Authoritarianism is bad for business, there are plenty of examples where big businesses get "nationalized" or where the founders are forced to sell to a "friendly party official" who then proceeds to run it into the ground.
Russia notoriously is very good at this, leading even innovative companies to sabotage their own growth as to not become an "acquisition target" of the ruling elite.
There is also the "creative destruction problem" where an innovative company is beating an incumbent, but the incumbent happens to be partially owned by party cadre and leverages its power to shut down the innovator.
In my humble opinion, the security and protection of property under the rule of law should be a human right as it's the core driver of economic growth.
> There is also the "creative destruction problem" where an innovative company is beating an incumbent, but the incumbent happens to be partially owned by party cadre and leverages its power to shut down the innovator.
A country doesn't need authoritarianism to accomplish this. Many democratic countries have a long history of very similar behavior.
Even a company with the resources of Google found it difficult to establish their own ISP in the USA. So did local governments within the USA. Famously, Google said it could not have been founded in Britain due to their onerous copyright laws.
The incumbent merely needs enough money to shut down the competition; with money comes influence and capability. Different countries require different strategies, all of which need money. If you're in China, you join the party to crush opposition; if you're in the USA, you bribe Congressman to regulate them out of business (or just sue them); if you're in Mexico, you send your armed thugs to kill the leaders.
Authoritarianism lowers the bar for the effort that it takes this kind of thing to happen though. It takes a lot more money and effort to do it in a system where power is less concentrated than one where it is centralized since there are more actors you have to coordinate with.
This simple fact is constantly overlooked by people who wish To expand government to stamp out corruption when the corruption lies in the centralization of power.
And it's likewise often overlooked by those who oppose regulation who fail to recognize when power is centralized by corporations which are even less accountable than a democratic government.
> which are even less accountable than a democratic government.
I've never seen a politician 'held accountable' for doing something I don't like in a democracy.
I'll pick out George W. Bush who (with massive public support) charged in to the Middle East, glassed one or two countries, set the US up for 20 years so far of ruinously expensive wars. He served two full terms. I might have seen an article sometime recently that he had taken up painting and is pretty good at it.
What level of accountability am I expecting him to be held to for that? I think those may have been some of the worst political actions taken in my lifetime. When you say "less accountable" - what do you think shows a democratic government being held accountable? I like democracy, but I don't think the government is accountable.
Corporations are actually held accountable. If they screw up, the owners can lose out massively. Executives too through incentive programs.
I don't think you're using "accountable" in the same way. A corporation is accountable to its owners in its quest to make more and more money. If making more and more money means doing unethical (but legal) things, many owners will have no problem with that. That's not a good situation.
Corporations are only accountable if they fail to make money. Unless they're too big to fail, in which case they're accountable to no one.
It's all well and good to pick a blatant example of a politician doing evil and getting away with it; on the flip side I see politicians at the local level losing re-election for doing things their constituents don't like. In any event, I'd much prefer democratic accountability over corporate accountability when it comes to entities who have the ability to take away my freedom or deprive me of life.
I do agree on that - but if you are using local politics the fair thing to do is to compare it to local businesses. If you are going to rule out the big parts of politics rule out the big businesses too (which renders the argument a bit moot).
I actually agree that war was a disaster, but he was held accountable to the electorate and won an election after having started the war. How much more accountable do you want? Every single voter in America had the opportunity to express their opinion and together they chose to keep him in office.
Corporations absolutely are held to account. The US is holding hearings on the tech giants at the moment. Apple is in court over the App Store. Microsoft got smacked down over anti-trust. Banks and google have been fined billions of dollars.
Theres a reasonable case that these sanctions were not sufficient, but that's just an opinion. Other people's opinions differ. Sorting that our is what democracy is for, but we cant always expect it to produce the results you or I personally prefer.
We might be in furious agreement on a couple of points here. I've been choosing my words fairly carefully - I want some sort of justification of the idea that the government or anyone in it is somehow accountable for anything.
If accountability means everyone sort of shrugged and moves on over the single worst barrage of decisions I've observed in US politics in the last 30 years then either it isn't accountable or being accountable is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure the government is unaccountable by design - it does whatever the polity wants that day, and then there aren't any meaningful consequences if the idea worked out or not. Democracy represents the best thing we have, but I don't accept that it represents accountability. Good people can get voted out and replaced by better people, for example. Or term limits kick in. They represent the electorate changing its mind on what approach to try in a no-fault-implied manner.
