depending on your jurisdiction. Just like whether you have citizenship or not.

> Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote.

Historically, there did exist experiments that not each person has the same voting power (for example the Prussian "Dreiklassenwahlrecht" [three-class franchise]):

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreiklassenwahlrecht

Depending on the amount of taxes you paid, you were assigned to one of three classes. The sizes of each of these classes were chosen so that each class paid 1/3 of the whole tax volume. The votes in each class elected representants for this class.

The idea is obvious: those who pay a lot more taxes should have more influence.

Thus: each citizen has the same voting power is just the "currently fashionable" implementation of democracy.

Likewise, there are companies with classes of stock, each with different voting rights.

But at this point we are simply discussing semantics.

You also have a "vote" as a consumer. The market could be much more responsive than a "democratic" system.

For instance, say you think pesticides are a bad thing. You can get 49% of the population to vote to the ban them and what do you accomplish? Nothing

No wonder people look at politics with despair.

If you can get 5% of the population to eat organic food on the other hand, you've reduced pesticide use by 5%. You create trade associations, the idea of organic food spreads more widely and maybe someday you get enough support that you can change the law.

That's hope.

If you have money. And the more you have the more vote matters both in practice and within the rules of the system.

I think California's system is a mess. It's been overrun with private interests bankrolling ballot initiatives and steamrolling them through. Add to that the Government itself sponsoring ballet initiatives that sale bonds to finance things that people don't understand really loans and it turns into a mess. I do like the ability to remove politicians from office via ballot though.

One idea that I think is reasonable is to use some kind of actual meetings.

Dividing people into groups of 50 or 100. Initiatives are voted on in these groups, if they are passed they go to the next level, 1000 people.

Sort of like that idea in the Yes, Minister episode about 'genuinely democratic local government'. The idea here is the tree structure is to prevent people to push initiatives other than as individuals.

Though two of your examples (not really Manhattan Project) had very significant private sector participants.

I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If we were to undertake any similar large scale public projects today, it would also have significant private sector participation. But, that drives job creation and positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal).

The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.

Yes of course

Might I note that we're building down nation states at a rapid rate at least in the west trough migration. The vast majority of my capital is not comprised of belgian ethnicities for example and the same will start to hold trough for a number of the other biggest cities.

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