- CanadaPlus@futurology.todayEnglish33 minutes
I mean, not as anything like a corporation. If they have to protect themselves with force, they’re a state or warlord, and will end up solving the same problems the same way.
Meaning no shareholders and no contracts, but on the other hand violent internal coups and endemic corruption (in the narrow sense of taking organisation money for yourself).
Edit: Funny story about this - a lot of big corporate guys don’t seem to get the distinction. They go and buy a bunker in New Zealand and think that will do them, but if you talk to the guards in charge of the bunker, they’ll say their plan when the apocalypse happens is to just kill their boss and move in themselves. Because there’s no state to stop them, and they’re better at violence than Mark Zuckerberg or whatever.
1 dayCorporations are construct of law. They can’t exist without a government to enforce corporate law through its monopoly on violence.
- 21 hours
Drug cartels do all the things any corporation would happily do without laws to restrict them. So I don’t see any distinction and I don’t believe a govt is necessary for a corporation to exist. Just like with any other crime by any other citizen, a govt uses its monopoly on violence to prevent corporations from doing harm.
- CanadaPlus@futurology.todayEnglish37 minutes
Drug cartels aren’t really corporations. There’s no formal structure, shares or board meetings, and sometimes they do just descend into civil war (like in Mexico right now). They’re businesses, but in some ways Rome was as well. The thing that makes them a funny historical edge case is that their primary business is transport rather than theft, and that’s down to the massive US/Canadian demand, the wealth behind it, and the inability of any recognised state to join the drug trade in their place and get away with it.
- 1 day
A government can create unlimited currency via an act of congress. Can a corporation create unlimited money when it wants to?
Anyone can create their own money. Consider Bitcoin. The hard part is getting people to use it.
Corporations can print corporate shares, though the more shares they print, the less each share is worth. You can’t buy a pack of gum with corporate shares, though, so I wouldn’t call it money or currency.
Private banks can print money, but not an an unlimited amount. They can only print as much as the government allows, and it can only be created as the principal of a loan, and the money is destroyed as the borrower pays down the principal.
- 1 day
Governments can create as much of their own sovereign currency as they want. Governments can levy taxes corporations can’t.
- 21 hours
Corporations try to all the time. It’s only through an effective use of law that they don’t. And lately, it hasn’t been very effective.
But also a government can’t print “unlimited currency”. Eventually it would be worthless. They are effectively only permitted to print currency proportional to what their creditors allow.
But also a government can’t print “unlimited currency”. Eventually it would be worthless.
Governments can do it, but you’ve explained why they don’t do it.
They are effectively only permitted to print currency proportional to what their creditors allow.
A government with fiat monetary sovereignty has no need to borrow its own money, because it already can create as much as it pleases. The purpose of government securities is not to fund spending but to give the rich a safe place to park their capital with interest.
- 19 hours
Heh, yeah. Love hypothetically, how would a company like, act, be, without any government influence? I mean there’s definitely like sketchy shit that should be prevented ideally, like bad food or bad drugs? That seems helpful. Prijkt sinds other positives?
But in like a lawless wasteland… Yeah if your service or product is good, people want it, want to work on it for pay (and which rates? Well maybe like a union instead of a government that negotiates?). But what about people just downright stealing? Maybe a market for protection would pop up, and live would become super unethical, because there will prolly always be a dick who wants to steal stuff? Just for his own good.
But by yeah if humans were super empathetic it would just work. Of people idk… Could really position then in others and think a bit honestly about things or something? Tbh its something that happens on small scales guess, like oh friends-weekend things or something.
- 1 day
No and yes…
A business entity that is proactively protected from liability could not exist without government charter.
However, a business entity could employ its own paramilitary and/or hire mercenaries and effectively make itself immune to liability, which works out to the same thing pretty much.
And I’m reasonably certain that that’s the future - that corporations will continue to acknowledge and submit to governments only as long as it’s to their advantage to do so, and that when the costs outstrip the benefits, they’ll simply stop, and instead manage their properties as essentially states unto themselves. And at that point, whether or not they have an official declaration of their corporate identity will be irrelevant.
- 1 day
Could the paramilitary unit fund itself without legal tender laws from a state and government created fiat currency?
- 1 day
Sure.
They could even do it today simply by paying in Bitcoin.
I expect though that the future will see private currencies backed by the-entities-formerly-known-as-corporations.
Governments don’t monopolize currencies because nobody else wants to issue one, but because it’s in their interests to monopolize them, and they have sufficient power (for the time being) to enforce their monopolies.
- 1 day
Governments have courts to enforce contracts and settle disputes. Corporations don’t have their own impartial legal system to settle disputes and enforce contracts.
- 1 day
So?
In the first place, a “corporation” could set up a legal system easily - draft some laws, build some facilities and appoint some officials, and done.
But they wouldn’t even need to do that. They likely would, because an impartial system wins voluntary compliance and thus promotes stability, but the only really necessary part of a legal system is sufficient power to enforce its dictates, and with enough armed professionals, that’s relatively easy, at least within secured borders.
- 23 hours
Whoever wants in on it really.
Primarily I presume it’d be the corporations themselves, but banking is certain to change to accommodate the growing independence of the “corporations,” and I expect that to some notable degree, the two will merge - that the largest “corporations” will have their own banking sibsidiaries and will handle most everything internally.
There’s a broad point underlying all of this - all that’s really necessary is that enough executives/owners at enough institutions have a desire to divest themselves of associations with governments and establish their own “states.” Once the will is there and they possess enough wealth and power to enforce their will, the rest is just details. They have entire staffs who are employed to figure out how to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, and they will figure it out.
- 5 hours
Maintaining a large private army would be expensive and time consuming. What stops another corporation with a private army from coming in and robbing them of everything they have?
Where is the corporation getting their funding from? Someone’s got to be paying them. So, they are using a sovereign currency created by a government using a central banking system chartered with the government.
I expect though that the future will see private currencies backed by the-entities-formerly-known-as-corporations.
Snow Crash becomes truer by the year.
- 1 day
Yes.
And specifically one of the things that impressed me about Snow Crash’s predictions was the idea that federal governments didn’t get overthrown or cease to exist - they were simply irrelevant. The “corporations” had amassed enough wealth and power that they could, and did, simply ignore the governments.
