How is that any different than some fiefdom ruled over by some noble? The whole point of democracy and elective government is that you can't rely on a system like that to be consistently good, whether it's the Duke's son squandering all the wealth and not listening to the people or a shift in management at the company. Just because sometimes there were benevolent companies that decided to contribute to their communities doesn't mean relying on that is a stable or desired outcome.
Require employees be paid and treated fairly. Require companies pay their taxes. Tax employees on those fair wages. Use those taxes to pay for community needs. That's the goal. That's our responsibility as citizens of a democracy. Relinquishing these responsibilities to others because it seems easier is how we got where we are. Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones, so take away their ability to be abusive.
If you relinquish your power to another, you should expect to be unhappy when their goals conflict with your own. Don't relinquish your power.
1) Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary. It is common for people to enter and exit the 'class' of business owner.
2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule.
That is a pretty solid contender for why people are less generous. I too would be investing more money in my community if I had more control of it. There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.
It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy. People took control away from businesses and the businesses stopped being in control.
> It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy.
Do you actually believe that? That all these business owners were running their factories out of the goodness of their hearts and that they only stopped because the government took all the money they had to give out as charity?
If that is the case why do we see ultra profitable businesses returning to this form instead of trying to carve out any section of their work base that they can, ex. The FAANGs turning most job positions into contractor filled roles like the janitorial staff?
There is this contemporary absurd narrative that businesses, business owners, and/or corporations only recently became greedy, and that this development (of greed), not the system itself, is the root of essentially all the problems with the modern economic system.
I think it is quite possible that you were more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord (partially because incentives were more directly, and forcibly, aligned) than find a corporation willing to put profits as anything other than first.
I’m frankly boggled that this thought is even entertained. We have literal centuries of evidence of corporations oppressing their workers and other peoples in the pursuit of profits, down to actual armies killing striking workers. I agree with you that you’d be more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord as they at least viewed their serfs as theirs and not some sort of cogs to be thrown away once they were worn out.
I'm not sure you are being clear in your argument. If we have literal centuries of evidence of corporations oppressing their workers [up to and including] actual armies killing striking workers ... how do you think it is possible that they've become more greedy recently?
Business greed has capped out since approximately the first 48 hours after the establishment of the first business back in Mesopotamia or wherever.
Possibly you haven't taken a literal enough read of what is being said here, but businesses don't ever get "more greedy". The greed capped out centuries ago. It cannot increase. It is impossible for it to get worse. It is at the human limit, and has been basically forever.
It is like the madness of people who think inflation is because businessesmen suddenly got extra greedy. If they could raise prices to that level they'd have done it in 22AD, not 2022AD. Prices are always as high as businesses can charge, if they go up something that isn't greed has to have changed. We can argue about what.
> Possibly you haven't taken a literal enough read of what is being said here, but businesses don't ever get "more greedy". The greed capped out centuries ago. It cannot increase. It is impossible for it to get worse. It is at the human limit, and has been basically forever.
I don’t agree with this premise, at least not in the context of the United States. You can even see in recent history where the greed amplified in the 80’s with the phrase “greed is good” becoming popular or that myth about how businesses have a legal requirement to pursue profit over everything got into the American psyche after that case against Henry Ford.
Fuck, charging interest on loans used to be considered a sin in western culture. We explicitly have seen greed change in magnitude.
You're right it's not greed itself, but the scale of its target that has grown. One person losing their job to corporate greed is a tragedy, and 10000 people losing their jobs is a statistic.
I think both lines of thought are correct and aren't mutually exclusive. Systemically, we have a fundamental underlying issue where profit motive isn't always aligned with the rest of society and there in lies what we see now.
I also think greed, or perhaps better described as flaunted greedy behavior, has increased over the past several decades. While capitalism has of course always been greed driven, different periods of time and different cultures have set guardrails up as to what level of greedy behavior is and isn't acceptable.
