I was thinking about this after listening to Marc Andreassen blather on about how he doesn’t trust government as a repository of trusted keys and other functions. He advocates for private companies to perform critical functions. Standard libertarian stuff in many respects.
The problem of course is that corporations lack accountability. They can shift terms and conditions or corporate purpose and there is little meaningful recourse except to stop using them. I can think of small examples that don’t widely resonate (Mountain Equipment Co-op I’m thinking of you 🤬) but are there big examples that I’m missing?
But government also lacks accountability. At least with corporations there are multiples of them, and so they are accountable to the standards established by the market.
Governments are monopolistic by nature. It’s not impossible but it’s orders of magnitude harder to switch governments than it is to switch corporate service providers.
And while our constitution and those of many other countries promise a degree of accountability, those constitutions are violated all the time.
So ultimately corporations are held to an evolving standard that they cannot escape which is market expectations based on what their competitors are offering.
Governments are held to a rigid but changeable standard that they can easily escape by deciding not to enforce those standards upon themselves.
Governments are self-regulated and corporations are market-regulated, meaning a government can slip the leash much more easily and choose to ignore that regulation.
The accountability is both legal and electoral. Neither is necessarily easy, but this is dramatically different than the legal framework that applies to corporations.
I don’t want to clog up the thread with examples, but you don’t need to search too hard to find examples of minor harms that aren’t worth any individuals time to sue.
Class actions are supposed to be the antidote but wind up enriching the filing lawyers and the named plaintiff. Everyone else gets a coupon for $1.27 off their next purchase.
Here’s one I just ran across shortly after writing this.
Booz Allen is a private company that runs recreation.gov and sets it’s own fees to pay itself.
Somebody sued and won saying that fees charged for access to national parks were meant only for park maintenance and therefore the fees were illegal. They won! And then…nothing.
Technically everyone who paid a booking fee to access an American National park in the last decade is entitled to a refund. Not a penny appears to be forthcoming because fuck you, that’s why.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back