> A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules
The most despotic and scary governments of history would probably like a word with you. Maintaining a believable pretense of following any rules is a luxury we take for granted in many countries today, but Mao and Stalin didn't worry about the appearance of propriety.
Not really arguing against your main point though, I think you're right. Just don't forget how bad totalitarian governments can be.
You are citing outliers. A majority of the countries in the world aren't run by people like Stalin, or Pol Pot.
Yes, in those instances nothing is worse than the government, but a majority of the world doesn't live in those places. For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.
> For most people, it's the tyranny of corporations that affect our lives in outsized ways.
No, for most people it's corporations that enable our current best-in-history lifestyle. The hardest things we face are scarcities created by government policy.
Posted via that government internet project because the government finally forced the monopoly communications companies to allow 3rd party connections.
Indeed according to the big private businesses at the time the internet was stupid and a money losing idea.
It's a common thing in American history where the US government invests in ideas/concepts that are seen as losers by the for profit industry only for those industries to swoop in and profit off the results...
Stuff like that and the American national standards institute is why the USA was in the front of the technological evolution for so long. We spent money on "useless" crap that ended up paying massive dividends later and allowed for the USA to set the standards.
This massively obscures all the incredible efforts by people in those companies over the decades to bring us from unreliable, insecure, hyper slow, wired proof of concept to something so valuable everyone will pay for it.
The most despotic and scary governments of history would probably like a word with you. Maintaining a believable pretense of following any rules is a luxury we take for granted in many countries today, but Mao and Stalin didn't worry about the appearance of propriety.
Not really arguing against your main point though, I think you're right. Just don't forget how bad totalitarian governments can be.