In the US the culture during the prime time of the industrial revolution, capitalism had technology progress propping its greedy appetite up. Those gains have been largely consumed and greed shifted over more and more towards optimizing on labor. We live in an environment now where we no longer assume your employer has your interests at heart and everyone listens to HR and leadership propoganda selling pictures of families and care for their employees while everyone rolls their eyes. We assume our employer will try the pay the least for us and get us to do the most for the least. We assume that they'll replace us the second they have a quantifiable cheaper alternative. Many decades ago these practices weren't as accepted, they certainly occurred, but they came with bad image and cultural rejection that harmed businesses. That isn't the case anymore. Businesses can basically do whatever isn't explicitly restricted by law or more profitable than penalties law sets and its just the accepted state of affairs. After all, it's legal, what are you going to do? Meanwhile through aggressive lobbying businesses are basically writing the law as they see fit.
Being charitable / good to employees is good for business and for retaining workforce in a world where employees don't have anyone else to care for them.
If I need to give 40% of my profits (and your salary) to the government and there is an avenue for getting some of that money back when you're in trouble, then go and ask for the government for help.
The mistake is in allowing the government to gather more resources and in turn making people dependant on them.
Welfare also destroyed the family unit (especially in the black community).
Indirect democracy is a fancy name for "electing" with your 1/100M vote an elite which gets to decide how to spend half of your salary.
If it is pretty clear that it did then you’ll have no problem finding sources that can prove that it occurred, that also take into account the targeted imprisonment that the black community has/had faced since emancipation. Anyone who looks at the black community in the US being destabilized and blames _welfare_ as the cause while ignoring that the legal system imprisons black men at a higher rate than white men regardless of the incident rate of crime is ignorant at best
I read the comment you're replying to as saying it didn't actually destroy anything, it's just easy to infer that from what's visible in records (e.g. statistics). "Didn't actually destroy anything in practice" pretty clearly puts it as against the idea that it destroyed anything though, to my eyes.
That may be what they meant, but my interpretation of their full statement(including the part about the formalization of that unit) was that they didn’t have any family structure to begin with. The poster may have had a nuanced reason for saying that, but given the dog whistle and lack of any nuance actually stated by them, I don’t see a reason to assume as such
Not quite sure what the "dog whistle" was that you're referring to...please explain that!
The statistics show significantly lower marriage rates among black families (moreso correlated to poor families, in which black folks over-represent). The thing not shown in the statistics is the number of families where parents are together, but unmarried (and oftentimes reporting different addresses) because they get SIGNIFICANTLY more benefits that way. So...the family unit is there, but just not formalized. And people are just responding to the incentives in front of them.
That explanation doesn’t have a dog whistle, but implying that a family structure doesn’t exist in any manner in the black community is the dog whistle that it seems you inadvertently triggered
You aren't "investing" in employees by paying them a salary. Employees will get a 10-15% payrise by switching after 2 years. Give them that payrise and communicate why. Even if they leave anyway, you only pay them while they stay so you don't lose much.
At least in tech, companies have already decided to make employees pay for training. You don’t see people doing leetcode training or side projects to pad their resume because their employers invested in increasing their skill set.
Given that this has already occurred, why would any employee agree to a system where now they have a financial obligation to their employer if they leave?
I get your sentiment but the employers already cut all the benefits out of the system when it comes to skill development. They’ll need to start adding back in investments to employee’s skills without any sort of guaranteed payback for a while before the average employee would extend them any trust
Can't even take seriously a comment which refers to elected leaders as "elites" and that's against my very harsh criticism of the voting restrictions and average voter apathy here.
If I overlay that spending graph with quality of life during the same timespan, I might conclude government spending is a miracle. A greater success within 200 years can hardly be imagined.
Correlation doesn't imply causation and the pirates disappearing didn't cause global warming.
I'm grateful to entrepreneurs and companies for innovating so much, while the USA is turning into the largest employer in the world (bigger than China).
From gp:
> There is a pretty simple correlation between growth in government spending and a reduced ability of businesses to have a positive impact in their community.
Oh really? I'm somewhat familiar with German companies and the extreme regulation and worker-focused rules they endure as a good comparison to American businesses which I am intimately familiar with. My takeaway is that while it's much much harder to operate and innovate in Germany, the citizens are better off in immeasurable ways. Spectra, pendula, all that...