Corporations actually have a built in accountability - if they don't have customers onboard with the idea that they are providing goods and services effectively then they disappear and their owners get hit right in the financials. I can see that in the companies I deal with - they do what I want quickly and with no fuss by and large. They are accountable to me - if I don't like the service I go elsewhere and that is their loss. I can't see it in government, and I'm not seeing anyone in this thread who has managed to lay it out for me. Most of the politicians representing me I would dearly like to replace for their many and obvious failings. They certainly aren't accountable to me, and I don't know anyone who they are accountable to or I'd spend more time trying to argue my views to that person.
> Corporations actually have a built in accountability - if they don't have customers onboard with the idea that they are providing goods and services effectively then they disappear and their owners get hit right in the financials.
Do they? The continued existence of most American telecoms and insurers would appear to prove otherwise.
Really, the issue with American politics is that presidential incumbents rarely get challenged by their own parties, and the two-party system is terrible for providing any sort of nuanced choice. Bush's legacy was truly punished in 2008, when America elected the most serious looking anti-Bush candidate running by one of the largest electoral and popular vote shares in recent history. (Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain were successfully painted as not anti-Bush enough during that campaign season.) And generally speaking American democracy doesn't outright prosecute former leaders, because generally speaking the government does not like the appearance of political retribution.
John Kerry was also not a great candidate to have run with an anti-Iraq campaign plank, and 2004 was too soon for most of the country to have soured on the war.
Actually corporations (companies) are a legal structure invented to allow multiple investors to contribute capital towards a certain goal and have rights guaranteed by law rather than purely contractually. The limited liability is also to protect investors.
Concentrating capital to achieve big projects that founders wouldn't be able to fund themselves is clearly beneficial for economic growth
> Actually corporations (companies) are a legal structure invented to allow multiple investors to contribute capital towards a certain goal and have rights guaranteed by law rather than purely contractually. The limited liability is also to protect investors.
Untrue; the law of partnerships, which is older than corporations, already allowed people to contribute capital to a goal and have their respective rights governed by law. The legal arrangements are different in a corporation, those differences centering around the limitation of liability—the freedom from accountability—provided to the investors.
That freedom from accountability is the central focus of the corporate form. And it's arguably an aberrant path dependency; had we had limited partnerships first, the idea of business form where no one is ultimately accountable for the liabilities of the business—rather than one to which investors could contribute with limited liability while the active principals remained fully accountable—might never have seemed like a good idea, even to the investor class.
You still don't have a legal instrument (a share) that you can freely transact and has attached rights.
It's maybe important to realize that when the amounts get bigger and the projects riskier that the personal liability becomes meaningless.
What happens if you are personally liable for a 10 million eur debt... well your life is over, but also nobody is going to actually get their money back from you cause you are not able to pay that.
I think it's quite rational for a society to say that you will lose everything you have in that business, but the investors/debtors can only pursue you up-to this point. Especially when taking on riskier projects that require lots of capital.
Not sure corporate executives are particularly held to account either.
For example, Carly Fiorina wiped half the value of HP away but was given a massive payout to leave the company. I’ve seen estimates it was in region of $42m.
Ok sure, but that poster said - quoting again - "which are even less accountable than a democratic government"
So you're arguing that we don't need to hold GWB to account. Fair enough, there were mitigating circumstances. But then in what sense is the government accountable for anything?
Corporations and government are both held to account through the courts, I suppose. But the government will often change the rules so it isn't accountable (eg, wiretapping scandals), so that is a weaker form of accountability than a corporation faces. Is there an actual meaty argument to the idea that governments are more accountable than corporations? Because I'm drawing blanks on the times when a government was held to account for anything in a manner that wouldn't also apply to corporate actions.
I think the idea is that we don't vote for people like Bezos, but they have a lot of power over us all the same (even if we don't directly give them our money).
Bezos has developed a corporate behemoth that distributes goods at good prices, at absurd convenience, and as an encore provides web infrastructure for countless other businesses. I don't really have any stats, but it seems plausible the logistic chains he oversees saved a fair number of lives in the current pandemic because it reduces the need for people to contact each other.
