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Comment by darknesszy | Hacker News Reader

It makes one wonder if the Chinese government has a point. In the modern world, perhaps it’s not the government that should be feared, but the conglomerate corporations. A centralised government could have more teeth to compete with. Just an opinion...let’s keep it civil

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You can have effective anti-trust and not live in a dictatorship. We had this until the 80s

Are you suggesting the Chinese market is more competitive due to the government being big enough that companies in the market have to exist in an impartial regime? This isn't the impression I get from many other sources.

I don’t agree with respect to China - but perhaps the OP is suggesting that it’s like having an impartial referee.

I don't think any government is impartial, but you're right. That seems like it's the idea. In theory, it's much better to have the government be the big man on campus. You really don't want to live in a place where corporations are more powerful than the government.

This relates well with the gang model of politics, where the government is merely the biggest gang. It is an interesting way of looking at political systems because it encompasses such a range of scales.

Just make the biggest gang a democracy.

I'd say both an unelected government and a conglomerate should be feared and fought against.

One can argue if the US government is elected. Many people dont even bother to vote. And big states like California and New York are openly at war with the current administration.

Also, the democrats won the popular vote for president, but we got trump. In 2018, they won by 12%, but the senate has a republican majority.

Because of this, the judicial system is being stacked with ultraconservatives with lifetime appointments. They’re mostly filling seats that opened under the Obama administration.

“Majority rules” is becoming a bad joke in the US. Even after demographics shift enough to vote the republicans out, the senate and executive branch will still be blocked by the judiciary. There are ways to fix the supreme court, but that won’t change the fact that the lower federal courts are politically driven kangaroo courts.

Tl;dr: minority radicals intentionally broke the federal government, and it will take at least 30 years to fix (short of rewriting the constitution).

any power corrupts, political figure, govt. union, business, wives in marriages, even kids in schools. it's a builtin side effect of evolution.

How many people did Facebook or Google run over and gun down at Tiananmen Square, again...?

The East India Trading company and Purdue Pharmaceuticals make for a more fair comparison.

They both killed more than an order of magnitude more people than the Tiananmen Square (and related) massacres.

One actually had a standing army for this purpose. The other is hiring.

Those examples aren't entirely invalid, but in one case of one of them (Purdue) they are facing legal jeopardy for their actions including a $270MM settlement in Oklahoma alone. The other company was founded 400 years ago, relied on letters of marque issued by (you guessed it) governments, and is no longer a going concern.

The thing about governments is that they have basically zero accountability to anyone except a better-armed government. We talk a good game here in the US, but it's certainly playing out differently.

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