You're gonna kinda hate this, I'm sorry. I'll only touch on "The Basic Problem of Government" real quick. First I will invert the three "What is Democracy Good For" bullets and title.

So, democracy performs especially sub-optimally when a threat is:

a) obscured

b) targeted at a minority

c) eventual

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a decent model for explaining the effectiveness of Donald Trump's assault on American representative democracy.

a) There are several recent comments (link for future posterity) of mine and others' containing theories on the establishment media's role in obscuring the reality of Trump, and professions of concern that the democrats are unable to comprehend some of the finer machinations of MAGA/fascism's workings. And before we can proceed further, you'll need to sign the 299W mod of the base model 4.6 Trump NDA. Ok, thank you. I can now disclose that Trump's secret religious ritual of choice is pathologically lying, followed by a closing hymn from our beloved House band, Never Being Held Accountable. Treating NDAs as casually as a handshake and pathologically lying are a bit obscuring, speaking conservatively. And done intentionally, too. Biden lies, yes, but probably less than most modern day presidents going back to, eh, LBJ, whatever. It's not worth fleshing out in detail because the severity and frequency of Trump's lies are both about several orders of magnitude larger. I'm not really sure how anyone could seriously dismiss the meat of that claim as speculative or disputed, at this point. And, as I try to make the case for in one/some of those linked comments, MAGA obscures an accurate perception of the dems. Anything not MAGA is branded communist.

b) Oh boy! Oh boy. Goddamn woke DEI! 'nuff said. (apologies) Donald Trump leads a movement that is also not a majority, and perhaps increasingly not a majority of voters, either, but it is still advantageously rooted in long-established power hierarchies in the US. Even so, the MAGA faithful, now faced with a diversifying America wherein they lose influence within a democratic system, have largely made the decision, consciously or not (which correlates well with leadership/office holder or not, I'm sure), to abandon democracy. So MAGA brass have a) obscured the issues facing actual b) minority groups currently seeing some degree or another of legal and social persecution relative to themselves. Florida's anti-LGBT laws (legal), Musk's re-installment of literal Hitler fanboys to twitter (social), and SCOTUS repealing Roe are some prime examples. MAGA is agitating to some degree on almost every front, every actual minority group, stoking the grievances of the largest and wealthiest demographic (white christians) in an effort to simulate the boot of systemic oppression and boost voter turnout. No doubt, many of the most dyed-in-the-wool MAGA face real hardship, though moreso stemming from class differences, not racial differences. I also note that redirecting classist grievances through a race-based ideology is made a bit easier when class and wealth break down quite discernibly along racial or ethnic lines, as they usually do all around the world. And this is where Great Replacement theory really springs to life, of course. Of course all of this is underlined by the point made in the article that I half-read, somewhere, which is surely that it's harder to get an electorate to fight back against bad actions that only affect a small amount of voters. Yes. This idea has been systematically applied by MAGA to slowly strip back the hard-fought gains of the minorities. There are people still very much alive who marched for civil rights in the '60s. I dunno how anyone thinks a systemic injustice that deep and that recent is now disappeared without a trace, but it's funny how almost everyone saying that is wealthy and white. Or they're Clarence Thomas. Boy it makes more sense than ever, nowadays. Thomas Sowell? If PragerU is deifying someone, yeah, I don't think they got laughed out of academia because his ideas were... too good.

[insert concerns about the electoral college, Senate representation, gerrymandering, on and on, you know]

c) When you get a head start out front by launching your campaign with a racist birther movement, "eventual" carries the day. I'll say that it's certainly taking longer than I once thought to reach whatever the next major phase is for MAGA, that's for sure. Dedicated exchangers of $20 will recall that I thought the outcome would be that America might take a couple years to process the full story of the Trump admin after his white house exit but eventually see through the facade of Trump. Instead, because of how a) obscured Trump has somehow managed to make his true self (or at least enjoys obscurement in some form or another by most media, especially the media favorable to him), that didn't happen. Trump's command of media revenues has guaranteed continued attention as he slowly normalizes increasingly dictatorial lies and policy ("bitch I'm the FEDDDDDDD"). The result is widespread cultural acceptance that Trump is inevitable. That he never left, and 2020 wasn't even that bad. Biden did the lockdowns. Apparently even the very NOT c) eventual threat of deporting 20 million(!) people within the next few years isn't animating enough for many Americans, but most have no clue about Project 2025 because of an almost total absence of reporting about it [a)]. And Trump's gradual, incremental wins, or even sometimes just a lack of setbacks, seem to be facilitating a quickening of the rate he is permitted to continue radicalizing the GOP. Said differently, in a democracy responding to threats, when the threat is decreased functionality of the democracy, it can enable a nasty feedback loop that makes anti-democratic backsliding potentially snowball.

