I've never seen a politician 'held accountable' for doing something I don't like in a democracy.

I'll pick out George W. Bush who (with massive public support) charged in to the Middle East, glassed one or two countries, set the US up for 20 years so far of ruinously expensive wars. He served two full terms. I might have seen an article sometime recently that he had taken up painting and is pretty good at it.

What level of accountability am I expecting him to be held to for that? I think those may have been some of the worst political actions taken in my lifetime. When you say "less accountable" - what do you think shows a democratic government being held accountable? I like democracy, but I don't think the government is accountable.

Corporations are actually held accountable. If they screw up, the owners can lose out massively. Executives too through incentive programs.

Corporations are only accountable if they fail to make money. Unless they're too big to fail, in which case they're accountable to no one.

It's all well and good to pick a blatant example of a politician doing evil and getting away with it; on the flip side I see politicians at the local level losing re-election for doing things their constituents don't like. In any event, I'd much prefer democratic accountability over corporate accountability when it comes to entities who have the ability to take away my freedom or deprive me of life.

Corporations absolutely are held to account. The US is holding hearings on the tech giants at the moment. Apple is in court over the App Store. Microsoft got smacked down over anti-trust. Banks and google have been fined billions of dollars.

Theres a reasonable case that these sanctions were not sufficient, but that's just an opinion. Other people's opinions differ. Sorting that our is what democracy is for, but we cant always expect it to produce the results you or I personally prefer.

We might be in furious agreement on a couple of points here. I've been choosing my words fairly carefully - I want some sort of justification of the idea that the government or anyone in it is somehow accountable for anything.

If accountability means everyone sort of shrugged and moves on over the single worst barrage of decisions I've observed in US politics in the last 30 years then either it isn't accountable or being accountable is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure the government is unaccountable by design - it does whatever the polity wants that day, and then there aren't any meaningful consequences if the idea worked out or not. Democracy represents the best thing we have, but I don't accept that it represents accountability. Good people can get voted out and replaced by better people, for example. Or term limits kick in. They represent the electorate changing its mind on what approach to try in a no-fault-implied manner.

Corporations actually have a built in accountability - if they don't have customers onboard with the idea that they are providing goods and services effectively then they disappear and their owners get hit right in the financials. I can see that in the companies I deal with - they do what I want quickly and with no fuss by and large. They are accountable to me - if I don't like the service I go elsewhere and that is their loss. I can't see it in government, and I'm not seeing anyone in this thread who has managed to lay it out for me. Most of the politicians representing me I would dearly like to replace for their many and obvious failings. They certainly aren't accountable to me, and I don't know anyone who they are accountable to or I'd spend more time trying to argue my views to that person.

Do they? The continued existence of most American telecoms and insurers would appear to prove otherwise.

Really, the issue with American politics is that presidential incumbents rarely get challenged by their own parties, and the two-party system is terrible for providing any sort of nuanced choice. Bush's legacy was truly punished in 2008, when America elected the most serious looking anti-Bush candidate running by one of the largest electoral and popular vote shares in recent history. (Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain were successfully painted as not anti-Bush enough during that campaign season.) And generally speaking American democracy doesn't outright prosecute former leaders, because generally speaking the government does not like the appearance of political retribution.

John Kerry was also not a great candidate to have run with an anti-Iraq campaign plank, and 2004 was too soon for most of the country to have soured on the war.

Corporations are legal fictions that exist for the purpose of preventing their owners from being held accountable.

Concentrating capital to achieve big projects that founders wouldn't be able to fund themselves is clearly beneficial for economic growth

Untrue; the law of partnerships, which is older than corporations, already allowed people to contribute capital to a goal and have their respective rights governed by law. The legal arrangements are different in a corporation, those differences centering around the limitation of liability—the freedom from accountability—provided to the investors.

That freedom from accountability is the central focus of the corporate form. And it's arguably an aberrant path dependency; had we had limited partnerships first, the idea of business form where no one is ultimately accountable for the liabilities of the business—rather than one to which investors could contribute with limited liability while the active principals remained fully accountable—might never have seemed like a good idea, even to the investor class.

You still don't have a legal instrument (a share) that you can freely transact and has attached rights.

It's maybe important to realize that when the amounts get bigger and the projects riskier that the personal liability becomes meaningless.

What happens if you are personally liable for a 10 million eur debt... well your life is over, but also nobody is going to actually get their money back from you cause you are not able to pay that.

I think it's quite rational for a society to say that you will lose everything you have in that business, but the investors/debtors can only pursue you up-to this point. Especially when taking on riskier projects that require lots of capital.

For example, Carly Fiorina wiped half the value of HP away but was given a massive payout to leave the company. I’ve seen estimates it was in region of $42m.

That said, the US does have term limits to at least blunt the damage when the balance of power and even impeachment don't suffice.

So you're arguing that we don't need to hold GWB to account. Fair enough, there were mitigating circumstances. But then in what sense is the government accountable for anything?

Corporations and government are both held to account through the courts, I suppose. But the government will often change the rules so it isn't accountable (eg, wiretapping scandals), so that is a weaker form of accountability than a corporation faces. Is there an actual meaty argument to the idea that governments are more accountable than corporations? Because I'm drawing blanks on the times when a government was held to account for anything in a manner that wouldn't also apply to corporate actions.

