From a historical context, I do find it a bit odd this fear of "corporations". It's really difficult to argue that they function in any way as a cohesive group. Sure it can be argued that they're all profit seeking (some more than others) but the search of profits is done in such radically different ways.
If anything, the power of corporations has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think how difficult it's been for even politically authoritarian societies like China to maintain a control over what people hear/see/think). Fortune Magazine tracks the life of the average Fortune 500 company and it's been in steady decline. The dominance of any individual company is far from permanent and made even less so with continually falling barriers to entry.
The perverse irony is that larger firms like regulation because they're the most able to adapt to them and can use them to keep upstarts out.
"If anything, the power of witches has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think how difficult it's been for even politically authoritarian societies like China to maintain a control over what people hear/see/think). Fortune Magazine tracks the life of the average Fortune 500 witch and it's been in steady decline. The dominance of any individual witch is far from permanent and made even less so with continually falling barriers to entry." ;)
Of course, you meant the grandparent post. That means that you're saying that because witchcraft was seen as a threat to society in the Early Modern period (but _not_ the Medieval period, when the Papal Inquisition regarded witchcraft as a superstition, and referred anyone who brought them a witchcraft charge to Ye Olde Psychyatryste), and the witches were not a threat (although there were real witches -- Kieckhefer, Richard, _Magic in the Middle Ages_ (200)) -- again, because the witches (and the enormous number of innocents who were falsely killed as witches) were not a threat in the 17th Century, anything that anyone sees as a threat at the present day is similarly not a threat.
The right thing to do is to ask whether this particular possible threat is in fact a threat. I agree with your conclusion -- I think that the parent post is right, corporations are no longer the cohesive bloc that they were as late as the 1980s -- but I think you're doing it a disservice by using such a weak argument for it.
I know you're trying to be incendiary, and I don't think corporations are evil, but I will give you an example of corporations acting like witches. Look up redlining (implicates the government as well).
in a market the search for profit is the search for more efficiently serving aggregate preferences of consumers. allowing corporations to assume disproportionate control of the political process is almost assuredly a net improvement.
That's clearly false. A really simple example is antitrust legislation - if MS (or any other monopolistic organisation) were able to remove regulation on monopolies, you can be assured that they would, and that the effect on our society would be dramatically negative.
I don't know if it's "clearly false". Anti-trust/anti-competitive business practices are an area that personally make me uncomfortable but again, here too, companies are having increasingly difficult control over maintaining dominance if they don't provide the best products/services and focus instead on trying to suppress competitors (e.g. browser wars, high end computers - apple v pcs). I'd also be pretty uncomfortable with governments making the determination of what's "good" and "bad" as there have been some bizarre anti-trust rulings over the past few decades.
Even the Economist has clearly argued that being "pro-business' is not the same thing as being "pro-market".
Besides, I don't agree with you, because it doesn't take into account externalities. When "efficiency" takes the form of polluting the river because someone else will clean it up, it most assuredly is not a net improvement.
If anything, the power of corporations has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think how difficult it's been for even politically authoritarian societies like China to maintain a control over what people hear/see/think). Fortune Magazine tracks the life of the average Fortune 500 company and it's been in steady decline. The dominance of any individual company is far from permanent and made even less so with continually falling barriers to entry.
The perverse irony is that larger firms like regulation because they're the most able to adapt to them and can use them to keep upstarts out.