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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Public corporations, private corporations, state-owned, party-controlled corporations. It doesn’t matter. At least public corporations are known to bow to pressure.

I think ownership is irrelevant. What matters is lawfulness and what remains lawful after pressure or indifference from the constituencies.

Hand in hand with this is the rule of law. Some countries on paper have great liberties and rights for their people, but in practice it’s up to the party to interpret and enforce (as in the great purges, etc,)

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> What matters is lawfulness and what remains lawful

To expand on that idea - if something is both lawful and profitable, you have to have an almost absolute consensus amongst the people capable of doing it that it should not be done. Otherwise, potentially even if 1 person thinks it is fine, then they will be the one to do it.

Typically this is the main strength of the economic system - jobs that people don't want to do get allocated to the person who has the least problem with doing it.

The threat here was never the development of the technology - it is obvious that it is coming - the issue here is government demand. A corporation can only do so much with my face that annoys me - the government on the other hand can make life really miserable.

> if something is both lawful and profitable, you have to have an almost absolute consensus amongst the people capable of doing it that it should not be done.

Sure, but you just need a weak consensus amongst everyone that it should not be done to make it unlawful.

There are B-Corps (benefit corp) in many states that have charters that include bylaws that are as important or at least equally as important as profitability. IMO all health providers should have to be B-Corps that have patient health as their #1 above profit.

"B-Corp" is a certification[1]. It has no force of law anywhere. It has nothing to do with a benefit corporation[2], which does.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

I would agree with you entirely and I think that the history of both capitalism and communism have demonstrated that we are not at a level yet where we can design a socio-economic system to make it not matter whether we are good to each other and in fact, they are both likely, in different ways, to sometimes distort and amplify some of the worst parts of our animal natures.

I have found it a certainty on HN that at some point, in any discussion of these things, that someone will step in and say "but this is legal, and the corporation must maximize its profits for the shareholders, so if you really want a change, change the laws, the company itself is utterly amoral and working as designed"

It's always good to remind: lawful != moral/ethical. Sometimes the law is twisted and wrong, and it needs to change.

Very true. And ethics change over time. Laws change over time. But people want immediate reconciliation with their beliefs —which can be at odds with that of others. So we have to rely on the law.

Prohibition is a great example of what laws can do, good and bad. After lots of bloodletting we realized it wasn’t good and we were not benefitting from it so it was reversed.

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