Given that record, I think there is a better argument for putting him in charge of the US healthcare system than putting the people in overseeing the healthcare system in charge of Amazon. Bezoscare written by Bezos would likely be much more effective than Obamacare written by the US Congress.
And I still don't see the argument that the US government is somehow more accountable than he is.
The mistake in '08 was preventing the banking system from purging the idiots who were taking on too much risk. Protect the people, shred the corporations is my motto for financial crisii. And here is the roll call for "A bill to provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of troubled assets" [0]. I'm no expert on Senate procedure, but H. R. 1424 is TARP and that looks like the final vote to me. On the list I do spy "Biden (D-DE), Yea".
So whatever accountability the government faces it isn't enough to stop someone becoming president.
I'm sticking to my point here - I don't think the government is held accountable in any meaningful way for its screw ups. not_kurt_godel's opinion needs more support on this. If the government hadn't stepped in, a lot of banks would have lost everything in 2008 - they were on the verge of being held very accountable and I'm still grouchy that they weren't. The government should not be in the business of buying worthless assets.
These banks had to be bailed out because the ripple effect would destroy the economy and that would have been very disruptive even to companies and individuals that had nothing to do with the housing crisis. Even with the bailout, many suffered.
But I agree with you that the way they bailed them out did not hold them accountable, they should have "invested" in those banks by buying newly issued shares which would have completely wiped out the existing shareholders.
However, rather than the normal way to raise capital, they gave a blanket permit to the federal reserve to buy the bad debt from the banks.
The US government and the people by extension should have become the owners of those banks which they could resell the ownership again on the private market with a profit at a later point.
> Corporations are actually held accountable. If they screw up, the owners can lose out massively. Executives too through incentive programs.
Ha! Is that why climate crisis is being driven by 100 companies? What's your excuse for that? Some outdated Malthusian analysis of it being the consumer's fault for not "voting with their dollar?" which is an outdated and foolish libertarian argument Marx eviscerated long ago? A system where each person has one vote will be more democratic, even if corrupt, than a corporation which is not. You talk about centralization of power as if you cannot decentralize economic control democratically, which is exactly what the socialist/Marxist prescription is (please don't bother replying that "socialism/Marxism is when the government does stuff, like owning all the business," because that's an all-too-common misconception).
We have regulations because businesses often will do whatever they can get away with and are not accountable due to how much money they can make and are ran entirely undemocratically. Child labor laws. 40 hour work week. Safety regulations. Prohibition of leaded gasoline and leaded paint. Etc. These are examples of the state enforcing some degree of accountability onto businesses and it has been for the greater good of society. Without the state doing this these corporations could get away with anything (and often do get away with pretty much anything, anyway, due to material conditions, but removing what little protections we do have under liberal democracy would make things even worse [just look whence we came]).
Even in your own example of "corporate accountability," that accountability is coming from the government. Moreover, what's left of your argument is just saying "vote with your dollar," which hm:
> In 2019, families with net worths exceeding $1 million owned 79.2 percent of all the household wealth in the country. The bottom half of American families held just 1.5 percent of the wealth.
I could cite statistics like that all day. If your answer is to "vote with your dollar," then it's plain to see who has the most voting power! What's left then? To out-compete those with a dominion over material and the means of production?
Is that why the few billionaires who run the show, because they ultimately they control the material conditions, are able to control the means of production and basically make everyone bow to their demands to an extreme degree, barely curtailed only by a dwindling bourgeoisie democracy which the working class can only faintly tolerate. Why they pour tons of money into influencing electors and politicians? Also, I hope you don't give the libertarian argument "well corporations only get big an evil because the government exists!" Due to the way commodity production/the commodity form works, it is something which consolidates over time, and as we have seen some examples in history, enterprises which get large enough eventually establish their own rules and become the de facto state.
Is that why less than ten corporations own almost all the brands people are familiar with? That is not how commodity production works. The evolution of the commodity form has been one of competing commodity producers, where one will always lose out and have to sell their wage labor to the winning commodity producer and the existing commodity producers absorb the labor power, means of production, and continue expanding in a way which someone starting from 0 can not overwhelm. This is the economy of scale. You can cherry pick "disruptive" technologies all you want, but if you look at who holds most of the wealth in the world (a handful of billionaires), and their control over various industries, what I'm saying becomes extremely apparent.
