- Here’s something I don’t understand. It looks to me as if there is quite a lot of distrust and hostility toward corporations, especially large corporations, compared to other people and organizations. I put “compared to…” in there, because I could understand it if people were just distrustful in general (maybe that’s an evolutionary adaptation, whatever). But it seems as if people are much more distrustful of corporations than they are of (a) the government, (b) people they know in their personal lives.
... This is weird to me, because of the three groups, (a) government, (b) individuals in ordinary life, and (c) corporations, (c) appears to me to be by far the best behaved, the most beneficial, the smallest threat — and in ways that should be readily apparent to us.
Philosophy Bro, as Hubski dubbed Michael Huemer, has moved to Substack. I Love Corporations is archived. This was a great discussion. Further reading: The Basic Social Problem Humans are selfish. Some actions harm others but benefit the agent. Prediction from 1+2: There is going to be a lot of extremely net-harmful behavior. 2 Solutions Individual Retaliation The Fantasy Solution: Let’s just teach people to be nice. Government Anarcho-Capitalism Now, what sucks about the first three solutions? The Basic Problem of Government Government officials are selfish. Some government actions harm other people but benefit government officials. Prediction: There is going to be a lot of net-harmful government behavior. Here are four solutions, from the same post: Meta-Government Separation of Powers Constitutions Democracy Let’s think about why each of these are weak solutions. If you would like to have a conversation about these, post one up here.1 The Fundamental Social Problem
The basic problem of government, from my previous post:
Judging by the timing of my accidental "www" reply, I think I posted from my pocket during a wedding in Colorado. I'll be back. Someone's apparently got to defend the idea of government from the deeply-distrustful anarchists who will all magically trust each other after the government is dissolved. edit: ah makes sense, I've had this post pinned to my feed for... years
You're gonna kinda hate this, I'm sorry. I'll only touch on "The Basic Problem of Government" real quick. First I will invert the three "What is Democracy Good For" bullets and title. So, democracy performs especially sub-optimally when a threat is: a) obscured b) targeted at a minority c) eventual Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a decent model for explaining the effectiveness of Donald Trump's assault on American representative democracy. a) There are several recent comments (link for future posterity) of mine and others' containing theories on the establishment media's role in obscuring the reality of Trump, and professions of concern that the democrats are unable to comprehend some of the finer machinations of MAGA/fascism's workings. And before we can proceed further, you'll need to sign the 299W mod of the base model 4.6 Trump NDA. Ok, thank you. I can now disclose that Trump's secret religious ritual of choice is pathologically lying, followed by a closing hymn from our beloved House band, Never Being Held Accountable. Treating NDAs as casually as a handshake and pathologically lying are a bit obscuring, speaking conservatively. And done intentionally, too. Biden lies, yes, but probably less than most modern day presidents going back to, eh, LBJ, whatever. It's not worth fleshing out in detail because the severity and frequency of Trump's lies are both about several orders of magnitude larger. I'm not really sure how anyone could seriously dismiss the meat of that claim as speculative or disputed, at this point. And, as I try to make the case for in one/some of those linked comments, MAGA obscures an accurate perception of the dems. Anything not MAGA is branded communist. b) Oh boy! Oh boy. Goddamn woke DEI! 'nuff said. (apologies) Donald Trump leads a movement that is also not a majority, and perhaps increasingly not a majority of voters, either, but it is still advantageously rooted in long-established power hierarchies in the US. Even so, the MAGA faithful, now faced with a diversifying America wherein they lose influence within a democratic system, have largely made the decision, consciously or not (which correlates well with leadership/office holder or not, I'm sure), to abandon democracy. So MAGA brass have a) obscured the issues facing actual b) minority groups currently seeing some degree or another of legal and social persecution relative to themselves. Florida's anti-LGBT laws (legal), Musk's re-installment of literal Hitler fanboys to twitter (social), and SCOTUS repealing Roe are some prime examples. MAGA is agitating to some degree on almost every front, every actual minority group, stoking the grievances of the largest and wealthiest demographic (white christians) in an effort to simulate the boot of systemic oppression and boost voter turnout. No doubt, many of the most dyed-in-the-wool MAGA face real hardship, though moreso stemming from class differences, not racial differences. I also note that redirecting classist grievances through a race-based ideology is made a bit easier when class and wealth break down quite discernibly along racial or ethnic lines, as they usually do all around the world. And this is where Great Replacement theory really springs to life, of course. Of course all of this is underlined by the point made in the article that I half-read, somewhere, which is surely that it's harder to get an electorate to fight back against bad actions that only affect a small amount of voters. Yes. This idea has been systematically applied by MAGA to slowly strip back the hard-fought gains of the minorities. There are people still very much alive who marched for civil rights in the '60s. I dunno how anyone thinks a systemic injustice that deep and that recent is now disappeared without a trace, but it's funny how almost everyone saying that is wealthy and white. Or they're Clarence Thomas. Boy it makes more sense than ever, nowadays. Thomas Sowell? If PragerU is deifying someone, yeah, I don't think they got laughed out of academia because his ideas were... too good. [insert concerns about the electoral college, Senate representation, gerrymandering, on and on, you know] c) When you get a head start out front by launching your campaign with a racist birther movement, "eventual" carries the day. I'll say that it's certainly taking longer than I once thought to reach whatever the next major phase is for MAGA, that's for sure. Dedicated exchangers of $20 will recall that I thought the