How the new era of CEO supervillains are trapped in their own ideology
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
It correctly observes that once companies become dominant, they stop acting like normal competitors. Instead of just building better products, they lobby regulators, buy potential rivals, and shape markets to protect their position. This pattern is real, widespread, and shows up in every industry, not just tech. That alone should hint that ideology isn’t the cause.
Where the essay goes wrong is treating this as executive confusion or moral contradiction. Executives at dominant firms aren’t confused or especially immoral. At scale, durable dominance and real competition are incompatible. Public companies are punished for slowing down, executive pay is tied to growth and stock price, and losing dominance can end careers even if the company survives. Regulation becomes something to manage or reshape. With weak enforcement, rule-bending is the rational move.
This doesn’t need a moral or psychological explanation. It follows directly from incentives, scale, and governance gaps.
Coherent narrative might help. Framing the problem as bad beliefs (as this essay does), bad people, or “capitalism in general” misses the point and leads to confused demands. Policymakers are pressured by the public to punish individuals or signal virtue which are distractions from effectively funding enforcement, closing loopholes, and limiting power at scale. Meanwhile, clear, well-funded lobbying focuses their attention on their needs.
Clearer public narratives won’t fix the problem by themselves, but they’re a minimum first step. Without a shared understanding of what is wrong and how to fix it, meaningful pressure for reform never even starts.
The insane conclusion that amoral and mostly unaccountable conglomerations have the right to direct US legislation and policy without limit is why we are in this mess. Until we sentence an entire Board of Directors to a life sentence in prison, I think I will remain unconvinced that "corporations are people".
Proposing life in prison for people who are doing lawful things is a non-starter.
Having no moral compass is definitely a bug. It's utterly insane to think that's a feature.
> There's supposed to be a government generally maintaining the population's long term interests as a balancing force. The USA lacks that. The capitalists got the root password.
The government is a fail-safe, and to work in that capacity, it relies on people generally trying to do good most of the time.
The idea that it's supposed to be the only moral check on everyone's actions is an insane, unworkable, and surprisingly common idea. My guess is it's pushed and promoted by people who want to get away with their own bad behavior. Stupid software engineers, like stupid software engineers tend to do, believe what they're told, especially if it's some mechanistic kind rule that appeals to the way we think about computer systems (e.g. maybe separation of concerns in this case).
Or does a comparisasion between pagan religions, and the ones officially accepted as such in modern times.
Naturally this is heresy, as too much knowledge isn't called for when discussing religions.