Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization. We can certainly see this now in the US in highly polarized times where the State bears opposition from half the country depending on who is in power.
I think this "anti-monopoly" framing is a bit dangerous as it smuggles a political position into a much more complicated situation. There is an overall decline in the West of small association groups. More and more of these groups happen on Discord voice chats and are divorced from the real life constraints that offer a more "grounded" character. And I think this issue has been written about much less than the "anti-monopoly" one. Even if you fervently believe that the State needs to play an aggressive role in policing private organizations, I think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.
This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them from assembling enough resources to have a supersized impact on the state - the problem with monopoly is that monopolies buy out their competition and neuter regulations, the problem with wealth disparity is the ultra wealthy are sufficiently powerful to move the state in the direction they want it to go.
I agree with you generally regarding reducing the overall size of governing bodies and I agree with Terrence about the benefits of small organizations and the drawbacks of large specifically around the investment and perceived ownership of members of those organizations, but having a small state fundamentally requires having small organizations everywhere - and anti-monopoly, antitrust, and anti-wealth concentration - because for the state to be democratic and representative, it must be the most powerful organization in the area it covers, otherwise it’s just a tool for the more powerful to use.
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
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?
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
My point is: the social problems of disenfranchisement that come from large organizations are a property of their size. They may differ in that they're volunteer based, profit oriented, non-profit in a capitalist system, democratically organized, or several hundred or thousand more distinctions. But I'm going to feel just as disconnected from my national government as I will from the workings of Google as a small shareholder as I will from the NBA as someone that plays pick-up on a basketball court. The experience of going to a minor league baseball game is much more personal than going to a major MLB game.
To me the important issue is: the US specifically and the Anglophone West more broadly is seeing a decrease in its small institutions. This decrease predates the modern internet and social media landscape (see Bowling Alone.) I have many, many questions around this. Why is this happening? What is its effect on society? How can we reverse this? Is this something we can reverse?
It's an important issue to me because this trajectory is very different outside of the Anglophone West. Japan for example is not seeing the same decline in its small organizations as the US is, despite population reduction. If anything Japanese life is dominated much more by huge conglomerates than US life.
The cause of disengagement is that organizations, large or small, are not responsive to customers needs or citizens needs. In many cases, they are actively working to the detriment of their own customers and the country at large.
This is due to regulatory capture. It is that simple.
You're right about this generally, though. I've got two different theories for why this is happening.
First, I think the US is "individually nomadic" in a way that many other countries and cultures are not - it is unusual, at least in the populous areas, for someone to spend their entire life in one area, and doubly so for an entire family or community to stay geographically colocated long enough to really build durable organizations. I think this changes a bit as people get older, but it's quite normal for someone to move every 5 years or so between the age of, say, 20 and 60. Arguably this is driven by economics - job availability, especially for professionals, is a big reason for these moves.
I think there's something self-reinforcing about the trend, as well - notably, as, say, the focus in politics concentrates on the federal government, it becomes harder for people to really see the benefit in local politics. The repeal of Roe v. Wade, for example, is a policy made at the national level with strong impacts locally; similarly the recent change in policy around both trans rights and immigration are hard for people to look past towards local politics (I think this is a mistake - large politics are built on small politics - but I think it's a factor).
I'd also suspect impatience plays a part - it's hard to build an organization, it's hard to negotiate status and relationships, it's hard to keep something viable, and we've got a lot of easier routes to dopamine than bothering to meet up with other people now.
I'm not sure this is a universal definition. Some of us just want a state that maintains a monopoly on violence, and otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. An administration of peaceful coexistence rather than a mandate for cooperation. While administrating the peace does require some absolute power, it is required narrowly, to prosecute true crime, defend from outside threats, and resolve disputes.
Leading to individuals with net worths heading towards a trillion dollars who can just buy the government they want.
What you say you “want” is against your own interests.
You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches, PTAs, book clubs, business, forums, fraternities, and politics. There is hardly a part of our lives anymore that isn't intruded on by national narratives anymore. There is a very fundamental question of why that is, why it's allowed, and who benefits from it.
Oh, that one is easy. The original US constitution gave the federal government the right to preempt state laws in matters within its enumerated powers, but placed strict limits on what those powers are, and created a check against federal overreach by creating the US Senate, which originally had its members elected by state legislatures who would thereby send Senators disinclined to let the federal government usurp their powers.
Then populists amended the constitution to cause US Senators to be directly elected, and since US Supreme Court Justices are confirmed by the Senate, that in turn allowed them to replace the Justices with ones who would do things like read the inter-state commerce clause as covering non-commerce happening entirely within a single state.
Having eliminated any meaningful constitutional restrictions on federal power, federal officials were then captured by large corporations to enact federal regulations that only those large corporations can comply with, and to erode any federal constraints on corporate mergers while still preempting the states from imposing them either.