outcome would be that America might take a couple years to process the full story of the Trump admin after his white house exit but eventually see through the facade of Trump. Instead, because of how a) obscured Trump has somehow managed to make his true self (or at least enjoys obscurement in some form or another by most media, especially the media favorable to him), that didn't happen. Trump's command of media revenues has guaranteed continued attention as he slowly normalizes increasingly dictatorial lies and policy ("bitch I'm the FEDDDDDDD"). The result is widespread cultural acceptance that Trump is inevitable. That he never left, and 2020 wasn't even that bad. Biden did the lockdowns. Apparently even the very NOT c) eventual threat of deporting 20 million(!) people within the next few years isn't animating enough for many Americans, but most have no clue about Project 2025 because of an almost total absence of reporting about it [a)]. And Trump's gradual, incremental wins, or even sometimes just a lack of setbacks, seem to be facilitating a quickening of the rate he is permitted to continue radicalizing the GOP. Said differently, in a democracy responding to threats, when the threat is decreased functionality of the democracy, it can enable a nasty feedback loop that makes anti-democratic backsliding potentially snowball. c)ase study: The now heavily MAGA-aligned anti-vax movement provides a nice little microcosm of a far-left woowoo-ism that began with everybody laughing at Jenny McCarthy ten years ago, but gradually, c) eventually reaches the stage of Olivia Nuzzi posting a completely unprompted defense of raw milk after the FDA has identified it as the most common vector of bird flu. Is that where this distrust, a sentiment fanned by RFK Jr., is headed next? Not particularly excited about that, personally, knee-jerk contrarianism is naught but another flavor of reactionary politics. Screw the FDA, for sure, but any good case for reform obviously can't be rooted in anti-science. And now everyone is just going about their business, as if this and many more widespread anti-science viewpoints are totally normal. As if the rate of regression is some transient event that the institutions can print more reputationbucks and do more Joe Rogan appearances to depress. Who knows, maybe it will be this fast rate of regression, hugely deviated from a c) eventual/gradual collective experience, that will be the death knell. Like Lara Trump steps into the camera frame two weeks before the election to deliver the October Surprise, which is that you must boof 18 grams of microplastics, bare minimum every day for Trump to win the election. Demand for butt doctors soars, Pelosi already bought all the shares of BUTT. What I'm trying to say is, no, I'm not gonna shoegaze to some ambient anarcho-libertarian recreation of a constitution, a mandate we all concede is imperfect, when I could commandeer the content to savage Hitler II. OH! Oh! I Godwin'd! I lose. Yes, Trump-Hitler is a reductionist comparison, and I wish other folks all the best of luck out there explaining how it can't go unstressed that the elements of Milošević's capitulation to the Serbians showed their Peloponnesian roots once again in Trump's April 16th speech when he beiposdfalkhaeworilkhasf y'know whatever, bring a chalk board. I'll be focusing on a simple, true, and relatable narrative. Trump has told us himself that he independently arrived at literally the exact same xenophobic hate speech as Hitler ("immigrants poisoning the blood of our country"? like r u fuckin srs rn?). Best part is he then pretends to assume everyone agrees that Finding Hitler All On Your Own somehow exonerates him, and everyone in the press gaggle plays right on along. But like... saying "I'm doing Hitler" is super Hitler. Like if Hitler had an elder Hitler within recent history just before Hitler and it was politically expedient to make a nod to the older Hitler when the original Hitler was Hitlering, Hitler would be like "I'm doing Hitler", too. No joke I just write those... sentences, head to the googles, and h'wow guys, what do you know?! I never heard of this until one and a half minutes ago. But it's absolutely so predictable. So predictable. You love accurate predictions, right? Consider some of the very models you're already familiar with applied in the context of Donald Trump as mid 1930's Weimar Hitler. Get on predictit and clean up. And just to give the elephant in the room a big ol' smooch on my way outside, how am I supposed to talk with an anarcho-anything about the way a state functions or should function? How strong is the temptation to let yourself cheer for the demise of an admittedly notorious geopolitical agitator (the us), and see Trump as your guy? He'll definitely deliver, but seems about like devotees of the Thanos fingersnap philosophy. Yeah, half of everyone disappeared, but we already knew that would happen, from the vaccine. And now we're better for it, see, just before everyone disappeared we finally realized Earth was too overpopulated to sustain our current lifestyle, but that problem is solved, at 4 billion humans worldwide. Thanks, Trump. You don't even have to read this, answer this, or respond in any way, I won't tell. Actually this is all formal prepwork for my own future Hitler speedrun, I can easily improve on Trump's time. P.S. The festering fascism problem does unfortunately extend well beyond Trump if the democrats STILLLLL can't recognize: 1) the current Israeli regime is one of the most fascist governments in the world, 2) Netanyahu pines for Trump and has begun sabotaging Biden, which will escalate through the election, and 3) It is nothing shy of remarkable that the ICJ and UN have now determined, with two independent investigatory bodies, that Israel has committed war crimes. We're talking institutions established in the wake of the Nuremburg trials designed to prevent future genocides saying "actually, so, the victims of the Holocaust that spurred our existence are unfortunately doing a genocide right now, sorry". Score one for the institutions, that is righteous. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention 4) As it was happening, the dem consensus was "serves those anti-semitic stupid students right for setting up tents on the quad" while police cosplayed as a counterterrorism military operation using ridiculous amounts of force to subdue a bunch of people overwhelmingly doing nothing but legally exercising their free speech. P.P.S. We can get back to trust, it's very much like: Democracy isn't as effective when a threat is d) evaluated in a hyper-centralized structure of trust.