Given that record, I think there is a better argument for putting him in charge of the US healthcare system than putting the people in overseeing the healthcare system in charge of Amazon. Bezoscare written by Bezos would likely be much more effective than Obamacare written by the US Congress.

And I still don't see the argument that the US government is somehow more accountable than he is.

guess you missed 2008

So whatever accountability the government faces it isn't enough to stop someone becoming president.

I'm sticking to my point here - I don't think the government is held accountable in any meaningful way for its screw ups. not_kurt_godel's opinion needs more support on this. If the government hadn't stepped in, a lot of banks would have lost everything in 2008 - they were on the verge of being held very accountable and I'm still grouchy that they weren't. The government should not be in the business of buying worthless assets.

[0] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...

But I agree with you that the way they bailed them out did not hold them accountable, they should have "invested" in those banks by buying newly issued shares which would have completely wiped out the existing shareholders.

However, rather than the normal way to raise capital, they gave a blanket permit to the federal reserve to buy the bad debt from the banks.

The US government and the people by extension should have become the owners of those banks which they could resell the ownership again on the private market with a profit at a later point.

Ha! Is that why climate crisis is being driven by 100 companies? What's your excuse for that? Some outdated Malthusian analysis of it being the consumer's fault for not "voting with their dollar?" which is an outdated and foolish libertarian argument Marx eviscerated long ago? A system where each person has one vote will be more democratic, even if corrupt, than a corporation which is not. You talk about centralization of power as if you cannot decentralize economic control democratically, which is exactly what the socialist/Marxist prescription is (please don't bother replying that "socialism/Marxism is when the government does stuff, like owning all the business," because that's an all-too-common misconception).

We have regulations because businesses often will do whatever they can get away with and are not accountable due to how much money they can make and are ran entirely undemocratically. Child labor laws. 40 hour work week. Safety regulations. Prohibition of leaded gasoline and leaded paint. Etc. These are examples of the state enforcing some degree of accountability onto businesses and it has been for the greater good of society. Without the state doing this these corporations could get away with anything (and often do get away with pretty much anything, anyway, due to material conditions, but removing what little protections we do have under liberal democracy would make things even worse [just look whence we came]).

Even in your own example of "corporate accountability," that accountability is coming from the government. Moreover, what's left of your argument is just saying "vote with your dollar," which hm:

> In 2019, families with net worths exceeding $1 million owned 79.2 percent of all the household wealth in the country. The bottom half of American families held just 1.5 percent of the wealth.

I could cite statistics like that all day. If your answer is to "vote with your dollar," then it's plain to see who has the most voting power! What's left then? To out-compete those with a dominion over material and the means of production?

Is that why the few billionaires who run the show, because they ultimately they control the material conditions, are able to control the means of production and basically make everyone bow to their demands to an extreme degree, barely curtailed only by a dwindling bourgeoisie democracy which the working class can only faintly tolerate. Why they pour tons of money into influencing electors and politicians? Also, I hope you don't give the libertarian argument "well corporations only get big an evil because the government exists!" Due to the way commodity production/the commodity form works, it is something which consolidates over time, and as we have seen some examples in history, enterprises which get large enough eventually establish their own rules and become the de facto state.

Is that why less than ten corporations own almost all the brands people are familiar with? That is not how commodity production works. The evolution of the commodity form has been one of competing commodity producers, where one will always lose out and have to sell their wage labor to the winning commodity producer and the existing commodity producers absorb the labor power, means of production, and continue expanding in a way which someone starting from 0 can not overwhelm. This is the economy of scale. You can cherry pick "disruptive" technologies all you want, but if you look at who holds most of the wealth in the world (a handful of billionaires), and their control over various industries, what I'm saying becomes extremely apparent.

Also your example doesn't even make sense--the war indeed had massive support--we're talking about democratic accountability as in doing what the people want. You're simply playing with words at this point, you're asking if we can try an elected official we elected into office for something that had popular support at the time? Does corruption in the state happen? Yes and often. But by default, corruption is the name of the game in corporations whose sole purpose is the profit-motive under dictatorial/elite rule, or at the very least, rule by profit incentive.

When you leave the devices of power out of the hands of voters, you just let the profit incentive and a shrinking minority of billionaires control things--we literally made a device that separates rich people's heads from their bodies over this (to establish liberal democracy).

The answer is not more totalitarianism, but more democratic control over the economy and government, not less.

What a load of rubbish--shame to see stuff like this on Hacker news so often, likely due to out-of-touch petite bourgeoisie (as many programmers are), lending them to reactionary bents.

It's extremely reactionary to look at the over-centralization of power and say "ah, the solution is to give more power to corporations which already dominate the material conditions!" Again the solution is to further decentralize power by making the economy and enterprises democratic (and to increase the level of democracy present in the government). You can just gather that from a basic anarchist and Marxist analysis.

The major question on my mind is, should we distribute power by a democratic vote over orgs which control a collection of resources, or should we do it by distributing ownership of resources with individual freedom to commit those resources anywhere? Is one more efficient, or less likely to centralize, than the other?