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Comment by redhed | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the economy is basically a bunch of oligarchical/dictatorial command economies, or what we like to call companies. It's funny, a lot of leftist people use them as examples of how a larger command economy could work (usually the reaction a lot of leftists I know had to People's Republic of Walmart), whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.

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> it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.

I was wondering the same after PRW lol. Recently I had the chance to ask a friend of mine who worked in Google Infra (years ago) if they had ever tried to 'liberalize' their infrastructure planning; something like having internal business units bid on space, power, and compute instead of distributing it top-down. He said that yes, this was actually something like their original operating model, and the outcome was that YouTube basically bought up every piece of hardware in the company and then leased them out to other verticals at a profit.

That's pretty interesting. I always found the idea of democratizing a company pretty easy to understand (can easily just mirror civilian governmental structure in some sense), but creating an internal free market system harder to wrap my head around so pretty cool to see an example of it.

> whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.

There are a few small examples that come to mind (co-ops and communes mostly), but I can’t think of any that have been successful at scale. Running an internal market would be almost pure overhead, so if it worked it would really have to be efficient to be worthwhile.

I understand that line of thinking and honestly think it's possible you're correct. On the other hand, this is exactly historical rhetoric that was used against republicanism/democracy, with people saying the only successful examples were city states and that it was impossible to scale. Maybe we just need a corporate "America" that figures out the correct governing structure. If anything I think it's possible it might only be possible with extremely large firms while small firms stay autocratic to stay dynamic.

Isn’t this how conglomerates work? Like Samsungs memory division refusing to sell to Samsungs phone division recently.

Internal pricing always turns out to be problematic because the various divisions have neither the incentive nor the leverage to negotiate prices in the way that "real" customers do.

In addition to your Samsung example, I know of a major tech company whose services division often buys hardware from competitors because they get a 40% discount and priority deliveries when stock runs low. If they were to buy the in-house alternative, they'd be paying list price and be at the back of the queue for deliveries.

There's also huge scope for "funny money" Hollywood accounting-style practices, where internal prices become entirely disconnected from supply, demand, or any sort of underlying value - which actually results in the organisation being even more dominated by the whims of senior leadership than they otherwise would be.

(These problems are very similar to those experienced in country-level command economies too, of course)

Yes the Bell System, for example, had a lot of "funny money" stuff going on with Western Electric. They called it "gold plating"

I imagine it might look something like a company-internal gig economy; someone puts out a request for a code review and a bunch of fellow employees bid on doing the job, and the requester provides a tip for good service at the end, etc.

Well, at the extreme end of free market, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert drew from Objectivism and had his company's divisions internally compete with one another:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inte...

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-h...

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