All very salutary, but I remain curious to know what you think of Huemer's (relatively simple!) arguments about corporations and government. Do you disagree with any one of his numbered headings in particular? For what it's worth, he hates Trump. I observe that The Trump Organization is a corporation, one I can avoid with ease, aside from seeing the name on large buildings now and then. Trump the politician, however, has gathered power using democracy (as it is practiced, which matters more than how one might wish it worked) and this power is harder to avoid. DEC 21, 2018 Trump is your fault FEB 29, 2020 A Right-Wing, Populist Critique of President Trump JAN 16, 2021 What's So Bad About Storming the Capitol? DEC 30, 2023 Saving Democracy from the Voters JUN 24, 2023 Who Can Best Destroy America? I wonder how much left-wing intellectuals have contributed to the rise of Trump and the alt-right.
Trump does not encourage respect for our country.... President Trump does not make America strong. He weakens America, in several ways.... Trump’s trade war is estimated to cost average Americans about $1300 a year... When he dies, Mr. Trump will go to his grave laughing at all the people he scammed in his life, not least of all the American voters.
What matters is, if they had somehow succeeded in getting Congress to install Trump as President (which I think had about zero chance of happening), the result would have been a collapse of social order in America. There is no way in hell that the other half of the country would have accepted it. There would have been a civil war.
His remarks on January 6 were intended to intimidate Congress and Mike Pence into going along with his plan. Attempting to overturn an election using threats of violence sounds like “engaging in insurrection” to me.
If you’re a Woke ideologue, antifa member, or member of ISIS, you should vote for Donald Trump in the next election, because he will do the most to accelerate America’s destruction.
I don't feel an urgent need to get down into the weeds 50 yards off the fairway, at the moment. As my still having this post pinned to my feed signifies, I'd love to get back to this eventually, but Trump is currently having his caddie surreptitiously loiter around the green with a spare golf ball. I'll dunk on Huemer or whoever after I finish getting thrown in an internment camp for trolling the "free speech absolutists", or maybe just for being somewhat left-leaning on the European political spectrum.
If this is true it seems strange. Walmart does not profit from the planet Jupiter, and Walmart makes no effort to destroy Jupiter. Walmart does not profit from Sears either, and how does Walmart destroy Sears? By providing customers with better prices and better service. Walmart doesn’t bomb its enemies or threaten customers, it lets customers decide which retailer treats them best. Walmart does harm too, but the article asks us to compare our daily experience with Walmart to that with government and individuals. [Update: I just checked the mail. I got a postcard from the government which threatens to take $100 from me if I do not obey its instructions, and dozens of invitations to save money from organizations that don’t bomb their enemies.]People hate corporations because they see them taking an active role in destroying anything that doesn't make corporations more profit.
but if that doesn't work, there's always this and this and this and this ...and so on. That's cute. But Some Might Disagree EDIT: I appreciate the irony of your using the U.S. Census as an example of hostile government overreach. Given that the point of the census is to figure out how to allocate public moneys most equitably and efficiently. And that the government is constitutionally bound to conduct census- that is, beholden to the people. And that incentives and disincentives to behavior are cooked into just about every corporation, public or private. Were you being ironic?Walmart does not profit from Sears either, and how does Walmart destroy Sears? By providing customers with better prices and better service.
Walmart doesn’t bomb its enemies or threaten customers, it lets customers decide which retailer treats them best.
No one argues that corporations can do no wrong. The idea is to compare corporate behavior to that of governments and individuals. Let's make a scorecard for the behaviors you mentioned. Espionage Government spying is performed by groups like the CIA, NSA, KGB, and Mossad. These organizations are famously associated with tactics like torture, disappearances, and assassinations, when they are not sparking revolution and war, thereby killing multitudes of innocent people, always with noble intentions. Corporations perform industrial espionage by snooping around on networks, getting mole employees hired by the competition, copying proprietary information, and "predatory hiring" (beware the evil sign-on bonus!). The intention, for what that's worth, is to make money, a goal shared by basically everyone. Successful industrial espionage hurts the target business and helps the spying business, and may well be beneficial to customers in the end. "According to a 2020 American Economic Review study, East German industrial espionage in West Germany significantly reduced the gap in total factor productivity between the two countries." There's an article on corporate manslaughter saying that laws in some countries hold corporations accountable for accidentally killing someone. The Straight Dope asks "Do Corporations Ever Try to Kill People?" without irony. Individuals are nosy and spread gossip. I need a logarithmic scorecard to keep these values on the same page. Sabotage Suppose you see a headline saying that a factory was destroyed in an explosion, and it wasn't an accident. You might suspect that it was a lone terrorist, or a terrorist group. Or if the factory was in a conflict zone, it's a routine act of war. Would it ever occur to you to imagine that Nike is sending Under Armour a message, or Pfizer is playing hardball with Merck? The cola wars were marketing campaigns. Casualties of obesity are an unintended side effect of giving people sugary drinks that they enjoy, and often continue to consume, even when