[phyzix5761]

Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority shareholders for Visa are the retirement accounts of regular people and retail investors. We want the public to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.

[ben_w]

Allow me to explain by analogy:

  Why do we have this idea that non-democratic centrally-planned governments are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority stakeholders for state insurance, state healthcare, state pensions, state police, etc. are regular people. People calling for "democracy" want the public collectively to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money etc., but when you ask people in democracies if the electorate should take the *blame* when they pick a stupid government, they always say no and look at you appalled as if you'd suggest eating doggie biscuits.

To put it another way, why should society collectively make our pensions 1% better when the trade-off that entire categories of legal work, that our democracies have decided should remain legal, are made impossible to perform by the choices of a handful of private businesses that are big enough to set rules without being accountable to the democracies they operate within?

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people?

Because they are. The corporate structure as well as the internal and external systems in our political/legal/economic systems are designed specifically to make corporations work as economic engines where risk, responsibility, and liability are distributed and diluted to the point it they pretty much evaporate. This means that corporations can do things like commit full on crimes, without any real person going to jail. Why? Because they are disconnected from real people by design.

[RankingMember]

I think this is a core reason behind the amount of public elation seen when the United Healthcare CEO was killed: people were happy to see an example of the piercing of a corporate structure carefully constructed to shield leadership from personal responsibility for its decisions.