Also your example doesn't even make sense--the war indeed had massive support--we're talking about democratic accountability as in doing what the people want. You're simply playing with words at this point, you're asking if we can try an elected official we elected into office for something that had popular support at the time? Does corruption in the state happen? Yes and often. But by default, corruption is the name of the game in corporations whose sole purpose is the profit-motive under dictatorial/elite rule, or at the very least, rule by profit incentive.
When you leave the devices of power out of the hands of voters, you just let the profit incentive and a shrinking minority of billionaires control things--we literally made a device that separates rich people's heads from their bodies over this (to establish liberal democracy).
The answer is not more totalitarianism, but more democratic control over the economy and government, not less.
What a load of rubbish--shame to see stuff like this on Hacker news so often, likely due to out-of-touch petite bourgeoisie (as many programmers are), lending them to reactionary bents.
It's extremely reactionary to look at the over-centralization of power and say "ah, the solution is to give more power to corporations which already dominate the material conditions!" Again the solution is to further decentralize power by making the economy and enterprises democratic (and to increase the level of democracy present in the government). You can just gather that from a basic anarchist and Marxist analysis.
I was discussing how to handle economics in light of automation the other day, and at one point we joked that every household should have its own family robots which go to work and bring home a salary.
The major question on my mind is, should we distribute power by a democratic vote over orgs which control a collection of resources, or should we do it by distributing ownership of resources with individual freedom to commit those resources anywhere? Is one more efficient, or less likely to centralize, than the other?
Deregulation spurs competition which your centralized corporations hate and actually fight in favor for all the time. The chief lobbies for Obamacare was healthcare monopolies like Blue Cross.
Not to mention they don’t have the threat of jail, military, police, and other coercion to use against you.
Truth is the two work hand in hand. Big corporation loves big government
That is not how commodity production works. The evolution of the commodity form has been one of competing commodity producers, where one will always lose out and have to sell their wage labor to the winning commodity producer and the existing commodity producers absorb the labor power, means of production, and continue expanding in a way which someone starting from 0 can not overwhelm. This is the economy of scale. You can cherry pick "disruptive" technologies all you want, but if you look at who holds most of the wealth in the world (a handful of billionaires), and their control over various industries, what I'm saying becomes extremely apparent.
>> Even a company with the resources of Google found it difficult to establish their own ISP in the USA
That's because other companies were using their control over government to prevent it. We need a system where government actually governs and yet doesn't directly control or get influenced by companies. I have no idea what that looks like.
Depends, what you described in democracies is called "regulatory capture" and is usually only possible because politicians have a tendency to regulate and then rely on existing big players to find a regulation consensus.
Notably absent of those advisory boards are non-existing future companies. It's relatively rare for regulation to kill off businesses in democracies.. at most it's to boost barriers to entry.
In China and Mexico where the rule of law is selectively applied, incumbents do kill competition outright.
Democracy and the rule of law provide a considerable level of predictability. Google knew they couldn't work in the UK, but knew that they could succeed in California. Not everywhere needs to be conducive to every type of business or opportunity, as long as people and capital are free to flow to the places they can be effectively used for a given purpose. Fundamentally Capitalism is simply individual equal freedom of action within the law, freedom of association and respect for property rights. All the rest of capitalism just flows from respect for those basic principles.
The problem with authoritarianism is that not only does it have all the regulatory limiting problems of free capital democracies, but you also can't even rely on those rules, at all, because a leader can overrule them at a whim at any time.
» Google knew they couldn't work in the UK, but knew that they could succeed in California.
Sort of tangentially related, this reminds me of a story (not sure if it is true, I don't even remember the source for it) that movie-making became centered in California because the creative people wanted to not be forced to follow some onerous patents of camera manufacturers or something.
Edit: Wikipedia article for Hollywood also says this:
» In the early 1900s, most motion picture patents were held by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey, and filmmakers were often sued to stop their productions. To escape this, filmmakers began moving out west to Los Angeles, where attempts to enforce Edison's patents were easier to evade.
