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by gylterud 1106 days ago
How about an automatic nationalisation in stead? Where you take companies which have grown too big out of the private ownership’s hands.
6 comments

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.
What precisely would that solve in this case?

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

This is Hacker News, you can't say the N word here.
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.
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;
Or maybe do the the China model, where the board of directors gets some mandatory appointed board members...? ;)

Only 1/2 /s there...