Overall I thought this was a weak article. In many cases the reasoning seems to be ignorant of simple economics. Below I point out several issues; others I omitted in a vain attempt at brevity.
Corporate Growth
Incentives create strong selective pressure for corporations to grow (e.g. because they benefit from economies of scale).
It is definitely true that there are incentives for firms to grow up the their efficient size. However, equally there are incentives not to grow further, and many companies are around these levels—for a little background on the theory see for example wikipedia. Certainly, when I was an equity analyst, when news one of my companies had just announced an acquisition crossed the tape, I’d expect the share price to be down on the news—whereas if they announced a spin-off, I’d expect the stock to be up!
Revenues of the Fortune 500 increased from 58% to 73% of US GDP
This is very misleading.
We can see this by noting that, rather perversely, one of your proposed policies would actually increase corporate revenue as a % of GDP. Why? By breaking up vertically integrated companies, we would add a new layer of transactions that would be counted as revenue despite having no additional economic substance. If I have a solar panel factory and an installation business, no revenue is recorded when the panels move from the factory to the installation trucks, only when they go to the end customers. If you split my company into two, we now record revenue twice, despite no fundamental change—illustrating why this is a silly metric. It is more appropriate to compare profits to GDP, or revenue to gross transactions.
People more commonly look at S&P profits as a % of GDP, which is better, but still not great. You mention as an aside that this is partly due to international revenues, but without noting how this undermines the point. Over the last few decades we have seen considerable globalisation, as US companies have expanded into overseas markets, so this ratio would have increased even if the compositition of the domestic US economy remained totally unchanged.
One of the first lessons one learns in accounting analysis is that ratios have to make economic sense—the numerator and denominator have to refer to the same thing—which is not the case here. Instead we should be comparing domestic profits to GDP.
Why compare corporate revenue to state tax revenue?
One of the key parts of the argument is that we can meaningfully compare corporate revenue to state tax revenue as a measure of power. However the justification for this in the article is very weak:
Recently, researchers have proposed that states’ “budgets” (tax revenues) and corporations’ “budgets” (revenues minus their profits) are comparable in that they are crude, but useful proxies for their power (despite corporations and states spending on different things).
How do this random PhD student researchers justify this approach?
For this purpose, we compare the revenues of states (mainly taxes collected) with the revenues of corporations, as suggested by Jeffrey Harrod, who argued that we should see revenues (minus profits) as a “budget” of firms in analogy to governments.6767 Harrod, “The Century of the Corporation”.View all notes Admittedly, this is a crude proxy for power or influence, nonetheless it is instructive to juxtapose the financial scale of states and corporations directly. (link)
That’s right—they basically just posit it. There is no actual justification for assuming that a company with revenues of $100bn is more powerful than a state with taxes of $90bn.
It makes sense that there is no justification—because the statement is clearly absurd. Consider the example from the article: comparing the Australian State to Walmart, the latter of which is supposedly more powerful.
Australia has a powerful military, including ten frigates, two destroyers and six submarines. Their air force has over 100 combat planes, and they have 30,000 active soldiers in the military. Using this they have participated in a number of wars. In contrast, to my knowledge Walmart has zero frigates, zero destroyers, zero submarines, and zero combat planes.
In the event of a war, furthermore, the Australian government might be able to introduce conscription, dramatically increasing their manpower. Walmart is unlikely to be able to do so as they have no such legal authority.
With the benefit of these weapons, the Australian government is able to achieve a great deal. For example, they are able to force almost every single Australian to pay them taxes. In contrast, Walmart is reliant on people voluntarily giving them money, has to offer merchandise in return, and is unable to imprison people who refuse. Speaking of which, the Australian government has around 40,000 people in prison—Walmart conspicuously lacks its own prison system. Even in cases where someone directly steals from them, Walmart is forced to rely on the assistance of the US government to deal with the situation.