sugar-free varieties are offered. Even in an egregious case like Philip Morris the corporation does not profit from causing cancer, it's an unintended consequence that kills their customers. Hostile Takeover When a government wants to take over another government, the tanks roll and the bombs drop. "At least 108 million people were killed in wars in the twentieth century. Estimates for the total number killed in wars throughout all of human history range from 150 million to 1 billion." Governments have two main ways of interacting with other governments: threatening war and promoting trade. All of us prefer trade, when corporations are allowed to peacefully exchange goods and services. A corporate hostile takeover "can be accomplished through either a tender offer or a proxy fight." A tender offer is a "bid constituting an offer to purchase some or all of shareholders' shares in a corporation. Tender offers are typically made publicly and invite shareholders to sell their shares for a specified price and within a particular window of time. The price offered is usually at a premium to the market price and is often contingent upon a minimum or a maximum number of shares sold." Not exactly Germany invading Poland. A proxy fight is "the action of a group of shareholders joining forces in a bid to gather enough shareholder proxies to win a corporate vote. Sometimes referred to as a 'proxy battle,' this action is mainly used in corporate takeovers, where outside acquirers attempt to convince existing shareholders to vote out some or all of a company’s senior management, to make it easier to seize control over the organization." Top Examples of Hostile Takeovers In September 2009 Kraft Foods Inc. offered $16.3 billion for Cadbury PLC. The Cadbury chairman refused. (The U.K. government stepped in, demanding "respect" for the chocolate maker.) Kraft increased its offer to about $19.6 billion and the two companies finalized the takeover. Cadbury remains the second largest confectionery brand in the world after Mars. In June 2008 InBev offered to buy Anheuser-Busch for $65 a share in a deal that valued its target at $46 billion. Eventually, InBev upped its offer to $52 billion or $70 a share and shareholders accepted. Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser continue to be household names. In August 2010 Sanofi announced a bid to acquire Genzyme for $18.5 billion. The board refused. Sanofi negotiated with shareholders, and in February 2011 Sanofi declared the full acquisition of Genzyme for $20.1 billion. Genzyme had merged with or acquired dozens of other businesses in its history. It now employs 11,000 people in some 65 countries. Monopoly A monopoly on violence is "a core concept of modern public law" and Max Weber's "defining conception of the state." What's bad about a monopoly? It removes freedom of choice; everyone has to use the same provider. You may be satisfied with the DMV, but if you're not, too bad. There is no built-in incentive to improve service or reduce costs. When law protects a monopoly, there is no pressure from small, agile startups moving in when a bureaucracy is slow and inefficient. I can't think of any corporate monopolies that seem harmful on balance. Even De Beers has lost dominance. This could be a success of vigorous antitrust enforcement, but there are natural corrections for monopolistic behavior in the market. Dominant corporations like Standard Oil and Amazon get big and powerful by pleasing customers with low prices (sometimes with ruthless behavior toward the competition). There's always fear that a company like Amazon will grab all the market share by selling cheap diapers and then suddenly pivot, abandoning the business strategy that has made them successful and start jacking up prices to rake in even more profits. If this ever happens it would be the opportunity for startups to jump in and profit by undercutting the big player. Amazon has many advantages in that it can survive price wars (which are great for customers) longer, or buy up competing startups. But unless Amazon can get government protection from competition, it will eventually go broke acquiring a series of copycat startups. Thus Amazon sticks to its proven mission of pleasing customers. If you don't like the dominant business, you can switch to the nearest substitute or do your best to go without what they offer. It's not a perfect solution, but at least you don't have to spend your money to keep the business in operation. If enough customers think and act like you, the business will wither, creating opportunity for a better provider. What do you do when you are dissatisfied with a government service? 1. Go without the service. But you'll still pay for it, so nothing gained. 2. Write a letter to your representative. They will send a form reply. 3. Wait for the next election cycle. 4. Find another politician who promises to do a better job. 5. Vote for them. Your vote has almost no chance of changing the outcome. If the election is that close, it will be reviewed and the candidate with more influence will probably win. 6. Hope that the new representative keeps their promises. Most of the behaviors in these four categories are organized, not individual, so the mystery to me is why corporations would be perceived as more evil than government. Summing up: Espionage: Torture, murder and war versus stealing information to make better products, and stealing employees by giving them a better offer. Sabotage: Literally destroying factories, bridges and hospitals versus destroying the reputation of Brand X. Takeover: Dropping bombs, murdering and terrifying civilians, killing leaders versus winning over reluctant shareholders with an offer too generous to refuse and sending the leader off with a golden parachute. Monopoly: By design, services provided by single providers with compromised incentives and low approval ratings versus Apple, Amazon, Disney, FedEx, Netflix, Nike and Starbucks and engaged in a daily struggle for survival won by those who delight their customers better than the innumerable competitors trying to take their places. You don't have to love corporations; it's certainly not fashionable. But there ought to be some proportion!
