
Ask HN: Imagine: what if corporations ran cities? - jelliclesfarm
1. No more jobs. Like..Zero.  Everything is automated.
2. No income. Currency becomes obsolete.
3. No income. No taxes.
4. No govt exists. Only corporations.<p>What would the world be like? There are still people and there is still some version of ‘currency’ for transaction.<p>If there are no more jobs, what would happen to the economy and govt..as we know it?<p>What would be traded in exchange for the goods that automation produces?
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AnimalMuppet
You're assuming several things beyond "corporations run cities". Why should
that lead to no jobs? Is it still a corporation if nobody works for it? Or is
it just some rich person controlling everything?

In "Basic Economics", Thomas Sowell defined economics as something like "the
allocation of scarce resources that have alternate uses". There's still an
"economy" even if there's no money. Just for a simple example, there are more
people who want a beach house than there are beach houses. So who gets them?
Right now, the one with the most money. Eliminate money, and there are still
more people who want beach houses than there are beach houses. So who gets
them? Maybe those furthest up the corporate ladder? (That's essentially how it
worked in the Soviet Union.)

In the scenario you describe, I could see a barter economy quickly developing,
and perhaps even turning into an alternate power structure to the
corporations.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
What is the alternative to currency as we know it?

1\. What if we have a universal currency? How would that change world economy?

2\. What if there were multiple universal currencies? Example: housing
currency..food currency..healthcare currency. Which means that you can’t use
food currency for healthcare currency etc?

3\. What if we had currency with an expiration date? It becomes investment
currency once food currency expires.

Thoughts?

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benologist
If corporations were in charge our cars would use leaded gasoline,
construction would save with asbestos, sports would put tobacco advertising on
everything, we would eat only carbs and sugar and cows that were fed the
cheapest mixture of other cows and antibiotics, we would take subscription
drugs since childhood, while everything we did would be monitored and sold to
other companies for exploitation. The wealthiest cities would be exclusively
for straight white males and their families but their white-only wives
wouldn't have any rights and the children can only be medicated and obese. So
far.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
No utopian vision?

~~~
benologist
History is full of organizations - churches, government and corporations -
doing terrible things when they are unaccountable, to this day, so no. Most of
that stuff actually happened in the past and into the present _and_ only
stopped under duress, sometimes requiring decades of legal action just to do
the right thing and stop spreading lies and propaganda and poisoning and
killing people.

Today when corporate accountants deem a thing or place or persons unprofitable
enough they just abandon their employees and employee-cities where they funded
everything so it's all theirs and there's nothing to sustain the population
when they go. Mines, plantations, manufacturing etc have done this for
centuries.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-hyundaitown-
id...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-hyundaitown-
idUSKBN1KX0UT)

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Why can’t we change? Learn from the mistakes of the past?

I want to believe that we won’t repeat ALL the egregious mistakes of our past.

~~~
benologist
The thing that's changing and that we've learned is that humanity _desperately
needs_ transparency and accountability to stay benign... two recent examples
include security cameras emerging for slaughterhouses and body cameras for
first responders like police, both forced into necessity because unaccountable
people with authority struggle to be decent.

Why do you prefer corporations over god-kings like Kim Jong Un?

What do you imagine corporations would be doing better than governments with
gradually-enlarging oversight and transparency?

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I don’t know if it will be better.

Corporations have to be run well to survive. There seems to be no
accountability with government. What should happen for government to be
efficient?

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nabla9
How would jobs disappear?

See:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)

In the worst cases company town allowed only company shop in company town.
Workers worked for a company, lived in company housing and bought everything
from company shop.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Interesting. I was actually thinking of eco-villages and communes first. But
these from the hippee era and collectivist ethos have only had minimal
success. What if it was replaced by corporate principles in which the city or
town ITSELF is the corporation?

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znpy
No privacy whatsoever.

You get streamed advertising all day long.

