Of course he would. Big corporations can buy things and sell things, but they can't legally send out men with guns and dogs to simply take what they decide they need.
There is a necessity for someone to have the men, guns and dogs -- even if they only figurative. But men with guns and dogs are dangerous and so whoever has them needs to be strictly controlled and supervised. The ability to acquire more such men, guns and dogs needs to be resisted as much as possible, because it is very hard to claw back.
> Of course he would. Big corporations can buy things and sell things, but they can't legally send out men with guns and dogs to simply take what they decide they need.
Well, sure, because we have a government to stop them.
>Of course he would. Big corporations can buy things and sell things, but they can't legally send out men with guns and dogs to simply take what they decide they need.
No, they can just buy media to influence public opinion or buy politicians and influence policy, and have them send the men with guns.
But I think we mostly agree with that.
Only I don't think the solution is less government (a smaller government is even easier for big corporations to have power on), but more vigilant citizens participating in politics.
I personally suspect that there are no strategies that are stable over multiple generations. Otherwise one would have emerged. Basically that there is a kind of political thermodynamics that destroys all nations, no matter how great.
Peter Turchin has developed an interesting family of theories about the rise and fall of great powers. He wrote a popular account, War and Peace and War, which I reviewed here:
Hacking government and hacking software are different things. You can't offer TCP/IP $100M to leak you some private keys from the server.
The smaller the government, the more value you could get per bribe (more power located in individuals) and the easier it would be to do it (smaller governments presumably lack layers of security measures against bribery). In case of extremely small government a big corporation could buy it out entirely.
In smaller government there is one and only one person you come to. If this person does not accept your bribe (or "lobbying") then you have to play by the rules.
In larger government there are a lot of competing bodies with vague job descriptions. You can honey them all with varying results. You can oil "layers of security" as well so those rarely help.
Don't confuse big/small government with big/small country. Surely there are banana republics, but I can't imagine you can buy out government of Iceland that easily.
The most minimal government possible is reduced to just the scary parts. That's the thing. A smaller government is no less scary in a police/military sense, unless you actually make the military and police smaller.
The irony is that everyone who goes on about a marginal tax increase, social security or some land-use regulations being tyranny, all of those same exact people are the biggest cheerleaders for a less restrained military.
You can downsize military as well. It's easier with smaller government because there is one person responsible, if they say we downsize military, we downsize it.
Compare it with having a dozen of committees with everyone in it being mediocre and fearing change, fearing initiative, fearing that something will happen after the downsize.
Committees are good at reacting (one loud incident -> wham you've got new regulations) and bad at acting (runaway project will run forever with nobody having balls to shut it down).
Well, it is not very common for them to do that anymore, anyway. There are plenty of counterexamples if we allow historical examples. The East India Company being the biggest and most obvious example.
The majority of troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were not US Military - predominantly PMCs - so I don't think it's correct to say that corporations do not have the capability to wage real, physical war.
Those aren't facts. That is all speculation from 2 years ago. There is one fact in that article, the fact that there are now 19,000 armed security contractors. This number is much, much lower than the amount of troops in the country. There are a lot of contractors, but those are contract workers, not PMC employees. This is a huge difference than the point you're trying to make. Laundry workers and cooks don't wage war for the government.
There is a necessity for someone to have the men, guns and dogs -- even if they only figurative. But men with guns and dogs are dangerous and so whoever has them needs to be strictly controlled and supervised. The ability to acquire more such men, guns and dogs needs to be resisted as much as possible, because it is very hard to claw back.