Finally, the Australian state is able to effectively bar large groups of people from entering its territory on the basis of their nationality, potentially imprisoning them for long periods on remote islands to achieve this. In contrast, Walmart’s ability to prevent peaceful people from entering its stores is extremely limited.
This article, however, rather than interrogating the claim that corporate revenues can be directly compared to state taxes, instead accepts it completely. In the space of a few short paragraphs we move from proposing it as an interesting idea to accepting it as the basis for claims like:
71 out of the 100 most powerful actors are corporations
And some of the claims made in this section are simply bizarre. For example,
“Shell’s revenue/budget to sell fossil fuels is $272bn”
Where does this number come from? I checked their 2018 numbers on bloomberg and got revenue of $388bn. More importantly, revenue is not at all the same thing as ‘budget to sell fossil fuels’. That would be part of SG&A, which is obviously much smaller—around $11bn. Instead, most of their revenue is spent buying physical inputs for e.g. their refining business.
Or take this one:
For instance, Apple spends >$1bn/year on marketing. Lobbying budgets could increase to a similar level.
According to OpenSecrets, the largest US corporate spender on lobbying in 2018 was Alphabet (Google), spending just under $23m. It is technically true that their budget could increase to over a billion; however, this would require a >33,000% increase.
Or this claim:
In contrast, state power is curtailed by mandatory and entitlement spending taking up an increasing share of their budgets (e.g. >70% in the US).
This spending is not really mandatory at all—if states did not want to give out benefits there is no requirement for them to do so. We know this is true because there have been many powerful states that spent very little on benefits. If states are weakened by entitlement spending, it is because they choose to do so.
In contrast, corporations have to spend the vast majority of their revenue on raw resources, salaries etc. in order to produce the goods and services they sell. Buying potatoes is not optional for McDonalds!
Do corporations cause exponentially larger externalities over time?
This sections seems like a random grab-bag of complaints with a lack of model-based thinking. In particular, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think that externalities grow exponentially, except that corporates (and the economy as a whole) grow exponentially. The difference between externalities growing exponentially relative to corporate size, and externalities remaining fixed relative to corporate size, might seem like a trivial point, but one of the proposed ‘solutions’ - to break up large corporations—actually ends up resting on this confusion.
Firstly we should note that the citations mentioned do not actually support the article’s point:
There is no consensus amongst economists on whether governments should regulate the size of big corporations more generally (e.g. through preventing M&A or breaking them up).[62],[63]
The linked polls discuss specific government interventions in specific cases, as is standard in the antitrust literature, not general regulation of corporate size. I am not aware of any credible economists who believe in a carte blanche restriction on the size of corporations. I have literally never heard any economist suggest a policy which would restrict companies that have grown organically due to economies of scale and good execution, like Netflix or Apple.
But more importantly, breaking large corporates up into smaller pieces would only reduce externalities if those externalities were super-linear in corporate size. This doesn’t seem to be the case however—if you split up corporation with two factories, you still have two companies with one factory each, producing just as much pollution in total. (They might even produce slightly more as smaller firms are often slower to adopt new technologies).
The article might also have benefited from discussion of the track records of non-capitalist systems, like the pointless slaughter caused by the soviet whale quota system. The article mentions Fukushima… but not Chernobyl, despite the latter being an example of much worse behaviour. Similarly, it blames corporates for obesity, but does not mention the difficulties communist states had in avoiding mass starvation. Nor at these problems only in socialist countries—for example, even in the US privately-run power plants are cleaner than those run by the government:
Our empirical subjects are public and private entities’ compliance with the U.S. Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act. We find that, compared with private firms, governments violate these laws significantly more frequently and are less likely to be penalized for violations.
It is not possible to reduce corporate power in a vacuum—the proposed solutions largely instead transfer it to governments. But given that, even according to the bizarre revenue=tax methodology adopted, states were still more powerful than their corporations, this would mean concentrating more power in the most powerful entities. Entities which in the past have repeatedly brought mankind to the brink of nuclear war—an externality far greater than that of any mere corporation.