I don't think you're describing authorianism so much as centralized power. Private property does the same thing, it just chooses who has power using a different metric. Somebody with a lot of property can do the same stuff, except where laws prevent them, but it's the laws doing the protecting, not your own property
What you really need to avoid these issues is ways to distribute power. Anti trust, democracy, checks and balances, etc where lots of people to agree
No, but you can make that their suppliers break contract, their clients move away, etc. One can force a sale simply by making business untenable. Monopolistic and anti-competitive behaviors can happen without breaching private property laws, this is why government has to also fight anti-competitive behaviors.
The cost of doing this in a democracy is more difficult. The cost of extortion is lower in an authoritarian regime because there are fewer people to bribe.
Only the modern experience would lead you to believe that. The gilded era is a good example of how forced sales and/or abusive monopolies are not incompatible with democracy at all.
Talking to friends in China, there's actually a fair amount of understanding and support for the government. They value stability and the massive leverage ratio Ant was working with scares a lot of people about financial instability - the 2008 great depression is still quite vivid for a lot of decision makers
> there's actually a fair amount of understanding and support for the government
You have to thank disinformation and mass brainwashing for that. The fact that there is virtually no opposition in China says how far they have gone to control people.
> Eg. The lack of opposition to the idea that water is wet does not imply that water is in fact dry and everyone is just brain washed
There's no world in which no opposition actually exists when there is a little bit of freedom. You can observe it even in small groups where people can express themselves: you won't have a single convergence of opinions on every topic.
Theres no way to know if they have considered the alternatives, because it is illegal to even present or discuss any alternatives, and illegal to ask them about it.
If your response to people holding differing opinions is that 'They are obviously stupid and misinformed and brainwashed', I don't think that any productive discussion can be had. I can, after all, say the same thing about anyone who disagrees with me.
I like when people strawman my points by adding 'stupid' where it was not written and implied anywhere. Smart people can be equally brainwashed.
You cannot have productive discussion with people who have no access to different sources of information. The CCP completely controlling education, media and the Internet makes most people in China in a very bad position to access facts versus pure State propaganda. Add to that a strong social pressure to conform and punishment for divergence and yes, you have mass brainwashing going on.
It's great that you can recognize obvious biases in the information available in another culture.
Now, do you not think that we have any relevant prevailing biases, created by our education, media, history, culture, economic system, and government? [1] Ones that are so deeply ingrained in our society, that we don't even notice them?
If we were to apply your rubric, that would make arguments between people from different cultures completely unproductive - with each person hailing from each culture being able to dismiss the other's out of hand.
The argument you are dismissing as brainwashing seems pretty straightforward to me. It's entirely possible, even reasonable for economic stability to be a goal worth pursuing for government. You may find it anathema, but that viewpoint isn't particularly privileged, in the global space of ideas.
[1] That's a rhetorical question - of course we do. They are incredibly obvious to anyone who's lived in a few different countries.
> Now, do you not think that we have any relevant prevailing biases, created by our education, media, history, culture, economic system, and government? [1] Ones that are so deeply ingrained in our society, that we don't even notice them?
The difference is the key though. In the West we know that we are brainwashed at some level, because we can observe it happening around us with people who share different viewpoints or cultures.
However, in a country where there's only one discourse that is accepted, you can mistake your own brainwashing for the actual truth because nothing is out there to make you think otherwise.
Great point. I find culture itself is 'brainwashing'. It is just influence on your thoughts/who you are. The term brainwashing brings a good amount of negativity and polarism. It's not something that happens to 'us' but 'them'.
We are all brainwashed to an extent. Knowing that can at least prepare you to bring a good scrub and soap on your washings.
The question however is the decision was based on lending fears? (as it is not connected much to the IPO only the valuation) Or it was an ad-hoc personal decision of Xi because Ma started to overgrow him.
The problem with authoritarianism is transfer of power.
You can get an enlightened ruler once in a while (the expected value of competence is still a lot lower than in a democracy). But long run it devolves like other despotic countries
Kinda, Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister from 1959 to 1990 (and died in 2015, RIP). Goh Chok Tong took over in from 1990 to 2004, and Lee Hsien Loong has been in power since. It's been 30 years since Lee Kwan Yew left office.
Is Lee fils really so different from Lee père? I mean, he's probably a better mathematician, but has he done anything one couldn't imagine his father having done?
There was a TV interview in mid-00s in which the airhead interviewing LHL was really curious about how mad he must have been that Goh had led Singapore for a few years before he took over, and he grew more and more embarrassed as he assured her repeatedly that no, it hadn't been any sort of insult. Hilarious.
> Is Lee fils really so different from Lee père? I mean, he's probably a better mathematician, but has he done anything one couldn't imagine his father having done?
Lee Hsien Loong has been trying to soften his image since he took office.
Two examples: the press ceasing use of military ranks for all politicians (I remember him being addressed as Brigadier-General (Ret.) before), and his wearing of soft pink business shirts whenever he has to make an address.
You have to looks things in perspective. He did way better in almost every metrics as compare to neighboring countries. Show me which EU countries did better in Covid. I would like to see your benchmark.
Taiwan, Vietnam, and Thailand are neighboring, and they've had fewer deaths per capita. (Taiwan has had seven deaths on a 24M population!) [0] But that isn't the point I made. Do you think Singapore under LKY would have performed significantly differently in its response to such a health crisis? I don't.
"Neighboring countries" is not the EU. You also can't compare island countries with smaller populations to large land locked ones. Taiwan and New Zealand are probably the best comparisons
Disagree in the general case. Instability costs money, and incumbent players with better access to capital can survive more easially. On the other hand, stability in regulations make it easier for a start up to derisk themselves as there will be a well built up series of case law around the relevant regulations.
Now, if you mean technology instability, completely agreed. That's where innovation comes from.
I think Uber's a perfect example. Taxi regulations either have been stable or essentially unenforced for decades in most places. This gave them the opening. However, everyone getting a smartphone in 2010-2011 is what really blew the doors open.
At the risk of moving the goalposts, if what you're saying is true, then I disagree with the premise that "stability is good for business" is a good thing. This kind of "stability" leads to stagnation and ossification, which I consider to be negatives in any society.
You’re thinking of a different kind of stability. I think OP was referring to thinks like a stable financial system, legal and law enforcement and economic policy.
Those are generally good for new businesses too. Who wants to start a new business when someone comes by and changes all the rules suddenly?
The problem with this claim is that it is not that easy to see it in the evidence. While nearly all the richest countries are democracies and nearly all the poorest countries are dictatorships, the causality could go the other way - or something else could have made countries both rich and democratic. If you look at growth rates you don't see big differences. You have to work quite hard to find differences (though some people think they can: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/700936).
> Authoritarianism is bad for business, there are plenty of examples where big businesses get "nationalized" or where the founders are forced to sell to a "friendly party official" who then proceeds to run it into the ground.
I think this may be true but I would like to see a better argument for it. It is not hard to find businesses that have been successful specifically due to authoritarian State patronage (e.g. Huawei in China, Chaebols in South Korea).
First of all, you are asking me to provide a better argument for another case altogether.
Authoritarianism is bad because it enables party cadre to outright steal businesses (expropriation) and protect incumbents.
The case you want me to argue authoritarianism is bad for business is where the state is buying goods or services and picks a winner by providing state patronage.
The short answer here is that when the state picks winners, they are screwing themselves because the incentive to innovate disappears in companies that managed to attain "regulatory capture".
There is also a significant incentive for big companies to merge or bid on government contracts as a joint-venture (e.g. Airbus, United Launch Alliance) because they can form a price cartel.
That the state does not break up these cartels and goes along with it is because politicians are generally not too savvy and most likely a good amount of corruption is involved.
Anti-trust laws are used to protect consumers and businesses, but ironically I haven't seen them used to protect the government as a customer.
That's almost the main point, to be bad for business. Specifically business coming from a foreign dictatorship that is hostile to our businesses, threatens national security, etc.
To some degree, yes. One difference is that the proposed buyers are not owned by those in power, so that direct financial benefit is not the motive for forcing the sale.
> the security and protection of property under the rule of law should be a human right
Well, it is - although the extent to which this should extend from humans to corporations is debatable. Otherwise you end up with situations like Philip Morris suing Australia over their anti-smoking policy.
