I've always thought that every authoritarian regime is simply a company whose business is to manage and extract value from the country that they own, like any other productive asset.
Some of them are longstanding family businesses (monarchies), perhaps they have delegated or divested some of their ownership to a board or to the public to some degree (spectrum of semi-democratic monarchies).
Some are private companies with a single leading founder (different kinds of revolutionary/military dictatorships). Some act like large enterprises, that may be democratic or meritocratic to some degree internally, but closed to the public (single-party regimes).
It's interesting to think that we spend the majority of our time (work) quite happily within such power structures.
I guess the rather obvious trick is that it works as long as a company does not get a monopoly on violence. That's the difference.
I think your analysis seems roughly reasonable, but I would like to point out that violence is not the only way to abuse your position of power. You can also withhold resources or information, or spin narratives which make you work against your own interest.
I would also like to point out that, although private companies do not have a monopoly on violence, governments in liberal democracy protect the private property of said private companies using their monopoly on violence.
I spent some time in East Germany when the wall was still up and often think that a corporation is run like a communist planned economy. 5 year plans, lots of internal propaganda, rewards for following the plan, no tolerance for dissent, discouraging of innovation, clear split between leadership and the rest. It’s all there
Access to basic goods are locked behind bureaucracy and often in shortage. “It will be 90 days before you can receive your laptop”.
Problems are deflected from one bureaucratic hell to another, with nothing ever getting solved. And the employees are gaslit into thinking everything is very good and normal.
> I've always thought that every authoritarian regime is simply a company whose business is to manage and extract value from the country that they own, like any other productive asset.
Yes, they are predatory organizations by nature - in fact a closer operational model would be mafias. This was developed further by Murray Rothbard in his book "Anatomy of the State": https://cdn.mises.org/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf
Murray Rothbard is a radical anarcho-capitalist of the Austrian school, he doesn't believe that empirical data can falsify a mathematical model of human behavior. In other words, if I can editorialize a little --- he's a nut.
Some of them are longstanding family businesses (monarchies), perhaps they have delegated or divested some of their ownership to a board or to the public to some degree (spectrum of semi-democratic monarchies).
Some are private companies with a single leading founder (different kinds of revolutionary/military dictatorships). Some act like large enterprises, that may be democratic or meritocratic to some degree internally, but closed to the public (single-party regimes).
It's interesting to think that we spend the majority of our time (work) quite happily within such power structures.
I guess the rather obvious trick is that it works as long as a company does not get a monopoly on violence. That's the difference.