The purpose of the article is to ask if our mistrust in corporations is proportional to corporate misbehavior, compared to government or individual behavior. I am suggesting a "follow the money" approach, arguing that if someone offers money to get something done (build a car, drop a bomb) they share responsibility when that thing happens. This is the way the law works; you can't hire a hitman and then say you are innocent because you didn't pull the trigger. You mention corporate espionage, corporate sabotage, and hostile takeovers. Who is the victim of these practices? Most directly, other corporations. If you are hostile toward corporations, you might welcome these practices. I don't worry about them very much. Walmart destroyed Sears (let's say), now they see Amazon as a threat. If Walmart steals secrets about how Amazon pleases customers, perhaps with technology enabling one-click purchases, then Walmart can improve customer service by adopting those practices. Let Amazon take them to court, why should customers care? You mention monopoly. Do you feel threatened by monopoly? Most of my spending goes to corporations, and I have a dizzying number of choices; I get lost trying to make a decision of where to shop. Price wars, hostile takeovers, cutthroat business practices, it sounds like hell in the board room. But from the customer perspective, I see cheap diapers. The East India Company may be a fair example of commercial abuse of power in the 1800's, but it basically was the government in India, exercised military power, and does not reflect business practices today. Can you really compare them to Google or Facebook, who make money by advertising? I would ask if a private agency like Pinkerton is better or worse in terms of strikebreaking than similar behavior by police and military forces. Who are the customers of Blackwater and Northrup Grumman? Ultimately, taxpayers provide the money, but not by choice. If you don't love the work they do, your quarrel is with the organizations paying them to do it. Corporations are reviled for collecting data about customers. How do they get the data? By watching how people use their services, and sometimes asking questions. Sometimes they provide compensation for data, a "token of appreciation" for taking a survey, or providing me with free links to information on any subject I ask for. (One of your links is to a Google search -- if you don't trust corporations, why do you use one to find links? If you can't live without finding links, why not at least use one of the smaller search engines instead of the world's largest?) If I lie to a corporation about my personal information, nothing happens. If I lie on the census, the penalty is $500. The census has a noble intent, but if I happen to believe public money won't in fact be more equitably and efficiently allocated based on my postcard, why must I be threatened to fill it out?
Working backwards: If you lie to a corporation about your personal information, that might be called "insurance fraud," for which there are absolutely ramifications. Much like an insurance company, the government compels us to pay a certain amount in to promote good behavior and indemnify against the societal risks of bad behavior. That's called social contract. "But what if I don't want to" has never been a compelling argument to me, which is one of the reasons I've never found libertarianism convincing. If you don't want to follow the social contract, then the social contract breaks down. When the social contract breaks down, and corporations (as well as individuals) are allowed to act in their own unfettered self interest, then you get the East India Company. That's the point. If you remove government oversight, you don't get better business. You get government by another name.. The difference between modern liberal democratic government and corporate government is that one is ostensibly using monopoly on power to enforce social boundaries and thereby uphold social order and manage use of national resources; the other uses that monopoly on power to maintain profit at all cost, no matter how brutal. I know which rubric of public management I'd be willing to trust more if I "followed the money". Speaking of monopolies. You opened a previous portion of the discussion describing how Walmart might increase market share simply by improving their overall customer experience. The implication, I presume, was to illustrate how beautifully the market self-regulates through positive interactions to make both sides prosper. But it ignored malfeasance, because malfeasance illustrates how in the absence of regulation, the market cares only about profit by all available means. The means I supplied are absolutely tactics pursued by corporations to consolidate market share and increase profits without having to consider the quality of their product or user satisfaction. And the absence of end user harm cannot be conflated with the presence of end user benefit, especially if we recalibrate our idea of who the end user is. While I, some random Joe on the street might not care about corporate espionage so long as my computer still runs, if I was, say, the inventor of a certain kind of computer chip and I appreciated the revenue that my intellectual property generated, I might be kind of sore if somebody stole that intellectual property, and might appreciate the regulations that curb such bad behavior. As for monopolies, they decidedly don't result in cheaper diapers. All this is to say, I really truly don't understand this dogmatic trust in corporation over governance. There's too much evidence being swept under the rug indicating how corporations would act in absence of regulation. In my eyes, mistrust is maybe the strongest regulatory weapon we as individuals have at our disposal. That goes for both government and the market. Why do we have to couch it as a binary choice between one or the other? As for the opinion piece that we're discussing: Pish posh. The purpose of that piece is to present the author's opinion as common sense using a sort of gee-whiz, down-home-country-lawyer reliance on The People's love of a good, simple narrative. It opens: And then expels paragraphs of hand-wavy opinion such as without ever relying on so much as personal anecdote. Even the portion on history doesn't refer to any particular historical example. The author practically begs his audience not to consider concrete examples or counterpoints lest it deflate the argument. Never mind the fact that in the introduction, the author questions the sense of mistrusting the corporation over personal acquaintances, asserts that out of the three provided groups, the corporation is by far the most trustworthy, and then never addresses the enormity of that claim. I should trust the corporation more than my wife? My friends? My mother? It's an absurdity so enormous that the author seems to rely on us just kind of... accepting it? And here's what I really don't understand. You're obviously very intelligent. And you're obviously well-attuned to historical precedent, and not afraid to buttress your opinions with examples. If I asked you not to consider history or legal precedent, you'd wonder why I'd redirected your attention. Moreover, you strike me as somebody who tailors his argument to the audience- the right tool for the right job to maximize efficiency. This opinion piece you posted- it bothers me because it asks its audience not to consider things too carefully. It requires tremendous faith not only in corporations, but in the authority of an entire stranger (not at all one of the "people I know in my personal life") without that stranger's ever having to demonstrate that authority. To whit, it's written for an audience of stupid people. And you chose this article over others to present to this audience on this site. Then again, it generated discussion, so who am I to finger wag.If I lie to a corporation about my personal information, nothing happens. If I lie on the census, the penalty is $500. The census has a noble intent, but if I happen to believe public money won't in fact be more equitably and efficiently allocated based on my postcard, why must I be threatened to fill it out?
