In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils?
The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
Overall national wealth and power shrink under monopoly super corporations, that is the reason it is a matter of public policy in the first place. If you go back and review the major antitrust actions of the 20th century, each one was followed by an explosion of market-creating innovation: Standard Oil, Bell Telephone, even Microsoft. Look even further back, and many national economies were organized around a few state-sponsored monopolies e.g. the East India Company. They all lost ground to economies with more numerous and competitive companies, most notably the U.S.
i think it could be argued that sure, 20 Googles would be better for US power, yes. why wouldn’t it be? it would drive more innovation which likely would only increase our influence on multiple levels.
there could be more reason to argue it would absolutely be more secure—if any of these tech giants or one of the people inside were to sell us out it could be very very bad. if one or two out of twenty were to sell us out, the damage is much much less severe.
not to mention we’re significantly stronger as a country when we have diversity of ideas leading to diversity in innovation which the dominance from a tiny few just entirely undermines.
As long as the state has power over Google (and it does, even if the media cycle presents it like they’re powerless), they can surveil billions of people, control populations, distribute propaganda.
Look how the US is able to spread it’s culture everywhere, cut off regimes, debank people it doesn’t like, all by controlling a few choke points.
Look how China uses its corporations to increase state power. The US does the same but with a few more carrots (lucrative govt contracts).
A mega corp means you can do your coercion behind closed doors rather than with sweeping regulations
> In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations?
I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're currently facing that isn't down in one way or another to some mega-entity acting against the public interest with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to fail."
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe them at face value, the current ruling party and administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
... but we have a lot of these supposed super-corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people, does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations are in fact far more worried about accessing China's market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do, and there's far more Chinese consumers than American ones.
Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean. It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.
I think the real lesson is that when you're the big player already benefiting from global free trade in virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country is... well. Fucking stupid?
I mean it largely depends how you define that. I can think of a lot of social ills the government isn't working to solve... poverty, houselessness, poor funding of schools in general, the ongoing deterioration of social programs, but I wouldn't say they're the cause of those issues?
Fact is when you scratch even fingernail deep on any of them you find the private sector, far more often than not. The welfare state is in tatters because numerous components of it have been privatized and are operated by contracted companies who are siphoning off substantial amounts of the utter pittance we dedicate to the problem itself, which means what gets to the people who need it is even more a pittance than it started as.
The houseless issue is perpetuated in part by local governments zoning restrictions and the myriad of issues around building them here, from supplies to labor availability, and also a substantial contributor is the fact that huge amounts of homes are being purchased by investment companies and hoarded either without people in them, or are rented out in which case worker's earned income is being siphoned off to those already far wealthier than they need to be.
Poor funding of schools is often due to a whole mess of factors relating both to how we as a society prioritize education (or don't, more often) and the fact that a school's funding is heavily dependent on property taxes around where it is operating, which means under served areas have less quality schools from the off, which means less educated people with less money to spend, which means less economic activity, which means less property taxes and so on and so forth.
And in all of these and many other problems you have the elephant in the room: lobbying. Corporations spend billions to lobby the government to do even less than it does about these and a bunch of other issues, chief among them to permit said corporations to hold more money, a solid portion of which can then be spent on yet more lobbying. And certainly the government and it's politicians aren't simply helpless patsies in that arrangement, I also would hold the people making the decisions to route that money far more responsible.
> only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
At a glance it seems this would only remain true so long as American interests and the interests of the corporation align. Which they do, up to a point.
The question then becomes where is the "triple point" between "A globally competitive USA", "Corporate oligarchy", and "Power to the people"? If such a balance can when exist
The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations