Yeah, but it compares companies from a state/economic zone of 300m or 450m people to a state of 4m people.
Sure, yeah, but that's like comparing a city of a 1million to one of 10k inhabitants and pointing at the much larger usage of construction material in absolute terms. Technically correct but ultimately useless.
If there's a company in the US that has a larger market cap than the US, that would make it more interesting. But even Apple is barely a tenth of it, and that's comparing the expected total future wealth of Apple to a year's worth of output of the US.
I'm not sure what comparing a year's amount of oranges to all future apples really tells us.
It’s useful in the argument that (1) states, as they’ve grown in size have also been reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size, and (2) that companies, as they grow in size, must be reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size (anti-trust, anti-monopoly).
Metaphors are useful but they can also just confuse the issue through unnecessary abstraction. The fundamental question is already there at the surface: it’s not about market capitalization or about gdp, but about the power that size in either metric represents. That’s the characteristic binding these two dissimilar ideas together.
Sure, yeah, but that's like comparing a city of a 1million to one of 10k inhabitants and pointing at the much larger usage of construction material in absolute terms. Technically correct but ultimately useless.
If there's a company in the US that has a larger market cap than the US, that would make it more interesting. But even Apple is barely a tenth of it, and that's comparing the expected total future wealth of Apple to a year's worth of output of the US.
I'm not sure what comparing a year's amount of oranges to all future apples really tells us.