Working backwards: If you lie to a corporation about your personal information, that might be called "insurance fraud," for which there are absolutely ramifications. Much like an insurance company, the government compels us to pay a certain amount in to promote good behavior and indemnify against the societal risks of bad behavior. That's called social contract. "But what if I don't want to" has never been a compelling argument to me, which is one of the reasons I've never found libertarianism convincing. If you don't want to follow the social contract, then the social contract breaks down. When the social contract breaks down, and corporations (as well as individuals) are allowed to act in their own unfettered self interest, then you get the East India Company. That's the point. If you remove government oversight, you don't get better business. You get government by another name.. The difference between modern liberal democratic government and corporate government is that one is ostensibly using monopoly on power to enforce social boundaries and thereby uphold social order and manage use of national resources; the other uses that monopoly on power to maintain profit at all cost, no matter how brutal. I know which rubric of public management I'd be willing to trust more if I "followed the money". Speaking of monopolies. You opened a previous portion of the discussion describing how Walmart might increase market share simply by improving their overall customer experience. The implication, I presume, was to illustrate how beautifully the market self-regulates through positive interactions to make both sides prosper. But it ignored malfeasance, because malfeasance illustrates how in the absence of regulation, the market cares only about profit by all available means. The means I supplied are absolutely tactics pursued by corporations to consolidate market share and increase profits without having to consider the quality of their product or user satisfaction. And the absence of end user harm cannot be conflated with the presence of end user benefit, especially if we recalibrate our idea of who the end user is. While I, some random Joe on the street might not care about corporate espionage so long as my computer still runs, if I was, say, the inventor of a certain kind of computer chip and I appreciated the revenue that my intellectual property generated, I might be kind of sore if somebody stole that intellectual property, and might appreciate the regulations that curb such bad behavior. As for monopolies, they decidedly don't result in cheaper diapers. All this is to say, I really truly don't understand this dogmatic trust in corporation over governance. There's too much evidence being swept under the rug indicating how corporations would act in absence of regulation. In my eyes, mistrust is maybe the strongest regulatory weapon we as individuals have at our disposal. That goes for both government and the market. Why do we have to couch it as a binary choice between one or the other? As for the opinion piece that we're discussing: Pish posh. The purpose of that piece is to present the author's opinion as common sense using a sort of gee-whiz, down-home-country-lawyer reliance on The People's love of a good, simple narrative. It opens: And then expels paragraphs of hand-wavy opinion such as without ever relying on so much as personal anecdote. Even the portion on history doesn't refer to any particular historical example. The author practically begs his audience not to consider concrete examples or counterpoints lest it deflate the argument. Never mind the fact that in the introduction, the author questions the sense of mistrusting the corporation over personal acquaintances, asserts that out of the three provided groups, the corporation is by far the most trustworthy, and then never addresses the enormity of that claim. I should trust the corporation more than my wife? My friends? My mother? It's an absurdity so enormous that the author seems to rely on us just kind of... accepting it? And here's what I really don't understand. You're obviously very intelligent. And you're obviously well-attuned to historical precedent, and not afraid to buttress your opinions with examples. If I asked you not to consider history or legal precedent, you'd wonder why I'd redirected your attention. Moreover, you strike me as somebody who tailors his argument to the audience- the right tool for the right job to maximize efficiency. This opinion piece you posted- it bothers me because it asks its audience not to consider things too carefully. It requires tremendous faith not only in corporations, but in the authority of an entire stranger (not at all one of the "people I know in my personal life") without that stranger's ever having to demonstrate that authority. To whit, it's written for an audience of stupid people. And you chose this article over others to present to this audience on this site. Then again, it generated discussion, so who am I to finger wag.If I lie to a corporation about my personal information, nothing happens. If I lie on the census, the penalty is $500. The census has a noble intent, but if I happen to believe public money won't in fact be more equitably and efficiently allocated based on my postcard, why must I be threatened to fill it out?
The East India Company may be a fair example of commercial abuse of power in the 1800's, but it basically was the government in India
The purpose of the article is to ask if our mistrust in corporations is proportional to corporate misbehavior, compared to government or individual behavior.
I would initially expect most people’s attitudes to be pretty closely tied to their personal experience, more so than their book learning or what they hear on the internet.
I would not, and neither would most people. Maybe a few very unusual people would. But we can hardly be resentful and distrustful of someone for just behaving the way the vast majority of normal people would behave.
