An organization has: more than one person, some resources, and a process for making decisions about them. An org owned and controlled by a single person need not declare a purpose, as that owner will use it to achieve their usual complex personal ends. But other orgs tend to declare official purposes, to coordinate their leaders, members, employees, investors, donors, partners, suppliers, and customers.
We have experience with for-profit governments in a colonial context, mainly in the early period but with latecomers such as the Congo Free State. I wouldn’t like to be ruled by any foreign power that regarded me as less than a full citizen, but apples-to-apples comparison (say the Congo Free State vs. Belgian Congo) doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence in the for-profit over the more standard version.
Another instance of for-profit government is mafia organizations. These act much better, and put more effort into producing public goods, than the most extractive colonial states. But the general preference isn’t to live under them and equally undemocratic governments (for again apples to apples comparison) can generally establish legitimacy by eliminating them. It can be argued that mafias suffer from lack of bureaucratization (some of the largest, as in Mexico, may be counter-examples worthy of study) and the violent costliness of unclear political borders with rival “states.” I also think the lack of bureaucratization is related to the for-profit status; mafias rely especially upon family connections because attempting to function internally on an entirely profit-led basis leads to disaster.
State-owned enterprises can be seen as an instance of for-profit government. Some of these work poorly and others work extraordinarily well. However these are involved in the least essentially state-like functions, relative to the maintenance of the monopoly of violence and sovereignty.
If for-profit governments worked better than not-for-profit governments, then it would have been the East India Company that bought out Britain, not the other way around.
There is a large amount of prosocial, long-term investment that must be put into effective governance, and one can always cut costs while delaying the downstream effects for years or even decades, in government. Thus, effective governments rely on sacred values like "justice" or "ensuring a better life for our children" to maintain a legal system that people trust and a school system that bothers to actually educate.
Places like Prospera's good governance rely on the fact that they can't force people to live there (so they have to actually make living there something somebody would choose). But this is only because they are subordinated to a real government which ensures freedom of movement; an unfettered corporate state would begin to restrict migration just as countless real countries have, for much the same reasons.
There are probably a lot of other effects like this. Again, if for-profit governance was really superior, then the largest and most powerful corporate state in the history of the world would not have good quietly into the night.
A for profit government would simply confiscate everything. In fact I would say that it would be the obligation of that government to its shareholders.
In the free market, PRICE is the feedback mechanism.
In politics, VOTE is the feedback mechanism.
Today VOTE is corrupted, so politics suffers Hanson's Disease (leprosy). Govt. blunders about doing damage without feeling any pain, and so is unconstrained.
We do NOT want monopoly providers. We want govt. limited to only that which we must of necessity do collectively.
I am not sure what you think the main selective pressure has been on governments, but at the national level it seems to have been predominantly military, both in terms of individual mobilization capacity (for which GDP is an approximate metric, which is part of why it's considered such a big deal) and in terms of alliances (which benefit from cultural similarities among governing castes).
The Middle Ages in Europe, the Levant, and the Fertile Crescent was characterized by competition between Christian and Muslim systems of government, in which polylegal systems were common, and militaries had to use currencies valid outside their own territory in order to mobilize enough resources to compete with each other. But during the period roughly from 1453-1945, polylegal systems were decisively defeated by financialized nation-states which acquired control of their own currencies, at first gradually, and then suddenly in the 20th Century. Patrick Wyman's podcast series about the emergence of Modernity, and Adam Tooze's books The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction cover the gradual and rapid transitions respectively.
When a nation controls its own currency, it isn't very meaningful to think of it as operating on a for-profit basis, as any nominal profits or losses are better understood as a tool by which the regime manages the value of money and rate of economic mobilization, than as a meaningful estimate of the resources that regime can meaningfully mobilize; a nation can in principle (and is supposed to frequently in practice according to macroeconomic theory) maintain a perpetually growing (in "real" terms) national debt, taking a consistent "loss" year-over-year, while simultaneously increasing both its actual mobilization of economic resources, and reserve capacity to convert those resources to military ones when needed.
For-profit government was pretty much the standard for Bronze Age rulers, as I understand it. Why did that change, historically?
It was also the norm in the Age of Exploration, as European countries set out to enrich themselves using their technological advantages to expand their territories.
Specifically, Contingentative Capitocracy. It is where the government is structured like a corporation of shareholders (stateshare-holders), and its issued stateshares are publically tradeable with prices determined by the longterm ability of the government to collect taxes fswith which it pays out to statesharelholders either/both as a monetary dividend or a service dividend (roads, courts, police, hospitals, voting privileges, etc). The kicker here is that no one is allowed on government property (ie, in the country) unless he or she is a stateshareholder over some minimum amount. While in the territory, a number of stateshares are locked away as collateral.
