notquitetrue

If you intentionally undercapitalize a business to avoid foreseeable liabilities, the courts can pierce the corporate veil. Otherwise, limited liability is thought to provide the necessary incentives for widespread equity ownership and investment and desirable economic risk taking. In any case, limited liability is not a constitutional right and could be modified or abolished. Free speech and freedom to petition the government are guaranteed rights though. The government can’t just circumvent the first amendment by making waiver of those rights so economically necessary that every business has to do it to be competitive. The courts don’t buy that logic nor should they.

Huh? Starlink is in the US and his right to operate physical satellites is under US jurisdiction. So even acknowledging this middle-school observation of yours that governments can in fact confiscate property, the only leverage foreign governments have over Starlink is the right to deny him permission to transmit into their territory. (Even then, only because the US mostly respects international agreements on this. The US lets Elon transmit into some countries like Iran without their permission and there’s not much they can do about it).

Part of my point is they’re not that different in practice. A law that bans your way of making money is worse than a lawsuit. And in a difficult tort lawsuit, the judges are making a lot of the same kinds of value determinations that a legislator does, such as whether the risk of harm from a practice is justified by the utility of it.

No, the idea is that existing businesses will lobby for the government to prop them up. Politicians are inclined to think it’s reasonable to protect jobs and such. But maybe if they let the business fail, what rises from the ashes would be even better.

So should all joint influence efforts be banned or just ones that have economically productive elements? Forming groups and trying to influence politicians is the only way to get things done. They can’t listen to 300 million atomized individuals. Are you suggesting the NAACP should be illegal?

The solution isn’t limits on people’s rights to debate and to advocate for their interests, it’s limits on the power of the thousands of elected rats running around DC and state capitals and city councils. We need less politics which means more centralization in the federal government and more power for the President.

Fwiw I think the bigger issue is that existing businesses are overrepresented relative to the businesses that don’t exist yet, or that would exist if rules were changed in a way contrary to the interests of some existing businesses.

The corporation is the legal embodiment of our joint interests. It is the only reasonable place to put the lobbying efforts. The silly thing you propose would in fact be workable for a small number of owners like this hypothetical, but how would a public corporation with diffuse ownership engage with the government under this proposal?

It’s really no different than a company defending itself in court. A legislative or regulatory proposal can be just as confiscatory or punitive, or have as many unexpected consequences, as a lawsuit. In both cases, the business needs to lawyer up and represent its interests.

Are you making an argument against supply and demand here? I’m trying to figure out what basic principles of economics I need to explain before I further engage.

Say my friends and I own a business that will be affected by something Congress is considering. So we hire a lobbyist to go inform the politicians about that. How is that not people exercising their First Amendment rights? Our livelihood depends on what they do. It is a major part of my life. It seems like your view is that you are only “people” when you’re not engaged in economic production, that human beings only exist in leisure.

You’re not entitled to use Elon’s satellites. And in reality, the service is aggressively priced. It seems they only started breaking even a few months ago.

Also, costs are not geographically uniform. They need regulatory permission to operate in a country, and some countries make that easier than others. Sometimes market access means paying lots of tax too.

I gather they are taking a loss on user terminals and hoping to recover it on monthly payments.

You’re forgetting the part where they launch and operate thousands of satellites and many earth stations, as well as manufacture the user terminals. Oh and they have to write the software that makes the whole thing work.

>Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it. In govt it ends up on CSPAN.

The other difference is that the business has to compete with other businesses and turn a profit (or convince investors it will eventually turn a profit) to survive. In any given year they might get away with waste. If you’re a mega corp in an oligopolistic business, maybe even a decade or two. But eventually, you live or die by the bottom line. By contrast, a government keeps existing no matter how poorly it manages its finances. Look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Greece, etc.