Capitalism is way out of control. No corporation should be able to strong arm the government to get out of taxes. At least not until I can pit states against each other to get out of my income tax.
You can by moving to any of Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, or Wyoming.
And there are US states with 0 income tax. And countries with very low income tax. Russia has 13% income tax, the state gets most of its income from its fascinating system of tributary taxation. (1)
It's certainly possible to vote with your feet for the system of government that fits your wishes best.
1. https://www.quora.com/Will-Russia-abandon-the-tributary-taxa...
Have a look at Europe, there's fully privatised states, and some that might be regarded wrongly, from an American point of view, as socialist, yet still actually capitalist in economic philosophy.
Privatization effectively does two things. It exposes the health of the organization to the market, and it takes the control out of the hands of the ruling class. It is unclear how you could do that to an entire state. If you remove from it the ability to collect taxes, that would do the trick, but also effectively destroy the ability of the state to govern, making it no longer a state.
The closest analogue to this may be Somalia, which is effectively a medieval feudal regime that persisted into the 21st century. Somalia's national government has no real control over the country and can only cajole, never force. Somalia's federal government is playing a 'fake it til you make it game' which apparent when you see that their actual collected taxes is only 30% of what they say should be being collected. Customs were 68% of the entire government revenue in 2016.
Another "private government" is the Vatican, which sustains itself largely on donations from Catholics throughout the world. As there is nothing compelling Christians to donate, the Vatican is much more market-oriented than most states.
I have already gone over Russia's system of tributary taxation, but that's a voluntary system as well that the Russian state could not survive without in it's current form. It's estimated that by midcentury, the system will be replaced with a more conventional one. Putin's successor won't be as capable as he is in keeping the current order humming.
The leap you just made from cities not being able to be extorted by corporations for tax cuts to all private enterprise becoming state enterprise is so massive I have no idea how you even did it.
The state is often heavily intertwined with industry, through massive regulation and, too often, good old-fashioned corruption. If the state thinks it can get away with nationalizing a vital industry concern, it will without a pause. Usually though it can't because it knows that bureaucrats make horrible managers.
Every other country in Europe progressed without these innovations and as such they're always only a few steps away from fascism / dictatorship. Except the Dutch. The Dutch were reasonably well protected and they also created a commercial empire. The US Constitution is modeled after the Dutch one.
The difference is that the English weren't able to build their commercial empire until after the legal reforms took place, while the Dutch couldn't make their legal reforms until after they built their commercial empire.
No such legal reforms exist in other nations. These laws are instrumental in allowing a class structure other than ruling class-peasants. Other countries can vary in the amount of wealth they can spread amongst their peasants, but the peasants don't really participate in the governing.
The big caveat here is France. The French mechanism for making demands on the ruling class is social unrest. Nothing like a good French riot. The spectre of a second French Revolution scares the everloving crap out of the rulers and that forces them to the negotiating table. This has the unfortunate effect of making them uniquely vulnerable to fascism. But enterprise in France is just as state-intertwined as it is everywhere else, because there aren't any strong institutions there to counteract it.
Only in Anglo countries can industry and state compete as equals. When industry bands together and cooperates, as we used to call monopoly / cartel, only a coordinated state response can check it. This is enshrined in law and a bedrock feature that our capitalistic society relies on for its competitiveness.
How is France "uniquely vulnerable to fascism?
How do you think that having a response to monopolies enshrined in law makes it a "bedrock feature" of our society when the US has seemingly abandoned any serious enforcement of antitrust law?
How do you respond to the state and industries working together as in the case of regulatory capture or governments adding protections for companies like preventing state level governments preventing municipalities from forming their own ISPs?
Your whole post just reads as "us good, them bad" with no actual evidence on the results
> So by virtue of being English/Dutch descended they have a better system.
Sure. Systems persist through generations. You can still see remnants of the old French colonial government in Louisiana to this day. I don't understand why this should be a controversial statement. The British attitude towards commerce evolved over hundreds of years, and their colonies inherited it.
> How is France "uniquely vulnerable to fascism?
A poor choice of words, sorry. They're 'particularly vulnerable', not 'uniquely vulnerable'.
> How do you think that having a response to monopolies enshrined in law makes it a "bedrock feature" of our society when the US has seemingly abandoned any serious enforcement of antitrust law?
When it comes to very very large institutions with difficult-to-check amounts of power, then ordinary law fails to provide for one side. The antitrust regime in particular was fighting against Standard Oil, a conglomerate that deployed the sharpest legal minds in existence at that time to circumvent federal regulation. It was checked by Teddy Roosevelt, who led the charge to disrupt their operations so they could be brought back under state supervision.
Where law fails, individuals and/or mobs take over. The ability of those corrective agents to actually check power is the operative concept here.
As another example, the Magna Carta was rammed down the throat of the British Crown by the aristocracy, which was tired of seeing their concerns meddled with by the Crown for no good reason they could see. A full-on war had to be fought between the baronies and the Crown before the Carta could be accepted as a legitimate check on authority.
When making a power play, you're changing who gets to write the rules. The mark of a functioning society is when royals, elites and commoners can square off against each other without igniting a war. If they can't do that, then one swallows the other, usually the state consuming private enterprise.
Only robust national institutions can maintain the balance of power between entities. After the Carta was passed, the actual text of the charter quickly became obsolete, but the ideas that it represented, that the Crown cannot just do whatever it wants, became enshrined in the minds of the British. Without this innovation, private enterprise cannot flourish, except in a trickle-down fashion from the state. It's not really private anymore, it's 'at the pleasure of the state.'
My argument is that only the Anglosphere and the Dutch managed to evolve this institutions throughout history, in slightly different ways, and that all other countries try to ape the institutions, and fail to create robust ones. Because it goes farther than merely having a judiciary and constitution. The public themselves has to buy into the system, which is what makes the French public so scary to its lawmakers.
The magna Carta for instance was so far back that their language is extinct, they have the barest of influence on the modern world.
The anglosphere and the Dutch may have evolved institutions that kept a balance between the state and private industry but that balance only existed for a short time. It certainly didn't exist between the civil war and world war 2 in the US as we swiftly changed between robber barons and the new deal. It seemed like they more in between 1945 and the oil crisis of the 1970s, but since then the companies have taken more control every year
I challenge you to learn more about history. Learn about the history of corporations and how they grew out of colonial enterprises. Learn about Standard Oil and what private enterprise looked like before and after them. There are a lot of devils in those details. When you study enough of it, you can sense a smooth, continuous line of social and legal innovations that threads through all of recorded history, thousands of years.
The Civil War that you mentioned settled many pressing issues regarding the ability of states to assert their will against the nation. World War 2 enshrined international agreements and institutions as vitally important for averting war. It also thrust women into economic importance. All of these events created bedrock principles for the new social order to coalesce around. Once they're set, they're set. Other countries want them and so they do the best they can to try to copy them.
But they're never going to work as well as in the countries that they arose in. Nobody does tributary taxation like the Russians. Nobody can build a single-party state quite like the Chinese, with 6.3% of the entire population in the CCP.
All it takes is political regime change.