I have just started reading _the Case for Colonialism_ by Bruce Gilley. It seems that, in Africa, various African leaders and groups, unhappy with the local mismanagement of affairs, invited the British Empire in to run things. They'd a continuous history of being conquered by local despots, who never gave them competent governance, and decided they would like it with a better class of rulers. It's been a fascinating read so far.
By that definition, my wife and I are an organization. I think there’s more to it. Clearly, the distinction is not that huge, but somehow, I think it matters.
So what lies in between an organization and an individual? Perhaps an informal social institution. We have standard games we play and roles we fulfill. They have rules we didn’t make up, but that we might be able to change if everyone agrees.
"They actually greatly prefer autocrats who substantially serve personal ends!"
Politicians primarily serving their personal ends (the main one being getting votes) is a fully accepted principle in European sociology for 200 years. That's called modernity. Unlike for-profit-prisons for example, with are premodern dysfunctional institutions (because institutions have functions, believe it or not).
A historical example of for-profit government is the Dutch West India Company, which had commercial outposts in many locations in the New World. Company-appointed officers, like Peter Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam, served as de-facto government officials.
The common explanation for why nobody in that part of the world today speaks Dutch is that when the going got tough, these commercial interests bailed. Two problems: (a) not many employees will put their life on the line to defend a corporation, and (b) a corporation tends to drop any activity that cannot turn a profit, and functioning societies have quite a few of these things.
I love the idea of government outsourcing more of its work to for-profit companies; tremendous value to unlock there. A favorite example is NASA's COTS program for orbital services; SpaceX wouldn't exist without it. A lot of National Park Service operations are outsourced. Imagine how much better the DMV experience would be if for-profit company ran it.
You should acknowledge that the empirical evidence is a bit iffy here. In the Congo, the part that the Belgian government ran was an ok, though colonial, government. The part that was the personal property of Leopold is a permanent exhibit in the museum of human evil.
It is not always true that that for-profit companies are more efficient than government organizations. When it is true, this efficiency often occurs via some variant of what is essentially cheating and non-ethical practices. For-profit companies save labor costs by paying unfair wages and ignoring safety laws; externalizing costs via dumping; and strategizing to maximize short-term profits.
The profit motive seems worse than humans pursuing their complex personal agendas.
Are there good for-profit universities? "Company towns" drive a shiver of fear down our bodies because worker exploitation can be extreme. Sometimes such towns are parodied in movies such as 'Sorry to bother you' but sober-minded accounts are also damning.
We have experience with for-profit governments in a colonial context, mainly in the early period but with latecomers such as the Congo Free State. I wouldn’t like to be ruled by any foreign power that regarded me as less than a full citizen, but apples-to-apples comparison (say the Congo Free State vs. Belgian Congo) doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence in the for-profit over the more standard version.
Another instance of for-profit government is mafia organizations. These act much better, and put more effort into producing public goods, than the most extractive colonial states. But the general preference isn’t to live under them and equally undemocratic governments (for again apples to apples comparison) can generally establish legitimacy by eliminating them. It can be argued that mafias suffer from lack of bureaucratization (some of the largest, as in Mexico, may be counter-examples worthy of study) and the violent costliness of unclear political borders with rival “states.” I also think the lack of bureaucratization is related to the for-profit status; mafias rely especially upon family connections because attempting to function internally on an entirely profit-led basis leads to disaster.
State-owned enterprises can be seen as an instance of for-profit government. Some of these work poorly and others work extraordinarily well. However these are involved in the least essentially state-like functions, relative to the maintenance of the monopoly of violence and sovereignty.
Where would the p[rofits go in a for-profit government? Would we have investors or shareholders or something else in that class?
If for-profit governments worked better than not-for-profit governments, then it would have been the East India Company that bought out Britain, not the other way around.
There is a large amount of prosocial, long-term investment that must be put into effective governance, and one can always cut costs while delaying the downstream effects for years or even decades, in government. Thus, effective governments rely on sacred values like "justice" or "ensuring a better life for our children" to maintain a legal system that people trust and a school system that bothers to actually educate.
Places like Prospera's good governance rely on the fact that they can't force people to live there (so they have to actually make living there something somebody would choose). But this is only because they are subordinated to a real government which ensures freedom of movement; an unfettered corporate state would begin to restrict migration just as countless real countries have, for much the same reasons.
There are probably a lot of other effects like this. Again, if for-profit governance was really superior, then the largest and most powerful corporate state in the history of the world would not have good quietly into the night.
A for profit government would simply confiscate everything. In fact I would say that it would be the obligation of that government to its shareholders.
No.
In the free market, PRICE is the feedback mechanism.
In politics, VOTE is the feedback mechanism.
Today VOTE is corrupted, so politics suffers Hanson's Disease (leprosy). Govt. blunders about doing damage without feeling any pain, and so is unconstrained.
