The difference is that giving the government more power is inherently dangerous. I can refuse to use a specific tech company’s product a lot easier than I can refuse to be under a government.
A corporation doesn’t have the power of the state to threaten to take away property or liberty.
Of course they do! Private mercenaries, prisons, banks, repo companies, landlords, insurance providers, all kinds... of course they do. Corporations were initially an arm of the state to do state functions. They still do that today.
What corporations don't have is any obligation to cede to the public demand or be held accountable for their actions. There's no democratic control, no way they can be fired by the voter nor do they have any responsibility of transparency.
Voting systems, red light cameras, municipal water, nearly every aspect is controlled by private corporations shirking responsibility oftentimes for decades. Polluting a town's water supply and walking away pretending they didn't - there's even many well known movies about things like this with academy awards. Often the criminals get away with it having hid under the legal fiction of the corporation.
If a secretive unaccountable private corporation determining the outcome of an election and claiming the audit trail is a trade secret doesn't ruffle your libertarian feathers then there's something seriously wrong.
What you claimed is yet another silly thing I've been hearing my whole life. It's totally wrong. Any inspection would immediately reveal this
What corporations don't have is any obligation to cede to the public demand or be held accountable for their actions. There's no democratic control, no way they can be fired by the voter nor do they have any responsibility of •transparency.
How well has that whole accountability thing worked out for the police department and the American military? The justice system?
There's no democratic control, no way they can be fired by the voter nor do they have any responsibility of transparency.
Nor can judges with lifetime appointments.
Voting systems,
Where conservative states consistently disenfranchise minority voters by closing polling places, passing voter id laws but then make it harder for minorities to get an ID and they count gun registrations as valid Id but not college IDs...
Polluting a town's water supply and walking away pretending they didn't
See the government run water supply in Flint Michigan.
The US government has treated people outside the US a lot worse than it's treated its own citizens, in the last 100 years, yet anti-US government people in the US don't seem to talk about that. You don't get invaded, saturation bombed, napalmed, droned etc. Or your democracy replaced with military dictators given a load of weapons and torture training.
Still, why corporations are internally so much better by nature than governments, in that world-view, I don't see.
The banana republics were done for the banana company
The oil wars were done for the oil companies
There isn't this mysterious firewall between government and business. They're different departments of the same thing.
Nor is there any mutual exclusivity. The absolute dictatorship of Pinochets Chile is also where the most radical forms of Milton Friedman's free market capitalism was tried.
They're two interacting institutions of power that can exist in many forms. Free business doesn't guarantee free societies.
I’m the first to call out the hypocrisy of people tsk tsking and saying destroying property doesn’t bring about change in the case of police misconduct but being the biggest supporter of the military that bombs other countries and kills civilians to “bring Democracy”.
Humans can be real bastards and governments aren't magical solutions just as corporations aren't magically evil.
The question is about who can be held more accountable, who can be more feasibly removed from power and what kind of institution can be more promptly remedied.
We as moral actors could potentially change the laws of governance probably far easier than we could form a corporation to defeat ExxonMobil in the marketplace. Both should be easier, but that's another discussion.
Both governance and private capital are imperfect and both deserve criticism. Being a fan of either is a mistake.
The US has a long history of not being “moral actors” when it comes to the rights and freedoms of racial and religious minorities and non straight people. Having a government that caters to the majority is fine if you are in the majority.
We just saw the government stripping rights of transexuals with regards to health care. What would they do if they had more access to data? If you were a Muslim America would you trust the government in its current state to have more access to your data?
How many decades did it take the government to rule that it was discrimination not to allow gay people to adopt kids? Get pregnant by in vitro insemination? If you aren’t in the affected group it’s easy to tell those who are to be patient.
Mine is there's endless propaganda depicting corporate America as bright shiny perfect perfection and government as slow clunky incompetence and I'm really really tired of the bullshit.
It's not academic, it's not scholarly, it's mindless partisan cheerleading, some kind of religious orthodoxy, a blind adherence to something that's obviously nonsense.
It's just endless streams of nonstop crap from places line heritage, hoover, heartland, aei, cato, they're overflowing bullshit factories. Enough of that nonsense already.
Governments do incorporated things and corporations do governance - they are different structures of cultural institutions that interact with each other all the time.
Well let’s see. In 25 years I’m quite positive that I have never been discriminated against when it came to hiring working in technology. That’s from working at some of the smallest companies to some of the largest. I can’t say the same when it comes to being stopped by police when I “looked suspicious”.
Given a choice between trusting Big Tech and Big Government. I trust Big Tech a lot more.
Non anecdotally, who were the first to recognize the rights of LGBTQ? The government or Big Tech?
The Kingdom of France 1791?
Monaco in 1793? Prussia in 1794?
When do you want to start this? Maybe 20th century instead? The October Revolution in 1917, Poland 1932, Denmark 1933?
Oh you're talking LGBT protected class discrimination for employment! Pennsylvania, 1975, Wisconsin 1982?
