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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

I used to believe that company breakups should happen automatically when they reach 1% of the country's GDP. There are lots of ways companies could avoid having the government decide how to break them up such as issuing dividends instead of hording cash, spinning off non-core businesses, setting up independent IP companies that would license back IP to the core company (and as an indpendent company, be required to license to anyone else at similar rates), and things like that. The problem comes in if one country follows this paradigm but then you have a company like Samsung that's over 20% of their host country's GDP and there's no appetite in the host country to break them up. How can your domestic companies that are limited in size compete with those of other countries with no limit on their size?

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I think what we’re seeing with “too big to fail” is that it also means “too big to succeed”.

Personally, I suspect that the 20 companies each at 1% GDP will out perform the 20% company in most or even all markets. (Setting aside the issue of relative GDP between nations.)

Often, the bazaar is more effective than the cathedral.

How about an automatic nationalisation in stead? Where you take companies which have grown too big out of the private ownership’s hands.

This is Hacker News, you can't say the N word here.

What precisely would that solve in this case?

Previous attempts to nationalize companies have not, as far as I know, been a shining success?

Or maybe do the the China model, where the board of directors gets some mandatory appointed board members...? ;)

Only 1/2 /s there...

Nationalization is corporate civil asset forfeiture.

This is just a lazy attempt to tie one thing to another, unpopular thing. What is the comparison here aside from "I don't like both"? In what sense is nationalization "corporate civil asset forfeiture"?

Not all nationalization is uncompensated, even in the real world. Further, you can imagine very fair ways, long term, to nationalize companies by e.g. requiring them to pay a wealth tax in the form of equity.

> nationalization: the transfer of a major branch of industry or commerce from private to state ownership or control

> civil asset forfeiture: enables a government to seize property and other assets belonging to persons suspected of committing a crime

The suggestion being that being wildly successful should be a crime.

Won’t someone think of the poor corporations D;

Changing the ownership does not address the problem, which is market concentration. You're still left with a company with too much power. That aside, look at the historical data. Nationalization has generally been disastrous and leads to all sorts of other pathologies.

Too dangerous unless it's a service that should be a vital government service.

You do not want your government to basically have a permanent monopoly on everything. This just gives power to authoritarian to rise.

Democracy allows authrotarians to rise in and of itself. Recent ones include Orban, Erdogan and Trump. Historical ones include, yes I know, Mussolini and Hitler.

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