Many thanks for your kind feedback. I thought your review and deconstruction of the issues were excellent and I concur with many points that you make. I have updated the Google Doc version of the manuscript that I believe you also kindly commented on. I might update this post to reflect this if I choose to do another version of this post.
Please see my inline response below.
>>It is definitely true that there are incentives for firms to grow up the their efficient size. However, equally there are incentives not to grow further
You are absolutely right that I ignored mentioning that there are indeed some incentives for corporations not to grow further. However, overall, I think on net incentives to grow are slightly stronger than to stay at the current size, as evidenced by growth in corporate size.
>> one of your proposed policies would actually increase corporate revenue as a % of GDP.
I’m really sorry for being unclear: I did not actually propose breaking up corporations, because I do not think it’s politically tractable. I merely mention it because people will probably think about this.
>>Revenues of the Fortune 500 increased from 58% to 73% of US GDP
>>This is very misleading.
>>People more commonly look at S&P profits as a % of GDP, which is better, but still not great. You mention as an aside that this is partly due to international revenues, but without noting how this undermines the point. Over the last few decades we have seen considerable globalisation, as US companies have expanded into overseas markets, so this ratio would have increased even if the compositition of the domestic US economy remained totally unchanged.
I’m sorry I was being unclear here — the point here is not the size of states relative to their domestic firms, but the size of the largest corporations (proxied by the Fortune, even though Fortune Global would be better) and the largest state actors (the US).
Why compare corporate revenue to state tax revenue?
>> There is no actual justification for assuming that a company with revenues of $100bn is more powerful than a state with taxes of $90bn.
I agree that the authors of that paper could have provided more reasoning on the measure and source they cite (you there original source is here). I absolutely agree that better measures of corporate power are conceivable — however I only found this one dataset.
However, I feel like there’s something to be said for using revenues instead of profits. As I write, the revenue is the budget a corporation has to fulfill its goal (often to sell things), which I had defined as being roughly proportional to its power. Profits usually benefit shareholders and not the corporate entity itself. There are corporations might have high profits but that are somewhat small and can’t use much revenues to fulfil its objectives.
You also outline some very telling differences between Australia and Walmart that I absolutely agree with. However, there might be more similarities between corporations and states that it might at first superficially appear. For instance, yes states ‘can imprison people’, yet, corporations can decide on supply chains and effectively keep many people in modern slavery.
>>This article, however, rather than interrogating the claim that corporate revenues can be directly compared to state taxes, instead accepts it completely.
I did mention that “corporate revenue is a crude, but useful proxies for their power (despite corporations and states spending on different things).” My thinking here was “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
In the space of a few short paragraphs we move from proposing it as an interesting idea to accepting it as the basis for claims like:
71 out of the 100 most powerful actors are corporations
Sorry I did postulate that I use revenue as a proxy for power, but have changed this (will be reflected in a future version of this doc). I did optimize for brevity while writing and so I agree that the reasoning can move quite fast, and a future version could benefit from much more hedging.
“Shell’s revenue/budget to sell fossil fuels is $272bn”
Where does this number come from? I checked their 2018 numbers on bloomberg and got revenue of $388bn.
I’m sorry I should have cited this more clearly—this is from the paper I cite, which is based on the Fortune Global 2017.
More importantly, revenue is not at all the same thing as ‘budget to sell fossil fuels’. That would be part of SG&A, which is obviously much smaller—around $11bn. Instead, most of their revenue is spent buying physical inputs for e.g. their refining business.
That’s an excellent point—fixed costs for buying physical inputs can significantly curtail corporate power. I agree that ‘budget to sell fossil fuels’ was poorly worded. What I meant by that is the budget available to get fossil fuels to the consumer (which includes extraction of fossil fuels etc.).
According to OpenSecrets, the largest US corporate spender on lobbying in 2018 was Alphabet (Google), spending just under $23m. It is technically true that their budget could increase to over a billion; however, this would require a >33,000% increase.
