Does limiting government limit the powers of the wealthy? It would limit one channel for them to exercise their power, but other channels like corporate control would exist.
I believe we are going to find it increasingly essential to view corporations as a second government that has a particular relationship with the nominal one.
The choice of opting out only exists where competition exists. Without a government to keep corporations in check, your ability to opt out would evaporate.
A powerful government is also really good at using its power to increase competition, encourage competitors, protect new comers, and so on. And a powerful government in command of its people will do more of that.
What government "power" is required to 'encourage competitors'? If there is business opportunity the market will attract participants all by itself without any need for government intervention.
In my experience, government incentives are generally misguided and force mis-allocation of resources. That is to say the government is distorting the market to favor activity that wouldn't otherwise be attractive to a business.
Yes, imagine how much more competition there would be on the pharmaceutical market, say, if governments didn’t discourage innovation by demanding that products be tested and safe. Think of barriers to entry it creates in the chemical industry that waste must be discarded of in highly regulated (and expensive!) ways. Not to think of air travel, which is so regulated that I doubt we’ll ever see a startup in that market ever again.
/s
This seems to me to be the trap of a false choice between regulatory power without bounds vs no regulation at all. A much more interesting discussion would be about the proper scope of regulation.
To take your example regarding pharmaceuticals, instead of mandating a particular regime of testing and efficacy, why couldn't the government require products that have not passed that particular hurdle be labeled as such?
What sorts of instances of corporate control are you thinking of here? Most examples that come to my mind involve corporations wielding the power of the state over people.
If you're engaged in a voluntary business relationship with a corporation, they're going to have their own terms, reasonable or not. And yes, the more asymmetric the relationship, the less reasonable the terms.
Fortunately, working for any particular corporation is voluntary. And thankfully, it seems that sunlight has disinfected these specific extreme practices. Hadn't heard of either.
Off-topic: This is the first I've encountered explicit citation of negative/positive sources. I like it.
Control of mineral resources, for example. Mining and oil/gas companies are already some of the largest corporations in existence. These are capital-intensive businesses where small entities often can't survive market downturns. Small resource owners get acquired by bigger ones during periods of financial distress, or juniors pre-emptively try to join forces with established companies as soon as they have a proven project to develop. The "natural" tendency, in absence of limits imposed by states, would be to reap maximum economies of scale, control over pricing, and resilience to downturn by combining extractive businesses without limit. A handful of giant corporations could acquire a commanding position over every mineral commodity required by industrial civilization. OPEC could be a very effective price-setter indeed were it a transnational corporation with unified ownership. Its monopolistic aims are actually hobbled by the diverse ownership of the oil fields of its members.
If you picture eliminating the state altogether, including its enforcement of property rights and contracts, then I concede that the powers attendant to wealth would no longer involve a de jure state. I think that the powers of concentrated wealth would remain nonetheless. Wealth would hire private guards to exclude others from their mines instead of using the law enforcement apparatus of a state, for example.
> Its monopolistic aims are actually hobbled by the diverse ownership of the oil fields of its members.
So, "competition"? Cartels in general are unstable because of these internal competitive forces.
I get that corporations with large market share can set prices in the short term. But every resource has a substitute. Even oil. So even price-setters have to operate within limits or risk their power being marginalized.
I am picturing the elimination of the state. And I agree that one can enforce his own property rights.
Where market competition exists it's effective in limiting prices and spurring innovation. But the natural tendency of successful businesses is to minimize exposure to competition. That can happen by buying the competition even if there's no state. (You can argue that regulatory capture is how successful businesses minimize competition by using the state, and I'm sympathetic to that argument, but it's also just another example of the tendency to eschew competition.)
OPEC is frequently divided against itself in terms of production targets; ExxonMobil is not. In a world without states there's no antitrust regulation preventing ExxonMobil from acquiring a market share equivalent to present OPEC, then exercising that pricing power with more effective discipline.
I am picturing the elimination of the state. And I agree that one can enforce his own property rights.
An entity that answers to no higher authority and enforces its own territorial claims with force is a de facto state. I understand and sympathize with many arguments for personal liberty over the power of the state. I don't understand the implication that unbounded private power is more trustworthy. It's an affront to liberty for the State of Delaware to exist and enforce its laws at the point of a gun, but it's ok if a corporation or family can acquire a Delaware-sized, Delaware-shaped parcel of land and enforce its decrees at gunpoint within those borders? That may not fairly represent your point of view. I have previously had arguments where self-proclaimed anarchocapitalists affirmed that it's fine for a small group of people to wield power equivalent to a state government as long as it's not called a state.
> but it's ok if a corporation or family can acquire a Delaware-sized, Delaware-shaped parcel of land and enforce its decrees at gunpoint within those borders?
Since "acquire" implies voluntary vacation of the premises by those who previously owned and occupied it, yes, exactly. I don't see a particularly problem with that scenario.
Consider the British East India Conpany, which at its peak controlled a vast territory and had an army larger than the British government’s.
For smaller, more common examples, look at the history of company towns and union busting.
Companies these days exert control by manipulating the power of the state because the state usually won’t allow them to exert control more directly. Nothing says it must stay this way.