The East India Company may be a fair example of commercial abuse of power in the 1800's, but it basically was the government in India
The purpose of the article is to ask if our mistrust in corporations is proportional to corporate misbehavior, compared to government or individual behavior.
I would initially expect most people’s attitudes to be pretty closely tied to their personal experience, more so than their book learning or what they hear on the internet.
I would not, and neither would most people. Maybe a few very unusual people would. But we can hardly be resentful and distrustful of someone for just behaving the way the vast majority of normal people would behave.
This is only true if I am a customer of the insurance company, which implies that I have agreed in advance to their terms of service. I would expect consequences if I try to cheat the insurance company, and would hold them responsible if they try to cheat me. EDIT: I can also file a fraudulent claim against another person's policy. That is an example of bad behavior by an individual. How does the corporation respond? Hopefully, the insurance company protects its customers by denying the claim. But sniffing out fraud costs money, so they will sometimes pay out when they shouldn't. A competitive insurance company will seek an optimal level of fraud detection to keep customer premiums as low as possible. The government also has a role, to punish people who commit insurance fraud. An industry source suggests that enforcement is minimal, so "Fraud comprises about 10 percent of property-casualty insurance losses and loss adjustment expenses each year." No insurance company compels me to pay anything. I am only obligated to pay for insurance that I agree to purchase. I can cancel my policy and stop paying any time I like. It's the government that operates on the basis of compulsion. As Huemer says, "I understand the arguments that this institution is necessary." But I think the concept bears some scrutiny. My idea of a contract is an agreement made between two parties, in which each side promises to fulfill some obligations. It should be written down somewhere, so everyone understands what the terms are. And most importantly, the parties should consciously agree to the contract. None of this is true of the social contract. We should call it the social tradition. Huemer makes the case succinctly in a précis of his book: Sam has a problem. "But what if I don't want to tell a stranger about my salary and ethnicity and who I live with?" "But what if I don't want to sell the house I grew up in to make room for a bypass?" "But what if I don't want to risk my life shooting at foreigners in a war I believe is unjust?" "But what if I don't want to arrest a fugitive slave so they will be returned to the South?" Surely you support occasional resistance to legal authority. The state is not infallible. The question of political authority is probably a book-length subject. I try to argue that there are cases where the market could provide better outcomes than we now get from government, though neither is perfect. It's true that the market underproduces public goods, since it is hard to profit from them, but providing public goods is a small fraction of what government does. A market requires two sides, buyer and seller. The seller cares only about profit. But the buyer doesn't care about the seller's profit at all, and tends to push in the direction of less profit and less malfeasance, against the buyer at least. Do you feel Walmart depends significantly on malfeasance for their profits? The complaints I see most are that they drive a hard bargain with their workers and suppliers. This is entirely due to their business strategy of providing the lowest possible prices to customers, who benefit. You mentioned intellectual property protection, that's a hard one to get right, and even if the IP laws are optimal it's difficult to enforce them. bfv noted the shift toward open source software, perhaps in response to the fact that it's hard to sell code so tech companies are shifting toward selling services. Can you cite an example of a harmful monopoly from this century? The first article I found complains that "three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms." Did Forbes forget what "mono-" means?If you lie to a corporation about your personal information, that might be called "insurance fraud," for which there are absolutely ramifications.
Much like an insurance company, the government compels us to pay a certain amount
That's called social contract.
"But what if I don't want to" has never been a compelling argument to me
You opened a previous portion of the discussion describing how Walmart might increase market share simply by improving their overall customer experience. The implication, I presume, was to illustrate how beautifully the market self-regulates through positive interactions to make both sides prosper. But it ignored malfeasance, because malfeasance illustrates how in the absence of regulation, the market cares only about profit by all available means.
As for monopolies, they decidedly don't result in cheaper diapers.
When governments misbehave, they do stuff like murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians.... And I don’t mean in some indirect or speculative way — I mean literally sending employees with guns to go shoot people.... If there were a corporation that did shit like that, people on all sides of the political spectrum would condemn it as the most evil corporation ever.
My reply will be probably mostly predictable, so I might save it for later. In response to your kind last words, I will certainly agree that this is a silly article, and I shared it expecting that the provocative title and snarky tone would resonate here. There's a principle of charity that says we should try to overlook small defects in the opponent's argument, and digest and respond to the strongest idealized version of the argument we can imagine. I'm not very good at following the principle, though. Someone once asked a great question of which posts we most wished got more traction, and I had many to choose from. Some are long and some are stuffy, some are both. Huemer is unorthodox, but a serious thinker. Take a look at yesterday's Risk Refutes Absolutism where he characterizes Ayn Rand as a crazy libertarian, and tries to find a sort of Bayesian middle way between moral absolutes. I think his approach to morality, Ethical Intuitionism, has some appeal. I suppose he is letting off steam on his blog, or just having fun outside of the classroom and academic publishing circuit. That's what I am here for; I enjoy sharing the ideas and exploring the different ways people think. Thanks for taking part in the conversation.
I agree that corporations are motivated by money. Generally, they don’t just take people’s money, they have to give something people want in exchange. Do customers share responsibility for the bad consequences you describe? I’ve seen people criticize Amazon for being cheap to employees, while also saying they shop at Amazon to save money. Streetcars seems like a good example. Horse-based transportation was dirty, slow, and uncomfortable. Corporations offered streetcars as an alternative and customers preferred the clean, fast, more comfortable ride (despite unsavory behavior by some streetcar operators). Then corporations offered automobiles, even cleaner, faster and more convenient. “By 1930, most streetcar systems were aging and losing money.” Customers had already made their choice by the time GM started ruthlessly putting nails in the streetcar coffin. I appreciate having a car instead of relying on animals or streetcars to get around. I don’t like GM cars, so I am pleased that there are so many corporations providing me with alternatives at no cost to me.
