One More Try

I tried asking the question "what do libertarians think should be done about untrammelled corporate power?" Or at least I thought I did. Based on the answers I got, most people seemed to think I was complaining about the quality of service I was getting from Amazon or Google. I was expecting something more along the lines of either "corporate power, what corporate power?" or "the magic of the market and its invisible hand will fix any problems."

Let me adduce a few examples of that rampaging corporate power. The most extreme example is probably the British East India Company, a corporate entity with its own army which overthrew dozens of independent nations and killed, directly or indirectly, millions of people. Similar rampaging corporations on a smaller scale were the slave trading companies that terrorized Africa for centuries, the corporate arms of King Leopold of Belgium, and Cecil Rhodes and the Rothschilds, each responsible millions more murders.

How about some more nearly contemporary examples. How about the tactics John D Rockefeller use to build Standard Oil. Details can be found in Ida Tarbell's works and, in slightly less detail, in Daniel Yergin's magnificent book The Prize. More recent still is the story of the great crash of 2008, as documented in several books. In each of these cases, legal and illegal activities, covered up or tolerated by law enforcement, used the power of concentrated wealth to produce results destructive of individuals and society.

Anybody want to try answering my real question?

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