You can't give the central government the authority to do something and then expect them not to. If you don't want them to do something, you need something actively constraining them from doing it. Which was the US Senate until it wasn't.
Sometimes narratives like these which lay out a simple cause-and-effect between political decisions and modern outcomes can make people think that reverting the situation is a solution to modern outcomes, but that is rarely the case.
Everything evolves, and the solution to modern problems is to find a solution that works within modern constraints.
That isn't necessarily the case.
Suppose there was only one federal law: It's illegal for any entity to have more than 15% market share in any market. If you do you have 30 days to figure out how to break yourself up so that isn't the case, e.g. by putting half your factories into a separate company and selling it off. You get to figure out how to do it, it's just that if you have more than 15% market share on two days more than 30 days apart in the same 5 year period, you get unconditionally fined into oblivion. You don't even need government prosecutors, just make it a strict liability offense that gives customers the right to sue for 100% of revenue. Companies can start planning to break themselves up ahead of time once they're getting close to the market share threshold if they feel like they want more time to do something about it.
Then the government isn't really doing any kind of central planning, it's just a strict unconditional ban on market concentration and nothing else.
You could start with a shorter standard work week.
If the voting is not a big deal, maybe we should just get voting rights automatically to any private organization over a certain size
(1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
(2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc).
... then someone who is skeptical of abuses of power should be wary of both government and corporate/wealthy power. But that seems like an untenable position — you can't check the one without muscling up the other.
Is there a way to maintain a small, decentralized, local-oriented government that can still check the power of corporate/wealthy/majoritarian impulses and provide a social safety net?
The legislation limited the power of wealth which made government more willing to police corporations bad behavior.
With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United, we are now in a free for all. Wealth now translates to political power. We are seeing not only de-regulation but the active collusion of the current administration and favored corporations.
The practical side is substantially harder - the anarchist-communal version of the world requires a citizenry committed to their community, phobic to bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen. Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the bigger practical concern is building an actual durable social contract that people will uphold and enforce over time, even when that means giving up personal glory.
This was basically the state of most societal groups in the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-day existence was within local community groups that had a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere of influence - but the modern world creates the ability to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth than prior means, which renders the whole affair much harder to keep in hand.
But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.
UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)
I'd say that the most well-developed concrete platform in this sense is Murray Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism", although that is arguably too organized to be properly referred to as anarchism (Bookchin himself, although he used to be an anarchist, dropped the label eventually). But, even so, it's much closer to an anarchist utopia than any state-centric model. And it actually has some practical successes on the ground in Rojava, although the jury is still out on whether it can hold long term.
At least when applied to Government in the form of "Representative Democracies" I think this overly simplistic view is not useful to analyze what's happening in the real world.
The assumption behind electing representatives is precisely that they will advocate and advance agendas on behalf of the majority - no matter their social status. However, for this to work it requires a populace that is sufficiently informed, educated, and intelligent to understand what sensible solutions look like.
Unfortunately, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and many others were wrong and even after 300 years of putting young homo sapiens through 10 years of public education and teaching them rational thinking this assumption turns out to be false.
True, though (at least in principle) a democratic government is a very special organization because it (again, in principle) exists only because it's the people's will.
Sure a democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people's will but not from your will, and that is the role of the small community organization.
In practice the difference between a democratic and a non-democratic society is more quantitative. In a non-democratic society, people still have a check on the government - they can revolt, and, being far more numerous than any security apparatus that can be maintained over a long time, the rulers therefore cannot simultaneously piss off too many people at the same time. So the bar is pretty high, but not entirely insurmountable. In a democratic society, the people also get an option of protest voting, which provides a safety valve that bleeds off a lot of effort that would have otherwise gone into potential violence, but at the price of making this kind of "voter revolt" less costly to participants and thus more likely. However, representative democracy is still pretty bad at accurately reflecting population preferences - it still takes a lot of abuse before protest voting becomes prevalent enough to alter election results. And then, of course, new mechanisms were developed to "manage" democracy - more efficient propaganda, mostly.
Thus, in practice, governments can indeed be treated mostly similarly to other organizations in this regard.
This is why “running a government like a business” is flawed, and treating all large organisations as the same, is also flawed.
The comment you're responding to specifically indicates private organizations. Public organizations are publicly accountable.
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters
Accountability, not legitimacy, is what's at stake here. If the local mining company is polluting the river, there's nothing you do anything about it. What, are you going to take hostile action & organize a global aluminum boycott? No. But if the local government is polluting the river, you can vote them out, at least in theory. Not every democracy is healthy, and failed democratic states are certainly little better than private organizations. But a healthy democracy is substantially different from any other institutional framework, and democratic governance is the only real alternative to private oligarchy.