This is only true if I am a customer of the insurance company, which implies that I have agreed in advance to their terms of service. I would expect consequences if I try to cheat the insurance company, and would hold them responsible if they try to cheat me. EDIT: I can also file a fraudulent claim against another person's policy. That is an example of bad behavior by an individual. How does the corporation respond? Hopefully, the insurance company protects its customers by denying the claim. But sniffing out fraud costs money, so they will sometimes pay out when they shouldn't. A competitive insurance company will seek an optimal level of fraud detection to keep customer premiums as low as possible. The government also has a role, to punish people who commit insurance fraud. An industry source suggests that enforcement is minimal, so "Fraud comprises about 10 percent of property-casualty insurance losses and loss adjustment expenses each year." No insurance company compels me to pay anything. I am only obligated to pay for insurance that I agree to purchase. I can cancel my policy and stop paying any time I like. It's the government that operates on the basis of compulsion. As Huemer says, "I understand the arguments that this institution is necessary." But I think the concept bears some scrutiny. My idea of a contract is an agreement made between two parties, in which each side promises to fulfill some obligations. It should be written down somewhere, so everyone understands what the terms are. And most importantly, the parties should consciously agree to the contract. None of this is true of the social contract. We should call it the social tradition. Huemer makes the case succinctly in a précis of his book: Sam has a problem. "But what if I don't want to tell a stranger about my salary and ethnicity and who I live with?" "But what if I don't want to sell the house I grew up in to make room for a bypass?" "But what if I don't want to risk my life shooting at foreigners in a war I believe is unjust?" "But what if I don't want to arrest a fugitive slave so they will be returned to the South?" Surely you support occasional resistance to legal authority. The state is not infallible. The question of political authority is probably a book-length subject. I try to argue that there are cases where the market could provide better outcomes than we now get from government, though neither is perfect. It's true that the market underproduces public goods, since it is hard to profit from them, but providing public goods is a small fraction of what government does. A market requires two sides, buyer and seller. The seller cares only about profit. But the buyer doesn't care about the seller's profit at all, and tends to push in the direction of less profit and less malfeasance, against the buyer at least. Do you feel Walmart depends significantly on malfeasance for their profits? The complaints I see most are that they drive a hard bargain with their workers and suppliers. This is entirely due to their business strategy of providing the lowest possible prices to customers, who benefit. You mentioned intellectual property protection, that's a hard one to get right, and even if the IP laws are optimal it's difficult to enforce them. bfv noted the shift toward open source software, perhaps in response to the fact that it's hard to sell code so tech companies are shifting toward selling services. Can you cite an example of a harmful monopoly from this century? The first article I found complains that "three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms." Did Forbes forget what "mono-" means?If you lie to a corporation about your personal information, that might be called "insurance fraud," for which there are absolutely ramifications.
Much like an insurance company, the government compels us to pay a certain amount
That's called social contract.
"But what if I don't want to" has never been a compelling argument to me
You opened a previous portion of the discussion describing how Walmart might increase market share simply by improving their overall customer experience. The implication, I presume, was to illustrate how beautifully the market self-regulates through positive interactions to make both sides prosper. But it ignored malfeasance, because malfeasance illustrates how in the absence of regulation, the market cares only about profit by all available means.
As for monopolies, they decidedly don't result in cheaper diapers.
When governments misbehave, they do stuff like murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians.... And I don’t mean in some indirect or speculative way — I mean literally sending employees with guns to go shoot people.... If there were a corporation that did shit like that, people on all sides of the political spectrum would condemn it as the most evil corporation ever.
My reply will be probably mostly predictable, so I might save it for later. In response to your kind last words, I will certainly agree that this is a silly article, and I shared it expecting that the provocative title and snarky tone would resonate here. There's a principle of charity that says we should try to overlook small defects in the opponent's argument, and digest and respond to the strongest idealized version of the argument we can imagine. I'm not very good at following the principle, though. Someone once asked a great question of which posts we most wished got more traction, and I had many to choose from. Some are long and some are stuffy, some are both. Huemer is unorthodox, but a serious thinker. Take a look at yesterday's Risk Refutes Absolutism where he characterizes Ayn Rand as a crazy libertarian, and tries to find a sort of Bayesian middle way between moral absolutes. I think his approach to morality, Ethical Intuitionism, has some appeal. I suppose he is letting off steam on his blog, or just having fun outside of the classroom and academic publishing circuit. That's what I am here for; I enjoy sharing the ideas and exploring the different ways people think. Thanks for taking part in the conversation.