Most Australians found the argument that plain packaging laws amounted to an unconstitutional acquisition of tobacco companies’ intellectual property ridiculous. Ultimately, the courts agreed, but the argument does follow from the premises often accepted by people who emphasise the primacy of property rights: that the government can’t take them without compensation, and that they include rights to commercially exploit trademarks and copyrights.
Ideas do not have the same dynamics as real property (scarcity). Rather than being an example of property rights, copyright is an example of government undermining property rights. The concept of real property rights predate nation states by thousands of years. Just because a government says that black is white does not make it so. “Intellectual property” are weasel words, of the same tradition as “people’s democratic republic”.
No, I’m agreeing with pjc50 that claims like “the security and protection of property under the rule of law should be a human right” deserve skepticism, if they mean that Western democracies should provide more legal protection for property rights than they already do, because that’s what the tobacco companies wanted and it would have been bad if they got it.
The word 'privatization' was coined to describe Nazi Germany's economic policy[1], and Germany went from a country with serious inflation, to seeing high returns on investment[2]. Violent states often makes friends with business owners.
> there are plenty of examples where big businesses get "nationalized" or where the founders are forced to sell to a "friendly party official" who then proceeds to run it into the ground. Russia notoriously is very good at this, leading even innovative companies to sabotage their own growth as to not become an "acquisition target" of the ruling elite.
Equinor (Statoil) and Gazprom seem to have produced results that can only be described as precisely the opposite of being run into the ground.
> Russia notoriously is very good at this, leading even innovative companies to sabotage their own growth as to not become an "acquisition target" of the ruling elite.
Lately the US doesn’t seem like a good place for businesses to become “too successful” in either. See the banning of TikTok and all the ruckus about forcing Apple to open the App Store or breaking Google up etc.
>"In my humble opinion, the security and protection of property under the rule of law should be a human right as it's the core driver of economic growth."
Economic growth and well being of the majority are not necessarily the same thing.
This doesn't sound all too dissimilar to what happened to Tik Tok.
2020-06-21: A Trump rally in Tulsa is reportedly trolled by people on Tik Tok.
2020-08-06: Executive order issued banning Tik Tok in November unless it can be sold to American stakeholders.
2020-09-14: Oracle is reportedly in the lead to acquire Tik Tok.
2020-11-12: Department of Commerce puts stay on the executive order.
There's a lot of talk about national security issues and whatnot, but the timing between Trump losing face and Tik Tok almost being acquired by American interests is just too convenient to ignore.
The stability of contract law is essential to a well functioning market and the actions of this administration are just plain gross.
TikTok is a foreign company and the president has unrestricted power in foreign affairs.
I am happy to agree with you that the president should have also restricted power abroad in let's say something like an overarching trade agreement that puts checks and balances on individual states.
This is true, but there are also plenty of cases where big businesses have propped up authoritarian regimes because they fear someone else more. The best historical example for this is Hitler; his rise was heavily supported by big and small businesses that feared left wing groups would cut into their profits[0]. This is part of why Hitler was able to rise despite never commanding an overwhelming majority.
0 - To be somewhat fair to the big businesses, there were actual communists running around Germany trying to get a revolution going there too, and that would be very bad for business too.
Communism is an extreme version of authoritarianism, officially executed in the "name of the people" but in reality executed by a revolutionary command of max 10 people.
In interwar Germany, there were also old imperialists who didn't value democracy too high that were more than willing to ally with Hitler.
It wasn't just businesses, it was also the church who rightly feared prosecution from the communists.
There were very few pro-democracy parties in interwar Germany and NSDAP was the only one with a huge militia that would be able to defend against a communist revolution.
The army was too small because of the treaty of versailles.
You could argue that businesses picked the least-worst option among a plate of very bad options.
The point of a business is to pool resources and make profit (add more value then taken away) and return money to the shareholders (make wealth)
Power can be a side-effect because you make A LOT of money and people are generally happy to do things for money, but generally businesses are not political and are dependent on their political environment.
Specifically the "return money to the shareholders" part can be affected by weak rule of law and weak property laws
There is also the "creative destruction problem" where an innovative company is beating an incumbent, but the incumbent happens to be partially owned by party cadre and leverages its power to shut down the innovator.
In my humble opinion, the security and protection of property under the rule of law should be a human right as it's the core driver of economic growth.