> 2) Success as as a business owner requires steady economic activity where people get what they want. Success as a noble ruling a fiefdom requires kneecapping anyone who challenges your god-given right to rule.
> Nobody pretends that business skills are especially hereditary
Is this a joke? Nepotism is a huge problem in every step of the executive pipeline. The children of executives are often groomed to become executives themselves from basically the time they can talk.
The problem is this isn't well defined. Somewhere maybe in the 1980s greed became good and the responsibilities of corporations shifted from being a fictional person that could benefit society to a thing that was in it for shareholders only. This is a cultural shift borne by MBAs and thinktanks, not something that can be pinned down to a specific incident.
As usual sunlight is the best disinfectant. It needs to be clear who owns what and who did what, and journalists need to go and look at cases where things are not in the interest of the community. There need to be records of whose interests are represented, who owns what, and who knows who.
This is not entirely untrue, but it's not particularly supported by the rest of your post.
Even if it's hard to completely define what "paid and treated fairly" mean, it's crystal clear that a very large percentage of employers today don't meet even the lowest possible bar—that being a living wage and not actively abusing the employees.
Yep, and it's not even hard to find examples of businesses that are not paying a living wage and/or are actively abusing people. Just walk into almost any restaurant or retail location. Pretty much anywhere below the highest end establishments of either kind will have both things going on.
Others have done a good job answering you, but I just want to add that there's a whole body of theory and scholarship that calls your mental model of this into serious doubt. It's called public choice theory and it essentially concludes that politicians, bureaucrats, and other officials are just as driven by selfish interests as anyone else, and that democratic systems typically do a very bad job at channeling that selfish energy toward the public good.
Forgive me for being sentimentalist a bit, but I think that nowadays we underestimate the weight that feelings of duty, loyalty, and trust had on rulers of times past. They were raised from the day they were born to be leaders, to care deeply about their family honor, to feel obliged to their subjects. Certainly, they were ultimately fallen men like the rest of us, and hereditary succession is not great at picking the best of each generation.
My point isn't that politicians are inherently better or more trustworthy than companies, but that you have more control over them. The amount of control as a community you can exert on a company beg enough to have a large influence in a community is minimal. The amount of control a community has over an elected official that oversees that community should be large.
There will be good companies and bad companies. There will be good politicians and bad politicians. One is easier to steer than the other.
Duty, loyalty and trust are good to have. What do you do if the large local company that has outsized influence on the community is lacking those? What do you do if the local elected officials are lacking those? Neither is easy to deal with, but I think one is a far more manageable problem.
The counter argument, is that relying on benevolent government to ensure a desired outcome is just as naive. In both cases, the holders of power are people. You're just trading one person for another.
You're trading one person who has no accountability to you in particular or the populace in general with a group of people who have at least some meaningful accountability.
Or, looking at it another way, you're trading a person who has the ability to go against group consensus for the betterment of the community to a person who is highly incentivized to follow group consensus to maintain their power (in the ideal circumstances, of course; I'm ignoring the obvious failure case of corruption or other manipulations). When that group consensus aligns with your values, that could be good. When it does not - such as living as a political minority, or when the group consensus is harmful to you (take, for example, NIMBYism), that can be very bad. In both cases you will have no meaningful political representation. A Democrat voter in a very Republican county has no real voice in government affairs unless they expend an inordinate and frankly unreasonable amount of effort campaigning - and will likely suffer some social repercussions for doing so. The reason people keep coming back to the idea of autocracy - why companies are often so much more efficient than governments - is that a central decision-maker can (not always will!) more effectively direct group efforts and establish priorities.
Democracy, as has been said, is the worst political system, except for all the others, but let's not lie to ourselves and ignore that in some contexts it is, in fact, strictly worse. The classic example, of course, is an army led by direct democracy. When a thing must get done, and damn the consequences, then there really is no substitute for autocracy. It's just unfortunate that the people who eventually end up as autocrats are rarely there to benefit the community. Building systems of accountability and responsibility through culture and non-systemic factors may better this (see, for example, the 85 terms of Roman dictators who did not try to seize any more power than they had been given by the Senate and in fact often returned their powers before their term was over), but culture-crafting to accomplish that is unfortunately beyond us at the moment.
if it is a local government you directly vote for, that supports your argument.
