hal@finney.org wrote:
> Yes, that makes sense; organizing in a group amplifies your power, for
> good or evil. However corporations and other groups are not inherently
> evil or wrong, any more than are other power amplification systems like
> science and technology.
>
> > A lot of evil contributed to big corporations seem to consist of
> > situations where two parties voluntarily cooporate on some effort, but
> > because one of the parties is in a significantly weaker bargaining
> > position (because of market conditions, lack of information, or
> > whatever), most of the benefit deriving from the effort goes to the other
> > party (i.e. shareholders of the corporation). Is it evil to take
> > advantage of other people, even though they would prefer that you did?
>
> IMO it is not evil to engage in interactions which are voluntary for
> all parties. As I understand these situations, the "victim" actually
> has his situation improved, but just not as much as the victimizer.
> However I know that many people have a different intuition.
Absolutely! The bottom line is that a corporation, because it is bigger has
the power of both money and armies of lawyers to screw everyone else. Sure
many companies are not malign. But what about all the ones that are? The
problem that you continue to overlook is that the malign companies are often
able to get away with their 'evil' acts because they have power to pay or
legalize the problem away, as is now with the DMCA.
Here is my point - in an idealistic legal system you have an arbitrary case of
Person X vs. Corp X where justice prevails every time. But instead the legal
system almost always favors the corporation, because they have more people,
more money, and more lawyers. That means that in any legal case, the
probability of victory always sides with the one with the most money.
To reiterate what I said earlier - the biggest bug in our so-called free-market
is that everything is up for grabs (freedom, justice), where he with the most
money wins.
Paul Hughes
http://planetp.cc/
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