[AnthonyMouse]

> If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.

Consider the alternatives to this.

The first is that great works are being accomplished without anyone being in charge of them. People invent alternating current and land on the moon in a completely decentralized manner with no one leading the effort and no one making a larger contribution than anyone else. Not the thing where everyone gets to try but only one out of a million succeeds but rather some other thing where everyone is a fungible cog and you can't identify anyone as being the lynchpin or anyone else as not pulling their weight, and yet the great works still happen.

The second is that great works are not being accomplished.

The first one seems implausible. The second one seems bad.

[Atlas667]

What are you talking about?

I don't think authority is bad. What we're talking about isn't purely organizational, its economical. Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.

Hierarchy can be an abstraction of group decision making and not a relationship to the products of labor (as it is now).

Or do you think people will only do things if others own the products of their labor? Would it be impossible to exist as a society without a small group of people owning the products of millions of peoples labor?

Like I said with my original comment our current notion of great men is mostly a political fabrication by the rich. The rich being the people who own the media outlets we consume, the publishing houses, the internet, the people who own the vast majority of the things we need. They have the power to influence our morality through information culling, exposure and/or volume. Thus they have birthed the modern idea of "great men". "Great men" as they exist today are not great by us, they are great by them.

Do you think these forms that currently exist are the end form of human organization? These forms breed too many ills to be able to last forever, monetary corruption IS the real manifestation of these forms of human organization.

[AnthonyMouse]

Hierarchy is someone being at the top. Who really freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln or all the people who elected him and then fought as solders to win the ensuing war?

> Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.

These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions, which is to say competitive markets rather than oligopolies or government central planning. And that is going to result in large companies and big personalities -- it's only a problem when they become so large that they no longer have adequate competition, which is something that happens well after the point that they have leaders whose names people know.

[Atlas667]

Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy. Both of them freed the slaves.

> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.

There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.

> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...

Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy.

This is sort of like saying that an oligopoly isn't a monopoly. Technically true but not a solution to the problem.

The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

> Both of them freed the slaves.

But only one of them ever gets credit for it.

> If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen?

There are two ways to frame this.

The first is, you're in charge of your portfolio and the manager is just your employee, so the one at the top is you, but then you're only in charge of your own money and not anyone else's.

The second is, retail investors are unsophisticated and lack the understanding necessary to hold portfolio managers to account, so the managers engage in shell games to steal from the investors and buy themselves yachts and otherwise act against the investors' interests. In which case they're at the top and they're autocrats.

> Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us?

Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

The inherent problem here is that if you have centralized power structures of any kind, Machiavellian opportunists will try to capture them for their own ends. What you need is a structure of government that prevents that from happening. It's nominally supposed to look like a government constrained in what it can do (checks and balances and enumerated powers) to prevent it from having the authority to issue competition-destroying regulations in the event it gets captured, and therefore reduce the incentive to capture it. But still having the authority to enforce antitrust rules, to prevent the same thing from happening in private markets.

We don't actually have that. A lot of the original checks and balances were removed by populists in the early 20th century so now the US federal government is thoroughly captured and in turn issues thousands of competition-destroying regulations and doesn't meaningfully enforce antitrust laws. But the only thing to do is fix that, because what else is there?

[Atlas667]

> The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

Why not? Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.

Most direct decisions don't even need to go all the way up. There could be a period of determination and direct voting, followed by a final plan that will be enacted and this is what is spread throughout the whole govt.

It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.

> Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government. So no capitalism, because like I said, and has been evidenced, capitalism is just oligopoly with extra steps.

So, yes to actual people ownership, but no to individual ownership. As individual or small group ownership leads to having interests that go against your society, incentivizing corruption for profits.

This way we can all benefit from the goods of production, we can all have an interest in keeping production going and making it better, as it increases our pay, and the corruption incentives are subdued by our collective vested interest.

This is logically the only way to solve this power imbalance which stems from the organization of production and not any mental faculties like morality or ideological leanings. This, of course, requires a culture of collective ownership if you want to keep your society free. This is also socialism.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.

The reason direct democracy doesn't work at national scale is that once you've diluted someone's vote by enough (i.e. there are 100 million voters instead of 100 voters), everyone knows their vote has a negligible effect on the outcome and therefore lacks the incentive to spend time researching every individual issue. And at the same time, a larger government is in charge of a wider jurisdiction, and then people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.

The attempt to paper over this is to get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite afflicted with the principal-agent problem and you get a corrupt/captured government.

> It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.

None of that is going to fix the problem that most people don't have time to read about all the details of fisheries rules or the economics of operating a power grid, and then the people who show up are the people with the goal of corrupting the process for their own interests.

Notice that this has nothing to do with capitalism. If the head of the computer science division -- a government department -- wants to do AI stuff, and the most expedient way to generate the power to do it right away is to bring decommissioned coal power plants back online, whether that happens depends on whether the bureau in charge of that has more political power than the one in charge of protecting the environment. There is no magic that makes the trade off go away or requires the alternative you would have preferred to be chosen when people who are better at political games want something else.

> I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government.

That isn't a thing.

Suppose you have a piece of property, like a house or a phone. If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's. You come home and there is a stranger sleeping in your daughter's bed and you can't even object to it. If you have naked pictures of you and your spouse on your phone, those belong to everybody. Obviously this isn't the thing that anybody wants.

But as soon as you put anyone in charge of deciding who gets to use what, those people are the privileged elite. They go gerrymander the districts so they can stay in office even after doing things you don't like, or use their existing control over media outlets to convince people to vote for their continued control over media outlets etc.

"Socialism" does nothing against that. It makes it worse; it's why the USSR was a dystopia.

For markets to work you need them to be competitive, which requires you to limit government corruption, and the best way we know how to do that is limited government so that the government doesn't have the power to do the things most strongly associated with corruption, like imposing fixed mandatory fees/costs or onerous regulatory barriers to entry. And that mostly works when you actually do it.

For a command economy to work you need some way to limit government corruption even while the government is fully enmeshed in every aspect of the economy, which no one has ever managed to pull off and there is not even any apparent means to do it.