Often, it is layers of government, way over you, who have no clue of the local needs, and it gets much worse.
Not only does it not know the local needs, it has no expertise in the subject area itself, and so an unelected unnamed bureaucracy rules the roost, and over time, gathers so much power, that regardless of which government comes to power, the true power rests with these bureacrats.
Who the hell wanted either trump or biden in the last election?
There is simply no choice because the political elites offered us this and we need to vote our guy not to let the other guy win.
The game is rigged and your vote is not worth much.
When you're buying a product instead you're effecting real change and telling society you want more of that.
If only we could control law making in the same way we would have a decentralised society which better approximates what people want.
I think the point is that many had other preferences, but our two party (and FPTP voting) system doesn't address them. Who I voted for in 2016 and 2020 weren't nearly my first choices, and I think that's a fairly common experience.
Ranked choice would show a lot more nuance in people's beliefs that US politics would have to address. I haven't looked into it in some time, though. It seemed to work where implemented in Europe.
> Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones
Which is exactly what happened in their situation! They "hoped" that the company would just remain nice out of the goodness of their hearts, and did not make sure that those benefits were built into the system. Surprise: when ownership changed hands, the gravy train was over and the people had no actual infrastructure to sustain themselves.
The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output. When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse. A time where societies had much higher levels of trust.
OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.
My opinion (having worked for one those companies the OP talks about) is it’s easy to be benevolent and generous when you face no real competition, profits grow year over year and everyone is fat and happy.
You never have to lay anyone off, pay raises come regularly, no huge pressure to perform, management gets big bonuses and shareholders watch the stock rise.
See the big US automakers in their hay day.
But when competition heats up, other companies take you business and profit growth has to be fought for, anything and everything is on the table.
The companies back then were never really loyal, they just never had the need to be ruthless, but they certainly would have been.
> The point of OP is about a time where local communities mattered more than global output.
Correction, a time when companies didn't have an easy and clear path to global output.
> When those in power were close enough to the common folk to the point where they could face consequences of their abuse.
I'm not sure that's ever been the norm anywhere in the world throughout history. I definitely don't think it was the reality in the Norman Rockwell like idea of what you think it was like.
We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses. Things were always bad, just in different ways. Those same companies that gave to the community and were the main employers in an area also set the working wage in the area with little market competition, and faced less scrutiny from the local law enforcement (who wants to be the prosecutor or police officer responsible for hurting everyone employed there in the community).
If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.[1]
> OP is not talking about "relinquishing the responsibilities to others". Quite the opposite. It's much easier to effectively exercise your rights and responsibilities on a smaller sphere of influence and power.
I wasn't really making a countering the OP, as much as expanding on a point they noted. Those situations that were good or appeared so are unstable and there's little the local community can do to change it. But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going.
> Correction, a time when companies didn't have an easy and clear path to global output.
No, you don't get to change what I said to fit your worldview. The 70's and the 80's had tons of multinational companies that didn't treat their employees like cattle, and that treated each of their branches as its community.
> We just view the past with rose-tinted glasses (...) If you want actual evidence of wrongdoing, it's trivially easy to find.
It's curious why your cynicism doesn't cut both ways...
Just as it is easy to find evidence of corruption at all levels of government.
> But in a democracy they all have power to elect local representatives, and if they rely on their representatives instead of a mostly unaccountable company, they can exert control the outcome of situations if they don't like where things appear to be going.
There are a lot more "ifs" here:
- If the local representatives are not in the pocket of the corporations.
- If the local representatives are not part of the elite with different interests from the common folk.
- If the local representatives are not just using their current term as a launching pad for a bigger point.
- If the community is cohesive enough to not have individuals just thinking for themselves, or (worse) divided into polarized feuds and make them waste all their political energy into hurting each other.
> No, you don't get to change what I said to fit your worldview. The 70's and the 80's had tons of multinational companies that didn't treat their employees like cattle, and that treated each of their branches as its community.
And were those companies acting as stewards of small communities, taking some of the role of local governments? If not I'm not sure how it applies.
> It's curious why your cynicism doesn't cut both ways...