Yes, I do cite numbers on lobbying expenditures, and agree that they are not as big yet. My point was merely that in theory there is a potential for large increases. In fact, corporations might spend significantly more—as your source suggests: https://www.opensecrets.org/dark-money
If states are weakened by entitlement spending, it is because they choose to do so.
In staunchly democratic states where many people receive entitlements, political realities being what they are, it is difficult, but agreed, not impossible, for states to cut spending.
smaller pieces would only reduce externalities if those externalities were super-linear in corporate size. This doesn’t seem to be the case however—if you split up corporation with two factories, you still have two companies with one factory each, producing just as much pollution in total.
I do agree that in some cases externalities might not increase with corporate size. However, because bigger corporations have bigger economies of scale, and one big corporation is often better at increasing consumer surplus and growth, they should also be ‘better’ at explointing profits from untaxed externalities. My intuitions here might be bias me though because I have never understand why anyone would want to fight 1 horse sized duck, effectively a dinosaur, as opposed to 100 tiny duck sized horses.
The article might also have benefited from discussion of the track records of non-capitalist systems,
My agenda was probably a bit simpler than you might have supposed – I just wanted to highlight that there might be something about corporate power that needs altruists attention.
I wholeheartedly agree that non-capitalist system are strictly worse than capitalist ones and have cited evidence that corporations do a huge amount of good in the world.
Although my agenda was fairly simple, the issues raised may well require more serious consideration – of the sort that you have offered.
You might be surprised to hear that I consider my own political leanings very free market.
I’m not denying that reducing ill-effects from socialist systems (see Venezuela) still deserve a lot of attention.
However, I think it’s a false dichotomy that we cannot worry about the ill effects that socialism can have while at the same time seriously considering whether corporations can have increasingly ill effects as well and perhaps deserve more regulation/attention.
It is not possible to reduce corporate power in a vacuum—the proposed solutions largely instead transfer it to governments.
My policy solutions come in different flavors. True, the sovereign wealth fund idea would be more statist, but with minimal government interference in the market. Tax incentives for private individuals would be a more market-y solution, even though that too is technically state interference.
Entities which in the past have repeatedly brought mankind to the brink of nuclear war—an externality far greater than that of any mere corporation.
I agree that states have historically created more risks (such as nuclear war), however, I myself was quite surprised by the evidence of corporate influence when it comes to nuclear war. In particular, the dilution of the Biological Weapons Convention protocol by the bio industry. I would want altruists to look into this more.
I wholeheartedly agree that non-capitalist system are strictly worse than capitalist ones and have cited evidence that corporations do a huge amount of good in the world.
I’m not denying that reducing ill-effects from socialist systems (see Venezuela) still deserve a lot of attention.
Let me start by agreeing that the people of Venezuela are in deep distress, and ill served by the ruling government.
I am not a fan of -isms and labels. Is public education socialist? how about public universal healthcare (like in Europe or Japan)? North Korea calls itself DPRK (Democratic.. Republic) I laugh at it and don’t take it seriously, why should we take it seriously when Venezuela claims that it is socialist? Anyway what do broad terms like socialism and capitalism mean? When did USA become capitalist? How about Britain? India? China? South Africa? Guatemala?
Socialist/communist/capitalist institutions are steeply hierarchical and with few exceptions have male leaders, likewise kingdoms before that were male led and steeply hierarchical. I see more similarities between the various -isms than differences.
I think the world we see today is an effect of industrialization, and the political systems today are reflections of that, on an evolutionary substrate of human behavior that is atleast a million years in the making.
==== added later ====
sigh the questions are serious ones, if downvoting please tell me why either via private message or as a reply
I downvoted the post because I didn’t learn anything from it that would be relevant to a discussion of C-GCRs (it’s possible I missed something). I agree that the questions are serious ones, and I’d be interested to see a top level post that explored them in more detail. I can’t speak for anyone else on this, and I admit I downvote things quite liberally.
