[cpursley]

I'm not sure why you're getting down votes. The police power of the state is multitudes more powerful than corporations (who unless are outright monopolies, will do everything in their power to keep you as a happy customer since you have a choice).

[ionised]

The only reason corporations haven't behaved in this way is that at the moment, they can't.

Given the power, they absolutely can, and will.

[chillacy]

No need to speculate, just look at the past behavior of the era of the East India Trading Company and you’ll see that corporations have fought in wars, applied force, basically ran the Atlantic slave trade, etc.

[cpursley]

How would it be in a corporations interest to abuse either their employers or customers in a competitive market? Last time I checked, I have many product and employment choices (with the exception of select industries ruled by cronyism). Last time I checked, Stalinist USSR murdered far more people than McDonalds or Ford.

[_khau]

> How would it be in a corporations interest to abuse either their employers or customers in a competitive market?

Ask AT&T and Verizon. Or Facebook. Or Monsanto. Or Nestle why they behave the way they do towards their customers.

You guys have WAY too much faith the benign passivity of publicly-traded companies. There is a LOT of money to be made in price-fixing, cartels and customer abuse.

And I'm not sure why you're bringing the USSR into this. This is almost a Godwin-like reprieve for those with no awareness of the 10-20 million people a year who die as a result of capitalism and capitalist policies, globally.

How about the US itself? It has murdered almost 20 million people since the end of World War 2 in its efforts to maintain its economic hegemony and take revenge on countries that leave the petrodollar.

The US, most aggressive and expansionist nation of the 20th and 21st centuries, is a capitalist country that can't even provide many of its citizens with clean drinking water.

"Capitalism is the worst system, apart from all the others" is a common refrain amongst those capitalism actually serves. They make no mention of the lives destroyed when a capitalist wants what you have.

But we move off topic.

[cpursley]

I don't disagree with the bad behavior by the US since WWII (and period before it as well).

But you'll need to provide a source for:

> the 10-20 million people a year who die as a result of capitalism and capitalist policies

And are you so sure those are capitalistic policies, or cronyism (the two are often conflated by the hn crowd)?

[_khau]

I'll find sources for my numbers after work, but I recall:

- 8 million due to lack of clean water

- 7.5 million due to hunger

- 3 million from preventable disease

- the millions killed by 'friendly dictators' and their regimes, like Pinochet.

- the unrecorded deaths as a result of national or global depressions, bankruptcies and debt (don't know where to get the numbers for this though)

Capitalism is a global system at this point, apart from the odd hold-out like North Korea etc. A lot of the deaths from lack of clean water and disease are attributable to things like the privatisation of water supply in Bolivia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization_in_Bolivia

Then we have Chiquita, Coca-Cola etc. hiring miltias to crack down on labour movements in Central and South America resulting in countless murders. How did they get away with it?

Most of the deaths caused by capitalism are due something called 'structural violence':

It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.

So, clean water, healthcare and access to medicine. Something that capitalism has failed spectacularly at.

If you're going to say the crony capitalism we have now isn't capitalism then that's as much a No True Scotsman fallacy as people who say true communism has never been tried.

What we have now is capitalism by the very definition of the word. The cronyism inherent in it isn't some transforming influence, it's part of the core.

I was going to write up a massive post but this guys seems to sum it up pretty well if you fancy a read:

https://www.quora.com/What-has-killed-more-people-communism-...

[cpursley]

Ok then, what's your suggestion for fixing this or an alternative system?

[itronitron]

>> in a competitive market

Not all markets are competitive, and corporations that are operating at the state level are often effectively monopolies.

[cpursley]

I don't disagree. But tech is one of, if not the most, competitive sector right now.

[nilskidoo]

Let's have AWS accidentally decrypt a few more dozen terabytes of DoD datum and then decide.

[HumanDrivenDev]

yeah I thought I might drop in and make a well reasoned point in good faith. the shower of down-votes shows me I shouldn't have bothered (:

HN is a bit of an echo chamber, unfortunately.

[cpursley]

Yeah, for a place with such a high concentration of smart folks, its more often than not, about the "feelz" on here...