> Just as it is easy to find evidence of corruption at all levels of government.
It does, and I agree. The difference is that with elected officials you have a mechanism to do something about it. How do you change the agenda of a company that controls the economy of the town you live in? You're not on the board, you can't feasibly get enough of the stock (if it's even public) to sway their strategy.
I will lay out my argument very clearly, again, so there's no confusion, and I will make some parts explicit that I left out that people seem to be making assumptions on.
- For any group in power, you cannot control their future actions. Any person that acts in a way you agree with today, may not act that way tomorrow. That extends to all politicians and all management of companies.
- Because of this neither a company, or interest group, or individual, whether elected or not, can be relied on to work in your interest in perpetuity. I do not view a governing body or a company in any way as superior or inferior to each other because both can go bad.
- Having some way to incentivize or change those in power is important because of the above.
- Citizens of a democracy have some power to do this. People that rely on a non-governmental body for this are thus relinquishing some of their control to affect whether those in power if they are working against their interest.
- Therefore in the absence of evidence that a specific governing body is better or worse than some company in meeting the needs of a community if given the resources of that community (e.g. lessened tax burden and favorable treatment by the community and local government), choosing the apparatus that you have more control over is the better choice.
I am not making any claim that an elected government at any specific instance of time is inherently more likely than a company to act beneficially for a community, but I wholeheartedly believe that since the community can change that local government, they are a better choice to have the power.
I think I got it, but it still seems that you were talking past the point from OP.
You are trying to make some statement about how individuals have more power with functional democratic institutions vs the despotic-like nature of the "town company".
What OP seems to be getting at is the point how communities before had higher levels of inner trust, and how this relates with TFA.
In a time where things were not globalized and people actually knew and interact with their neighbors (instead of getting stuck on Hacker News talking with people on the different side of the planet), the idea of the "town company" as the institution that coordinated the society vs "the government" didn't matter so much, as long as there was some sense of community and high-trust.
It was this local community with insular trust that we lost with globalization, and this why it makes no sense to talk about "company loyalty" anymore.
My whole point rests on the assertion that things are not static. Explicitly stated as companies changing from benevolent to less so, or politicians going from working for the people to against them. Implicitly, I expected this to be applied to other things as well, and I think it should be applied to things such as inner trust in communities.
You cannot expect the current conditions to persist indefinitely. Ceding what power you have to control parts of that, or even just to control tools which themselves affect that (such as politicians), just because right now things are good and you trust your community and the companies in it is a losing strategy.
Even back in the past when people had much more trust that a company would not treat them badly, any actions to make that the status quo (by weakening methods which those people had active input and ways to influence) was a bad choice, but possibly a less understood one.
Additionally, my response to rmason was meant less as a rebuttal, and more as an aside to do with the entire concept that relying on a company was ever a good idea, regardless of whether it often turned out okay for people during a certain time period. Not all replies are counters directly to what was stated, even if we are sometimes primed to view them that way. I didn't view myself as rebutting someone when I wrote that, but instead exploring the idea of why relying on a company was always a bad idea.
The obvious difference is that the employees are free to change jobs at any time. Yes, they may need to move if there are literally no other jobs in town, but that's not an option serfs had in a fiefdom.
I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners. And it's hard to totally escape any form of hierarchy when you live in a society.
> The obvious difference is that the employees are free to change jobs at any time. Yes, they may need to move if there are literally no other jobs in town, but that's not an option serfs had in a fiefdom.
You misunderstand my point, and possibly the discussion. If the company is large enough to be a majority employer in the area and much of the social works of the area are provided by the company, then regardless of whether you work for them you are beholden to them in some way. The local government will not want to upset the local economy by be antagonistic with them, they'll set the local pay scale based on whatever they pay as everything will be in relation to it, and there will be immense social pressure to not cause problems that would be bad for the whole community.
Do the people involved have more options for getting out from under the control of a company like that in an area? Yes, but far less than I think your statement would lead people to believe. To actually get out of control you'd have to completely leave the area. That's far easier now than in the distant past, but it's not easy.
> I'll also point out that maybe fiefdoms aren't as bad as you think. Don't get me wrong, I think we're way better off now, but I'm sure many rulers were just as generous and caring as these business owners.