Overall I thought this was a weak article. In many cases the reasoning seems to be ignorant of simple economics. Below I point out several issues; others I omitted in a vain attempt at brevity.
Corporate Growth
It is definitely true that there are incentives for firms to grow up the their efficient size. However, equally there are incentives not to grow further, and many companies are around these levels—for a little background on the theory see for example wikipedia. Certainly, when I was an equity analyst, when news one of my companies had just announced an acquisition crossed the tape, I’d expect the share price to be down on the news—whereas if they announced a spin-off, I’d expect the stock to be up!
This is very misleading.
We can see this by noting that, rather perversely, one of your proposed policies would actually increase corporate revenue as a % of GDP. Why? By breaking up vertically integrated companies, we would add a new layer of transactions that would be counted as revenue despite having no additional economic substance. If I have a solar panel factory and an installation business, no revenue is recorded when the panels move from the factory to the installation trucks, only when they go to the end customers. If you split my company into two, we now record revenue twice, despite no fundamental change—illustrating why this is a silly metric. It is more appropriate to compare profits to GDP, or revenue to gross transactions.
People more commonly look at S&P profits as a % of GDP, which is better, but still not great. You mention as an aside that this is partly due to international revenues, but without noting how this undermines the point. Over the last few decades we have seen considerable globalisation, as US companies have expanded into overseas markets, so this ratio would have increased even if the compositition of the domestic US economy remained totally unchanged.
One of the first lessons one learns in accounting analysis is that ratios have to make economic sense—the numerator and denominator have to refer to the same thing—which is not the case here. Instead we should be comparing domestic profits to GDP.
Why compare corporate revenue to state tax revenue?
One of the key parts of the argument is that we can meaningfully compare corporate revenue to state tax revenue as a measure of power. However the justification for this in the article is very weak:
How do this random PhD student researchers justify this approach?
That’s right—they basically just posit it. There is no actual justification for assuming that a company with revenues of $100bn is more powerful than a state with taxes of $90bn.
It makes sense that there is no justification—because the statement is clearly absurd. Consider the example from the article: comparing the Australian State to Walmart, the latter of which is supposedly more powerful.
Australia has a powerful military, including ten frigates, two destroyers and six submarines. Their air force has over 100 combat planes, and they have 30,000 active soldiers in the military. Using this they have participated in a number of wars. In contrast, to my knowledge Walmart has zero frigates, zero destroyers, zero submarines, and zero combat planes.
In the event of a war, furthermore, the Australian government might be able to introduce conscription, dramatically increasing their manpower. Walmart is unlikely to be able to do so as they have no such legal authority.
With the benefit of these weapons, the Australian government is able to achieve a great deal. For example, they are able to force almost every single Australian to pay them taxes. In contrast, Walmart is reliant on people voluntarily giving them money, has to offer merchandise in return, and is unable to imprison people who refuse. Speaking of which, the Australian government has around 40,000 people in prison—Walmart conspicuously lacks its own prison system. Even in cases where someone directly steals from them, Walmart is forced to rely on the assistance of the US government to deal with the situation.
Finally, the Australian state is able to effectively bar large groups of people from entering its territory on the basis of their nationality, potentially imprisoning them for long periods on remote islands to achieve this. In contrast, Walmart’s ability to prevent peaceful people from entering its stores is extremely limited.
This article, however, rather than interrogating the claim that corporate revenues can be directly compared to state taxes, instead accepts it completely. In the space of a few short paragraphs we move from proposing it as an interesting idea to accepting it as the basis for claims like:
And some of the claims made in this section are simply bizarre. For example,
Where does this number come from? I checked their 2018 numbers on bloomberg and got revenue of $388bn. More importantly, revenue is not at all the same thing as ‘budget to sell fossil fuels’. That would be part of SG&A, which is obviously much smaller—around $11bn. Instead, most of their revenue is spent buying physical inputs for e.g. their refining business.
