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by sunshinelackof 2631 days ago
Corporations insulate individual actors from the market in return for a corporate wage. The baker enters the market to pursue his own interests, but when USA Bread Corp. hires thousands of bakers, those bakers are no longer perusing their own interests but instead the interests of the shareholders of USA Bread Corp.

With this perspective it's reasonable to expect that a corporation that has every available advantage over the independent worker should serve and improve some common good.

1 comments

And when bakers hire an assistants, those assistants are no longer perusing their own interest but instead the interest of the bakers.

The scale is different, but generally scale alone does not change the ethical or moral designation of an action.

Even so the relation isn't simply a matter of scale. Corporations can do a lot things that people cannot. Notably, corporations can live for hundreds of years, some maybe forever. Simply put it would be nearly impossible for a baker to compete directly with a corporation in the same market. By contrast the baker's assistant could directly compete with the baker given the time and resources.
This is patent nonsense. At least here in the US, bakeries are overwhelmingly small single retail shops. Independent coffee shops are thriving despite Starbucks. Small businesses with <100 employees employ 35% of Americans.

Corporations have diseconomies of scale too. If they didn't ycombinator wouldn't exist.

>At least here in the US, bakeries are overwhelmingly small single retail shops.

How did you come to that conclusion? My reading of the market data shows the opposite.

https://www.bakeryandsnacks.com/Article/2018/10/31/Industry-...

Maybe you think retail shops that finish off parbaked goods are actually mom-and-pop shops?