I'm not saying every one of these companies was horrible, nor that every ruler was horrible. I'm saying that ceding your power to control who governs you to them leaves you at a disadvantage when inevitably a worse ruler or bad management comes into place, because nobody lives forever, and nothing is static.
Put another way, what if you contracted with someone to provide all your meals and you paid them $1000/mo. Maybe you're extremely happy with the quantity and quality of the food provided initially, but eventually, years down the line, the quality has changed to sub-par and the quantity is lower than your got previously as well. You'd want to renegotiate that contract, right? Well what if it was a lifetime contract? That would be a problem, and you'd probably see that as a major red flag initially and be wary of entering a lifetime contract where the future was uncertain.
That's what allowing a company to control the local economy and be the provider of social works is like. By allowing the company to take over the job of the local government, the people have ceded their power to enact change through their elected representatives, and they are stuck with whatever they get down the line. Elected representatives aren't perfect, but at least there's the option to change them or pressure them to change based on the community needs. What pressure can the community honestly exert on the company when if decides that it's so much cheaper to move the factory two states over that they have to do so?
> You misunderstand my point, and possibly the discussion.
I'm not sure what that adds to your post besides to antagonize. I'd respectfully suggest rethinking that as an opener on future comments.
I don't disagree with most of your post, and I don't think you seem to disagree with mine, preface aside. Yes, it's still difficult, but I think there is a world of difference between being under physical duress versus being very inconvenienced. Keeping the analogy, it's very inconvenient to change even a normal job, and we are held hostage with things like healthcare. That's fief like too. Scale matters.
> I'm not sure what that adds to your post besides to antagonize. I'd respectfully suggest rethinking that as an opener on future comments.
Then you interpreted my statement as more harsh than I intended, and I'll own up to my side of that, so I apologize. I don't necessarily take it as an insult for someone to say I misunderstood their point (if my statement to them comes across as a non-sequitur, I expect something like that), not that I've misunderstood some of the conversation. Sometimes comments are building on the context of a few prior comments in the chain, and seeing just the last two or three gives a distorted view of the context in which the current argument is being made. I'm not saying that happened here, but it is a reason I generally don't consider that statement to be very aggressive, but honestly it depends on the state of mind of the person hearing it.
> I don't disagree with most of your post, and I don't think you seem to disagree with mine, preface aside. Yes, it's still difficult, but I think there is a world of difference between being under physical duress versus being very inconvenienced.
My point was about control. No simile is going to be perfect. There will obviously be differences to being a fief than being a citizen in a democracy where the local company controls a lot of the resources and services.
That said, perhaps fiefdom wasn't what I was going for. Perhaps a Duchy is more appropriate? I admit to not being confident enough in the structures to know whether colloquially one implies more specific behavior than the other which might confuse the point (whether or not that implication is accurate).
> Keeping the analogy, it's very inconvenient to change even a normal job, and we are held hostage with things like healthcare. That's fief like too. Scale matters.
Yes. And I think adding power to this structure to reinforce those problems rather than a structure you have more control over which might alleviate them is the rational choice. I'm honestly surprised and confused that so many people are against that in this discussion.
Any time you think somebody is misunderstanding the discussion, pause a moment and consider that perhaps they have understood it, just in a different way from you. There are always multiple interpretations possible. A statement like the one you made assumes yours is the only right one.
> Just because sometimes there were benevolent companies that decided to contribute to their communities doesn't mean relying on that is a stable or desired outcome.
You are always going to rely on a few people, to do the right thing, which will become the wrong thing as life goes on, which will require a few more people, to do the right thing again, ad infinitum.
That's just how this human thing works.
Sometimes it's laws, other times it's breaking laws. Other times something else. It varies, there is no right answer forevermore, sorry.
You can't solve hard problems of coordinating, pleasing and doing right by many people with conflicting interests by 'requiring' it.
Who said there's a right answer forever? The whole point of what I said is to make sure you use your own power as a citizen to pass laws and elect those people you think will serve your interests best at the current time, and as soon as that's not the case, try to get rid of them. That's the point of democracy and a representative democracy, the power to keep interests aligned with the people.
