Comment Re:Sure, some access is bad (Score 1) 53
>On the other hand, for a corporation — operating in a reasonably free country — the best way to riches is through providing services and/or making goods, that people are willing to pay for.
This statement is guilty of the begging the question fallacy, in fact it's begging SEVERAL questions.
You are making numerous implicit assumptions which don't hold up to scrutiny.
1) You assume that "reasonably free country" is a representative example of the places where corporations operate, but most corporations today are global multinationals operating in all countries, and they love to make use of that by doing in the non-free countries all the evil things that they can't (as easily) do in the free countries.
2) You claim this is the best way for a corporation to get rich, but you offer no evidence to support that claim. That's not rational thought, that's a religious belief without any basis in fact. A mere moment's critical thinking and you'll be able to come up with thousands of ways a corporation can, at any moment, make more money than it could by doing that- and history is filled with examples, EVERY SINGLE DAY. A big news one recently was when Oracle decided the best way to riches was to take the MONEY for providing a service to the taxpayers of Portland without actually providing the service, and giving just a token piece of junk instead. Now when you or I do that, we get charged with fraud and go to jail, Oracle knew they would only face a lawsuit which would take many years to go to trail where it will be heard by a judge who probably won't understand the arguments and even if they lose they'll get a slap on the wrist because folks like you have destroyed the tort system. So the basic claim is clearly not true at all times for all transactions, in fact, for most corporations it's probably only true in a tiny minority of cases. You can try defend them on the basis of fearing government and since the other party here was the government but that's not logical. Logically you should say "if they are prepared to scam EVEN the government I fear so much with impunity, what stops them from scamming any and every other customer in the world ?"
3) You assume that, even when 1 and 2 are both true (which is now a very small number of cases) the people in charge of the corporations will always and without exception be sufficiently competent to KNOW this. That they will never end up doing something that makes less money but is more evil simply because made a bad decision. But corporations make bad decisions all the time, sometimes it's incompetence, sometimes it's a lack of perfect information or both - but you can't assume that even when both conditions hold and this really IS the best option the corporations will never end up doing something else because they didn't make the best CHOICE.
Enron made some really bad choices - and the directors ended up deciding the best way to riches was to pay themselves massive bonusses out of the company's debt pool less than a day before they announced the company was bankrupt and over a thousand people were suddenly and surprisingly devoid of an income.
4) But even in the vanishingly small number of cases where all three the above conditions hold you are assuming that the corporation will ONLY do the "best" thing to riches, and not the 2 best things, or the 3 best things or the 20 best things - of which ONLY the first option was one that isn't harming somebody else. PG&E was providing electricity to customers - a services they paid for while at the SAME time improving their bottom line by not paying to clean up toxic waste properly and dumping it in people's drinking water instead.
5) You assume that the way a product or service is provided to one customer cannot harm another.
Facebook is the perfect example here - their product is private information for targetted advertising, the users aren't the customers, they are the product that facebook is selling and facebook has had a trackrecord of numerous incredibly evil things done with that data. There is a reason they demand real names - it makes the product more valuable, the people it HARMS aren't that important - as long as they can be assuaded with empty press releases.
Facebook is in the BUSINESS of selling private information to the highest bidder, do you think for one second they will turn DOWN A purchase offer when the highest bidder is the NSA ?
And that is just the first line of reasoning, it doesn't even consider the possibilities that arise when companies start interfering in the political system. Like bribing the government to give you a protected monopoly, bail you out when you fuck up (after stealing millions of people's homes from them) etc. etc.
It's easy to point the finger solely at government for those but it's also false, if the government didn't exist the companies would do the SAME things, they would just be cutting out the middle-man, to prevent such things you have to restrict the ability of companies to interfere with politics, preferably to zero.
Campaign finance reform would do far more to reduce corruption in both government AND private sector than all the small-government policies in the world ever could.
The problem with your religion is that literally every single day it is NOT what actually HAPPENS. The reason it doesn't happen is because your belief is based on assertions you think are self evident but they are, in fact, quite easily proven to be entirely false.