We do NOT want monopoly providers. We want govt. limited to only that which we must of necessity do collectively.
sacred feel of non-profits style to explain the madness of their tax exemption for contributions.
the government effectively subsidizes non profits without any oversight of optimization. but sacred
I am not sure what you think the main selective pressure has been on governments, but at the national level it seems to have been predominantly military, both in terms of individual mobilization capacity (for which GDP is an approximate metric, which is part of why it's considered such a big deal) and in terms of alliances (which benefit from cultural similarities among governing castes).
The Middle Ages in Europe, the Levant, and the Fertile Crescent was characterized by competition between Christian and Muslim systems of government, in which polylegal systems were common, and militaries had to use currencies valid outside their own territory in order to mobilize enough resources to compete with each other. But during the period roughly from 1453-1945, polylegal systems were decisively defeated by financialized nation-states which acquired control of their own currencies, at first gradually, and then suddenly in the 20th Century. Patrick Wyman's podcast series about the emergence of Modernity, and Adam Tooze's books The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction cover the gradual and rapid transitions respectively.
When a nation controls its own currency, it isn't very meaningful to think of it as operating on a for-profit basis, as any nominal profits or losses are better understood as a tool by which the regime manages the value of money and rate of economic mobilization, than as a meaningful estimate of the resources that regime can meaningfully mobilize; a nation can in principle (and is supposed to frequently in practice according to macroeconomic theory) maintain a perpetually growing (in "real" terms) national debt, taking a consistent "loss" year-over-year, while simultaneously increasing both its actual mobilization of economic resources, and reserve capacity to convert those resources to military ones when needed.
For-profit government was pretty much the standard for Bronze Age rulers, as I understand it. Why did that change, historically?
It was also the norm in the Age of Exploration, as European countries set out to enrich themselves using their technological advantages to expand their territories.
have you ever heard of Capitocracy?
Specifically, Contingentative Capitocracy. It is where the government is structured like a corporation of shareholders (stateshare-holders), and its issued stateshares are publically tradeable with prices determined by the longterm ability of the government to collect taxes fswith which it pays out to statesharelholders either/both as a monetary dividend or a service dividend (roads, courts, police, hospitals, voting privileges, etc). The kicker here is that no one is allowed on government property (ie, in the country) unless he or she is a stateshareholder over some minimum amount. While in the territory, a number of stateshares are locked away as collateral.
I have just started reading _the Case for Colonialism_ by Bruce Gilley. It seems that, in Africa, various African leaders and groups, unhappy with the local mismanagement of affairs, invited the British Empire in to run things. They'd a continuous history of being conquered by local despots, who never gave them competent governance, and decided they would like it with a better class of rulers. It's been a fascinating read so far.
By that definition, my wife and I are an organization. I think there’s more to it. Clearly, the distinction is not that huge, but somehow, I think it matters.
So what lies in between an organization and an individual? Perhaps an informal social institution. We have standard games we play and roles we fulfill. They have rules we didn’t make up, but that we might be able to change if everyone agrees.
"They actually greatly prefer autocrats who substantially serve personal ends!"
Politicians primarily serving their personal ends (the main one being getting votes) is a fully accepted principle in European sociology for 200 years. That's called modernity. Unlike for-profit-prisons for example, with are premodern dysfunctional institutions (because institutions have functions, believe it or not).
A historical example of for-profit government is the Dutch West India Company, which had commercial outposts in many locations in the New World. Company-appointed officers, like Peter Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam, served as de-facto government officials.
The common explanation for why nobody in that part of the world today speaks Dutch is that when the going got tough, these commercial interests bailed. Two problems: (a) not many employees will put their life on the line to defend a corporation, and (b) a corporation tends to drop any activity that cannot turn a profit, and functioning societies have quite a few of these things.
I love the idea of government outsourcing more of its work to for-profit companies; tremendous value to unlock there. A favorite example is NASA's COTS program for orbital services; SpaceX wouldn't exist without it. A lot of National Park Service operations are outsourced. Imagine how much better the DMV experience would be if for-profit company ran it.
You should acknowledge that the empirical evidence is a bit iffy here. In the Congo, the part that the Belgian government ran was an ok, though colonial, government. The part that was the personal property of Leopold is a permanent exhibit in the museum of human evil.
"Even thought msot" -> "Even thought most"
It is not always true that that for-profit companies are more efficient than government organizations. When it is true, this efficiency often occurs via some variant of what is essentially cheating and non-ethical practices. For-profit companies save labor costs by paying unfair wages and ignoring safety laws; externalizing costs via dumping; and strategizing to maximize short-term profits.
The profit motive seems worse than humans pursuing their complex personal agendas.
Are there good for-profit universities? "Company towns" drive a shiver of fear down our bodies because worker exploitation can be extreme. Sometimes such towns are parodied in movies such as 'Sorry to bother you' but sober-minded accounts are also damning.
https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/company-towns