[ExI] stossel on optimism

[Stefano Vaj]

On 5 January 2012 21:06, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Unless and except where corps effectively become governments.
> The line is not so clear as it might seem.
>

Yes. The "failure of planned economies" has become a platitude since at
least the eighties. But while markets may have other arguments in their
favour, I believe to have already remarked once that perhaps the failure
had to do with the attempt to manage something as large and complicate as
the USSR with pens, pencils, file cabinets, pocket calculators and
punch-card machines.

The real example of planned economies today are not the very few socialist
economies still around in not-so-developed countries, but large
conglomerates, whose internal workings are by no means based on market
mechanisms (the few attempts for intracorporate emulation of them, see
Aker's IBS, having been unqualified disasters).

Now, even without their hypothetical "seasteading", it is perfectly
imaginable even in the most libertarian scenario that one of them could
well assume a role even more pervasive than, say, XIX century governments.
Let us imagine that it ends up employing most or all of the members of a
community, who might in turn be shareholders, and/or consumers of the
product, thereof... From that to the assumption of government-like
features, there is just one small step.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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