I just opened my last sack of King Arthur flour, which I learned about here. It costs more, but I feel good knowing that I am supporting a business where workers are treated well. I also pay more for eggs with a Certified Humane label. I know I am not saving the world, but at least I can do the best I can to make my contributions support better practices. Do you think my shopping habits make no difference, or they do make a small difference but it's the government's responsibility to ensure good business practices so I should stay out of it? Usually it's the libertarians who get blamed for saying "I took care of myself, it's not my problem to worry about others." Do you really sense no tension when someone blasts Amazon for not spending more on employees while also paying $120 a year to be a VIP Amazon customer, citing their low prices? I do agree it is the management's responsibility to choose a business strategy. Both of the practices you mention would put a business at a disadvantage. A business that pays better wages will get first pick among employees, and a business selling better products can expect to ring up more sales. The cheap strategy can work if the business passes their savings on labor and quality to customers. Keeping prices low is exactly how Walmart survives while Costco sells better merchandise and gives employees better compensation. (It seems that Walmart actually gives their employees a bigger portion of the revenue they earn for the company than Costco, despite paying lower average salaries.) We should also remember to include the savings enjoyed by the customer (in the case of Walmart, typically a less-affluent demographic) as a positive. I can never remember these things so I had to look up the definition and public transportation does not meet the two criteria of public goods: Non-Excludability: it is possible to keep people out who don't pay for the service; that is what the turnstiles do. Non-rivalrous: when one customer takes a seat, no one else can use that seat. It's still possible to argue that low-cost public transportation is an important ingredient in social health; and you mention many plausible benefits. Maybe an abstraction like "efficient urban transportation" is a public good. From a practical perspective, I am skeptical. It seems to me that we spend quite a lot on public transportation, it invariably fails to make any profit (unless you count the contractors who do very well building infrastructure) and requires large subsidies, and also serves affluent customers much better than the poor. I think low-cost, flexible bus service makes a lot more sense, but light rail (and super-expensive high-speed rail) gets a lot more public support. If public transportation in practice worked better at meeting the goals you describe, I would be more supportive.No - customers don't share any responsibility.
If one corporation is undercutting others by paying its employees less than living wage and selling inferior products, and also using this to put their competition out of business so that there are no alternatives, that is the fault of the corporation, not the consumers.
public transportation is a public good
Competition might be better than you think, Walmart captures less than 10% of U.S. retail, Amazon less than 7%, and Target is behind Amazon. But if you find the notion of voluntary exchange for mutual benefit immoral, it hardly matters where we shop. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I enjoyed hearing your perspective and don't want to provoke any shouting :)
It's hard to define and measure power, but let's set that aside. Many people don't have enough money to buy a house. The usual solution is rent. Probably we will agree that someone who owns houses has more power than someone who doesn't have enough money to buy one house. So the landlord has more power. Under your rule, a lease will be invalid because of the power imbalance. If the landlord knows that the lease will be considered invalid, they have little reason to let the tenant move in. The lease gives the tenant more power, to assure the landlord of a credible intent to pay, compared to a tenant who cannot make a credible promise in the form of a lease. How are low-power people supposed to rent homes, buy cars, or get jobs if the high-power people know that promises they make will not be considered binding?
You make many fair criticisms. It's true organizations are composed of individuals, but I can distinguish my positive overall experience with Costco from occasional negative experiences with individual Costco employees having a bad day. I can laugh with a friendly clerk at the DMV while hating the DMV experience. As individuals, we interact with others as individuals, and also as representatives of larger bodies. I don't see this as a big source of confusion. The point about TV villians is silly. Maybe Huemer selectively remembers being triggered by heroic presidents played by Harrison Ford, and forgets about the heroic CEOs in ... some other movies I can't remember either. I'm not sure what you mean by "getting something" here. When you interact with an individual, you might get an insult or a complement, who knows. People are capricious. Huemer argues that corporations have brand reputation to worry about. They make efforts to consistently polish their reputation for good service. Corportations that do poorly at this tend to lose customers and lose business. Heck, corporations that do a half-decent job of customer service go out of business because other corporations really excel. This kind of feedback doesn't really exist for individuals; people can be jerks, yet see themselves as angels or victims, and live their whole lives dragging others into their misery. "Sometimes, you see an irate and unreasonable customer loudly berating an employee of some business over the business’ perceived failure. The employee generally listens patiently and tries to fix the problem." Is this not your experience? Do you agree that the response would likely be very different with a law enforcement officer? You asked if I have seen the police escort someone out of a business. Sure, people tend to be more docile with police, and if they're not the consequences escalate quickly. Do you not prefer interacting with employees over the law? If you have a good response to Singer I would love to hear it. I have donated about 0.05% of my net worth to the Against Malaria Foundation, and I can't prove that such a paltry amount saved any lives. But after seeing and hearing that damn story about the drowning child so many times, I can't find a way to be comfortable spending a thousand dollars on a cell phone. Once again, I am surprised to find Hubski expressing the allegedly libertarian trope that we have no responsibility to worry about the welfare of others. This time because suffering is not sufficiently quantifiable? If you think it's a bad idea to try and direct money toward causes that appear most likely to relieve suffering, I would like to understand why. Fair, the government has customer service numbers and workers who try to resolve complaints. Perhaps a more charitable interpretation is that the government doesn't have as much at stake when trying to please us "customers." We don't have an alternative place to register cars, so if you do run into trouble you're out of luck. In fact, he wrote a book on the concept. That's a great question. His position is outlined in Chapter 12. It's not completely satisfying. Getting invaded by a foreign government is very bad, and our strategy of building even more bombs than the other governments seems less than ideal. A national military is no guarantee either; plenty of countries get invaded despite having militaries. I don't count it as a huge defect that Huemer has not solved war. I'm not sure either, but I have some ideas. People may have an equal right to vote, but half do not find doing so worthwhile. People who can't afford lobbyists or activism might find it difficult to catch the ear of elected officials, but corporations are happy to offer them the same gasoline, shoes, and food that they offer to anyone else.So if an individual finesses the fuck out of you but you get something out of the transaction, they're an asshole, but when a corporation does it, it's good.
