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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I think looking at a for-profit corporation to take a moral stance is like expecting the police to plant trees, or the local school board to pave the roads, or the DMV to run health policy.

It's the wrong type of organization for that. It's not set up for it, its incentives are wrong, and its structure is wrong. Organizations are set up to do a certain job and structured and staffed to do that job.

It's why a functioning society needs multiple types of social organizations with different functions. Don't expect any organization to do what it wasn't made to do.

In this case, a public company is pretty much helpless against the US executive branch. One tweet from Trump could crash their stock. One investigation could wreck a major venture of theirs. One tariff could kill one of their major lines of business. So they're going to suck up because they have no power to do anything else.

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The entire reason we treat corporations as independent entities, rather than as the extensions of the government that they are, is that they are supposed to be institutions executing on their own imperatives, and protected to do so under the rule of law. If owners and management of corporations can't take moral stances, then who else can do so at scale?

If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator (on an issue as simple as data provenance) because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start directly democratically regulating them - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.

> If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government,

Ironically, in this narrow way, the US is becoming more like China: authoritarian control in the functioning of corporations. In the case of the current US administration, it ends up being poorly thought out policies like broad tariffs without industrial policy to support them, and shallow nationalist stunts like this.

> then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start democratically regulating them directly - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.

The only way this happens is if Congress claws back the power it had ceded to the Presidency (which the current administration has even overstepped). That will only happen when US voters start electing representatives who are not controlled by those corporations. We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.

> We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.

I fully agree here! Although I think it's too kind to characterize it as "compliance". Once you get past the sheer incompetent and histrionic theatrics, this seems to be the primary goal behind the backers of Grumpism - keep destroying what's left of the US government so they can keep on expanding the scope of unaccountable corporate government based on unilaterally-set "policies".

Corporations are extensions of the government? I think an argument can be made for the opposite view (lobbying, the military-industrial complex, regulatory capture, DOGE) but I suspect the reality is tentacles of influence going in both directions.

> Corporations are extensions of the government?

Yes, every US-domestic corporation has been chartered by a state government. Every corporation that operates in the US has gotten a license from each state it operates in. Corporations (/LLCs) aren't just mere groups of people, rather they have a government-created liability shield.

> the reality is tentacles of influence going in both directions.

I completely agree with this as well. Which is why when taking them to task we need to not stop at the line of "independent entities", where they can comfortably retreat to and regroup until the political time is ripe. For example one of the hopeful approaches to reforming Citizens United involves changing state laws to constrain what chartered/licensed corpos can do.

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