Or take this one:
According to OpenSecrets, the largest US corporate spender on lobbying in 2018 was Alphabet (Google), spending just under $23m. It is technically true that their budget could increase to over a billion; however, this would require a >33,000% increase.
Or this claim:
This spending is not really mandatory at all—if states did not want to give out benefits there is no requirement for them to do so. We know this is true because there have been many powerful states that spent very little on benefits. If states are weakened by entitlement spending, it is because they choose to do so.
In contrast, corporations have to spend the vast majority of their revenue on raw resources, salaries etc. in order to produce the goods and services they sell. Buying potatoes is not optional for McDonalds!
Do corporations cause exponentially larger externalities over time?
This sections seems like a random grab-bag of complaints with a lack of model-based thinking. In particular, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think that externalities grow exponentially, except that corporates (and the economy as a whole) grow exponentially. The difference between externalities growing exponentially relative to corporate size, and externalities remaining fixed relative to corporate size, might seem like a trivial point, but one of the proposed ‘solutions’ - to break up large corporations—actually ends up resting on this confusion.
Firstly we should note that the citations mentioned do not actually support the article’s point:
The linked polls discuss specific government interventions in specific cases, as is standard in the antitrust literature, not general regulation of corporate size. I am not aware of any credible economists who believe in a carte blanche restriction on the size of corporations. I have literally never heard any economist suggest a policy which would restrict companies that have grown organically due to economies of scale and good execution, like Netflix or Apple.
But more importantly, breaking large corporates up into smaller pieces would only reduce externalities if those externalities were super-linear in corporate size. This doesn’t seem to be the case however—if you split up corporation with two factories, you still have two companies with one factory each, producing just as much pollution in total. (They might even produce slightly more as smaller firms are often slower to adopt new technologies).
The article might also have benefited from discussion of the track records of non-capitalist systems, like the pointless slaughter caused by the soviet whale quota system. The article mentions Fukushima… but not Chernobyl, despite the latter being an example of much worse behaviour. Similarly, it blames corporates for obesity, but does not mention the difficulties communist states had in avoiding mass starvation. Nor at these problems only in socialist countries—for example, even in the US privately-run power plants are cleaner than those run by the government:
It is not possible to reduce corporate power in a vacuum—the proposed solutions largely instead transfer it to governments. But given that, even according to the bizarre revenue=tax methodology adopted, states were still more powerful than their corporations, this would mean concentrating more power in the most powerful entities. Entities which in the past have repeatedly brought mankind to the brink of nuclear war—an externality far greater than that of any mere corporation.
Many thanks for your kind feedback. I thought your review and deconstruction of the issues were excellent and I concur with many points that you make. I have updated the Google Doc version of the manuscript that I believe you also kindly commented on. I might update this post to reflect this if I choose to do another version of this post.
Please see my inline response below.
You are absolutely right that I ignored mentioning that there are indeed some incentives for corporations not to grow further. However, overall, I think on net incentives to grow are slightly stronger than to stay at the current size, as evidenced by growth in corporate size.
I’m really sorry for being unclear: I did not actually propose breaking up corporations, because I do not think it’s politically tractable. I merely mention it because people will probably think about this.
I’m sorry I was being unclear here — the point here is not the size of states relative to their domestic firms, but the size of the largest corporations (proxied by the Fortune, even though Fortune Global would be better) and the largest state actors (the US).
I agree that the authors of that paper could have provided more reasoning on the measure and source they cite (you there original source is here). I absolutely agree that better measures of corporate power are conceivable — however I only found this one dataset.
However, I feel like there’s something to be said for using revenues instead of profits. As I write, the revenue is the budget a corporation has to fulfill its goal (often to sell things), which I had defined as being roughly proportional to its power. Profits usually benefit shareholders and not the corporate entity itself. There are corporations might have high profits but that are somewhat small and can’t use much revenues to fulfil its objectives.
You also outline some very telling differences between Australia and Walmart that I absolutely agree with. However, there might be more similarities between corporations and states that it might at first superficially appear. For instance, yes states ‘can imprison people’, yet, corporations can decide on supply chains and effectively keep many people in modern slavery.