Peter Singer and the Centre for Effective Altruism
They have literally all that shit.
This philosophy bro has never read jack shit on the concept of the nation state.
Okay, so now what happens when another organization such as another government decides to invade your fucking country?
I'm not sure how a private police force is supposed to mitigate this. Remember a democracy at least gives people equal right to vote. Individuals do not have equal amounts of money.
The guy managed to search for the number of employees at Amazon, but not the CEO salary? Seriously!!? How Bezos is widely known to be in the billion club? Was it by receiving 10 million/ year (at that rate It would take him 100 year just to accumulate 1 billion) I couldnt read past such biased argument! The one thing right: I hate google, and I dont hate lottery winners, and Royal family ... But those guys didn't make their fortune on the back of employees (or users in case of Google and Fb), and abusing earth resource .. not directly at least. This guy is such a tool. I hope he is paid enough to spread what he knows is bullshit.. and you know what? I bet he isn't Let’s say Amazon offers you the CEO position tomorrow. It comes with a $10 million annual salary.
I don't think the detail of Bezos' actual salary of $81K plus benefits is really relevant to the argument. Would a $1 per month raise for the workers persuade you to give up most of your salary? Most of the Bezos fortune came from stock. Before Amazon raised the minimum wage to $15, warehouse employees received two shares of stock on hiring, and an additional option every year.Would you act differently if you ran a corporation? Let’s say [random big corporation] offers you the CEO position tomorrow. It comes with a $10 million annual salary. (I’m making that up — I don’t know how much the actual salary is. But that’s realistic for a big corporation.) You have the option of reducing your salary and giving the remaining money to your employees. You could cut your salary by, say, $9.9 million (who needs more than 100k a year?), distribute that money to the employees, and in doing this, raise each of their annual salaries by $13... Would you do that?
You could argue that, and you or someone else could start a company under those principles. Margins in online retail are thin, typically under 5%, so there isn't a lot of extra money floating around to cover additional expenses. The average Amazon salary is about $29,000. With about half a million employees, total salary is about $14 billion. Even if Jeff covers out of pocket, doubled salaries would bankrupt him after a decade, not that we should feel sorry for him. Amazon would have to make other adjustments to stay in business. Employees might be trained to work harder, but those who do not generate $30 worth of revenue in an hour would be dismissed and replaced with more automation. If Amazon raises prices much, customers will go to other retailers and Amazon won't receive enough revenue to make payroll, and the $30 salaries will turn to zero when Amazon folds.
So the only people allowed to work are those who have enough capital to open their own business. If you don't have much money to start with, you can't afford to open a business and you can't work at another business because you're not an owner. No job for you!all companies that are owned by anyone other than the workers should not exist
This will allow existing businesses to continue, but people without jobs or means still have no way to enter the labor market. So the employees seize the factory. A thousand workers now each own a 0.1% stake. Who decides when to upgrade the machinery? Who decides how much to produce? Who decides when to take out a loan and expand? Who makes the difficult decision in lean times to reduce the size of the business to survive, rather than keeping everyone on payroll and risking bankruptcy? What if a worker decides to stop working and count on getting income by eventually selling their ownership stake? In theory, these questions could be decided by voting and volunteering. In practice, some people are better qualified to make these kind of decisions, and businesses run by more competent leaders have a better chance of success. Imagine an army that decided on tactics and strategy by voting. Most worker cooperatives appear to be quite small, but it's possible that their worker/owners are happy. As a consumer, I am happy to buy flour from a benefit corporation, but I wouldn't want to give up automobiles or broadband internet.
Free software projects are managed by the programmers working on them, and most critical infrastructure is running on them. Microsoft is even supporting Linux on Azure and open sourcing developer tools after a couple of decades propagandizing about the superiority of proprietary software and throwing every technical hurdle it could out into the ecosystem. It isn't uncommon for all the worthwhile work someone does to be done behind their employer's back because the stuff they get paid for is trivial bullshit that's really an ad platform and it doesn't take all that much effort, while there's always something interesting and worthwhile to do in the time not filled by profitable bullshit. If tech workers had management competent enough to notice most of what they're paying us to do has nothing to do with making the graphs in their quarterly reports go up the whole industry would collapse.
plus du français est meilleur am i right mon chum
I disdain your economics, but your French is yes. See you in here eventually. Public domainnn, mon bwahhhhhhhhhh