Often that means putting in some safe lower bounds. Laws, as you noted. You put safeguards at the bottom preventing the worst behavior. That's the whole reason there are laws preventing child labor, because people decided that some things should not be tolerated.
Nothing prevents a company from still being a good employer and helping where they can, but that should not be required for our society to function. The goals of a company diverge from what is best for the people (both short term and long term) too often for that to be a good idea.
Your axiom is democracy and what sounds like dozens of other conditions.
My axiom is highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power. That's it.
My position is trivially superior, for many reasons, if only because your exact position is just one of many possibilities that highly intelligent, capable, compassionate people in power can choose to implement.
Well, I'm for utopias, which is better, so does that mean my argument is superior? I'm also for letting people eat as much as they want and not exercise and be in perfect health.
Perhaps having a feasible path to the desired outcome actually matters, rather than just assuming those are unimportant details... otherwise we'd already have off-world colonies and faster than light travel.
The vast majority of what makes society work is variations on the honor system. You can like it or hate it but it's better for everyone when we all agree on that.
The honor system works when there are social checks and balances that can be applied to punish socially for going against what's acceptable.
The whole point is that larger entities are shielded from some of these repercussions because of their size and power, and in some cases are almost completely untouchable by this system.
The legal system is there to catch extreme cases the social system can't feasible handle well enough. We don't just let murderers go and ostracize them, we incarcerate them and forcibly remove their rights. Some things are too important to allow social norms to be the ultimate arbiter of.
It worked and was stable for decades because unions ensured a balance of power between capital and labor. NAFTA and other pro-capital regulation broke that balance and shifted the balance towards capital.
Is the implication that conservatives supported NAFTA because it would reduce poverty around the world?
It's probably better to assess peoples motivations as they were at the time, not by what happened. A liberal would say they were focusing on the needs of the citizens of their own country and the problem in front of them. In any case, making this a case of liberals vs conservatives is silly, and to my view reductive.
As a citizen of a democracy you have power. Don't abdicate your responsibility, and thus your power, because it's easier to trust someone else handle it.
There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens. They (at least used to) have considerable purchase among conservatives.
As a category I think it’s also generally correct to say they’d argue for not yielding such power to any sort of decision makers, corporate or government, at all. Instead attempting to coordinate empowered individuals through coercive but distinctly non human forces like markets.
Whether the libertarians are correct or not is one thing, but I don’t think they’ve been hypocritical or inconsistent in their motivations.
> There are libertarians (even then popular ones like Milton Friedman), that have explicitly argued for open borders and free trade on the basis of the welfare of non citizens.
And there are liberal policy makers that look to increase protections for US citizens because they believe in negotiating from a position of moral authority, because without being able to practice what you preach you're easy to point out as hypocritical and ignore, or at a minimum it's easy to convince others to discount your position.
The important thing is that neither side, as a whole, is choosing a position with the intention of hurting local or remote peoples, and to various degrees both succeed and fail on various metrics. Neither side is inconsistent or hypocritical, they're entirely consistent within their own ideology for the most part, it's just that when not within that ideology, it's easy to point at specifics and explain them in terms of someone else's ideology in a way that makes them seem inconsistent.
The first thing I do when I see something lambasting a groups actions as hypocritical or stupid is to try to look into that group's own messaging on what they're doing and why. Sometimes I think their reasoning is flawed, but far more often than not there's a core of truth and consistency and truth to what they're attempting, even in those cases where I think they're working on flawed information.
Before I was willing to call a large group of people hypocritical or inconsistent, I would try very hard to understand their reasoning and how that action it is being presented/sold within that group. The risk of my own biases affecting my judgement is far too high otherwise.
Require employees be paid and treated fairly. Require companies pay their taxes. Tax employees on those fair wages. Use those taxes to pay for community needs. That's the goal. That's our responsibility as citizens of a democracy. Relinquishing these responsibilities to others because it seems easier is how we got where we are. Benevolent companies are just a precursor to abusive ones, so take away their ability to be abusive.
If you relinquish your power to another, you should expect to be unhappy when their goals conflict with your own. Don't relinquish your power.