Maybe you're talking about Bostock v. Clayton County(2020) which got to the SCOTUS because a private corporation, in 2019, fired an employee for being gay. That's how it got there, a private company not respecting LGBT rights.
So maybe you mean the courts? When was the first case in lgbt's people's favour? One, Inc. v. Olesen 1958. Nineteen fifty eight.
So yeah, probably government. Feel free to move the goalposts around if you want. I'm pretty confident on this on wherever you decide to place them
> * I can refuse to use a specific tech company's product*
This is less true than you might realize. Consider that if a friend of yours is on Facebook, they might upload photos of you and tag your name, allowing Facebook to build a profile of you regardless of whether you use Facebook or not.
Consider that credit rating agencies buy your loan history in order to rate you as a customer, regardless of whether you check your credit history with them or not. Consider that Google buys your credit card purchase history to build a profile of you.
Consider that Google takes pictures of your house regardless of whether you search for it on Maps. Consider that GM and Ford collect and sell your location data from your vehicle. Note that vehicles that don't do this are getting more difficult to obtain because the price of vehicles is becoming increasingly subsidized by surveillance.
Technology is ubiquitous. Not all technology is a product sold to consumers, and you don't always have a say in how it's used. GDPR covers all of the above situations. Its effect on websites is peanuts.
> A corporation doesn’t have the power of the state to threaten to take away property or liberty.
Automated systems are currently part of the decision-making process in hiring, firing, choosing to loan, choosing to rent, policing, and determining prison sentences. A corporation that offers "fraud detection" services has a surprising amount of power over your liberty and property.
...allowing Facebook to build a profile of you regardless of whether you use Facebook or not.
Why isn't there a law to prevent this while there's a law that accomplishes nothing except guarrantied annoyances? Is not the government that makes laws?
There is, it's called the General Data Protection Regulations. Its purpose is to protect consumers from companies that surveil and track without your knowledge and permission. You should read up on it as cookies are just a tiny paragraph.
Seems a bit simplistic. I'm always surprised at how really smart people revert to tribalist sound bites when it comes to politics. Power is derived from the ability to successfully enforce it. Doesn't matter who has the power.
You mean the power given to unelected departments like the FTC, FDA, etc that actually create regulations or the unelected judges with lifetime appointments or the unelected officials in the Department of Justice?
Those obviously need to be fixed. Finding egregious oversights in the structure of our public office doesn't immediately invalidate it because we have tangible, actionable mechanisms for fixing it.
Corporations on the other hand are effectively vestigial 21st century monarchies, with all the cost and benefits that comes with that.
I've ran a few small ones and believe in private industry. I'm not anti corporation, but let's call a spade a spade here. Believing in bullshit never helps you in a competitive marketplace, don't do it.
You mean fix one entire branch of the US government - the judicial branch. Or do you mean the Senate that has two senators regardless of population where someone in the Midwest has far more voting power than someone in a more populous state? Or do you mean gerrymandering?
It’s not libertarianism. It’s seeing the history of biased enforcement when it comes to the “War on Drugs” among other things but even with tech, we see the government would love to get access to data and in the case of the current administration “shut down Twitter”.
If the government had more control over the tech industry, who do you think they would go after?
The government could trivially shut down the internet.
They could easily raid the ICANN and IANA offices in playa vista and shut down global DNS in about an hour if they wanted. It's just a single floor, you could probably do it with 2 police officers.
The chains that bind them from doing so are those of public accountability.
A diligent public strangles the powers of a revanchist government.
Again I agree with you there are regrettable policies that should be addressed. Governance offers us that mechanism. That's why it's preferable as an institution in deciding public policy.
I'd rather have our imperfect government with their awful War on Drugs running the show than say Beyer, who marketed heroin to kids for mild ailments, or Purdue pharma which peddled opioids, you know, as late as last year, or the huxster Elizabeth Holmes or the price gouging Martin Shkreli or RJ Reynolds or any other profit seeking unaccountable entity.
Replacing the FDA with say a board of Shkreli, Holmes and Purdue? Yeah, I'm sure that'd go just great.
And there you have it. When drugs were affecting the inner city it was all about “lack of morality” and being “tough on crime”. But when it started affecting “rural America” it was “let’s blame the drug companies” and “treat it like a disease”.
I doubt people in the inner city or the people who “fit the description” wouldn’t feel the same way about the “War on Drugs”.
Some corporations will kill people if there's a buck to be made and then intentionally cover their tracks. Pg&e, ge, bechtel, nestle, exxon, rj reynolds, purdue, beyer, exelon...
The system as it stands is designed for people to "be as greedy as they can possibly get away with."
Then there's this theory that is everyone is exclusively a conniving bastard trying to double cross everyone and snatch profits by stomping on everyone else, the world will be a functional happy place.
Building a society by incentivizing what basically every religious text says leads to crime is a big mistake.
A corporation doesn’t have the power of the state to threaten to take away property or liberty.