I did mention that “corporate revenue is a crude, but useful proxies for their power (despite corporations and states spending on different things).” My thinking here was “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Sorry I did postulate that I use revenue as a proxy for power, but have changed this (will be reflected in a future version of this doc). I did optimize for brevity while writing and so I agree that the reasoning can move quite fast, and a future version could benefit from much more hedging.
I’m sorry I should have cited this more clearly—this is from the paper I cite, which is based on the Fortune Global 2017.
That’s an excellent point—fixed costs for buying physical inputs can significantly curtail corporate power. I agree that ‘budget to sell fossil fuels’ was poorly worded. What I meant by that is the budget available to get fossil fuels to the consumer (which includes extraction of fossil fuels etc.).
Yes, I do cite numbers on lobbying expenditures, and agree that they are not as big yet. My point was merely that in theory there is a potential for large increases. In fact, corporations might spend significantly more—as your source suggests: https://www.opensecrets.org/dark-money
In staunchly democratic states where many people receive entitlements, political realities being what they are, it is difficult, but agreed, not impossible, for states to cut spending.
I do agree that in some cases externalities might not increase with corporate size. However, because bigger corporations have bigger economies of scale, and one big corporation is often better at increasing consumer surplus and growth, they should also be ‘better’ at explointing profits from untaxed externalities. My intuitions here might be bias me though because I have never understand why anyone would want to fight 1 horse sized duck, effectively a dinosaur, as opposed to 100 tiny duck sized horses.
My agenda was probably a bit simpler than you might have supposed – I just wanted to highlight that there might be something about corporate power that needs altruists attention.
I wholeheartedly agree that non-capitalist system are strictly worse than capitalist ones and have cited evidence that corporations do a huge amount of good in the world.
Although my agenda was fairly simple, the issues raised may well require more serious consideration – of the sort that you have offered.
You might be surprised to hear that I consider my own political leanings very free market.
I’m not denying that reducing ill-effects from socialist systems (see Venezuela) still deserve a lot of attention.
However, I think it’s a false dichotomy that we cannot worry about the ill effects that socialism can have while at the same time seriously considering whether corporations can have increasingly ill effects as well and perhaps deserve more regulation/attention.
My policy solutions come in different flavors. True, the sovereign wealth fund idea would be more statist, but with minimal government interference in the market. Tax incentives for private individuals would be a more market-y solution, even though that too is technically state interference.
I agree that states have historically created more risks (such as nuclear war), however, I myself was quite surprised by the evidence of corporate influence when it comes to nuclear war. In particular, the dilution of the Biological Weapons Convention protocol by the bio industry. I would want altruists to look into this more.
Let me start by agreeing that the people of Venezuela are in deep distress, and ill served by the ruling government.
I am not a fan of -isms and labels. Is public education socialist? how about public universal healthcare (like in Europe or Japan)? North Korea calls itself DPRK (Democratic.. Republic) I laugh at it and don’t take it seriously, why should we take it seriously when Venezuela claims that it is socialist? Anyway what do broad terms like socialism and capitalism mean? When did USA become capitalist? How about Britain? India? China? South Africa? Guatemala? Socialist/communist/capitalist institutions are steeply hierarchical and with few exceptions have male leaders, likewise kingdoms before that were male led and steeply hierarchical. I see more similarities between the various -isms than differences.
I think the world we see today is an effect of industrialization, and the political systems today are reflections of that, on an evolutionary substrate of human behavior that is atleast a million years in the making.
==== added later ====
sigh the questions are serious ones, if downvoting please tell me why either via private message or as a reply
Thanks
I downvoted the post because I didn’t learn anything from it that would be relevant to a discussion of C-GCRs (it’s possible I missed something). I agree that the questions are serious ones, and I’d be interested to see a top level post that explored them in more detail. I can’t speak for anyone else on this, and I admit I downvote things quite liberally.