c)ase study: The now heavily MAGA-aligned anti-vax movement provides a nice little microcosm of a far-left woowoo-ism that began with everybody laughing at Jenny McCarthy ten years ago, but gradually, c) eventually reaches the stage of Olivia Nuzzi posting a completely unprompted defense of raw milk after the FDA has identified it as the most common vector of bird flu. Is that where this distrust, a sentiment fanned by RFK Jr., is headed next? Not particularly excited about that, personally, knee-jerk contrarianism is naught but another flavor of reactionary politics. Screw the FDA, for sure, but any good case for reform obviously can't be rooted in anti-science. And now everyone is just going about their business, as if this and many more widespread anti-science viewpoints are totally normal. As if the rate of regression is some transient event that the institutions can print more reputationbucks and do more Joe Rogan appearances to depress. Who knows, maybe it will be this fast rate of regression, hugely deviated from a c) eventual/gradual collective experience, that will be the death knell. Like Lara Trump steps into the camera frame two weeks before the election to deliver the October Surprise, which is that you must boof 18 grams of microplastics, bare minimum every day for Trump to win the election. Demand for butt doctors soars, Pelosi already bought all the shares of BUTT.

What I'm trying to say is, no, I'm not gonna shoegaze to some ambient anarcho-libertarian recreation of a constitution, a mandate we all concede is imperfect, when I could commandeer the content to savage Hitler II. OH! Oh! I Godwin'd! I lose. Yes, Trump-Hitler is a reductionist comparison, and I wish other folks all the best of luck out there explaining how it can't go unstressed that the elements of Milošević's capitulation to the Serbians showed their Peloponnesian roots once again in Trump's April 16th speech when he beiposdfalkhaeworilkhasf y'know whatever, bring a chalk board. I'll be focusing on a simple, true, and relatable narrative. Trump has told us himself that he independently arrived at literally the exact same xenophobic hate speech as Hitler ("immigrants poisoning the blood of our country"? like r u fuckin srs rn?). Best part is he then pretends to assume everyone agrees that Finding Hitler All On Your Own somehow exonerates him, and everyone in the press gaggle plays right on along. But like... saying "I'm doing Hitler" is super Hitler. Like if Hitler had an elder Hitler within recent history just before Hitler and it was politically expedient to make a nod to the older Hitler when the original Hitler was Hitlering, Hitler would be like "I'm doing Hitler", too. No joke I just write those... sentences, head to the googles, and h'wow guys, what do you know?! I never heard of this until one and a half minutes ago. But it's absolutely so predictable. So predictable. You love accurate predictions, right? Consider some of the very models you're already familiar with applied in the context of Donald Trump as mid 1930's Weimar Hitler. Get on predictit and clean up.

And just to give the elephant in the room a big ol' smooch on my way outside, how am I supposed to talk with an anarcho-anything about the way a state functions or should function? How strong is the temptation to let yourself cheer for the demise of an admittedly notorious geopolitical agitator (the us), and see Trump as your guy? He'll definitely deliver, but seems about like devotees of the Thanos fingersnap philosophy. Yeah, half of everyone disappeared, but we already knew that would happen, from the vaccine. And now we're better for it, see, just before everyone disappeared we finally realized Earth was too overpopulated to sustain our current lifestyle, but that problem is solved, at 4 billion humans worldwide. Thanks, Trump.

You don't even have to read this, answer this, or respond in any way, I won't tell. Actually this is all formal prepwork for my own future Hitler speedrun, I can easily improve on Trump's time.

P.S. The festering fascism problem does unfortunately extend well beyond Trump if the democrats STILLLLL can't recognize: 1) the current Israeli regime is one of the most fascist governments in the world, 2) Netanyahu pines for Trump and has begun sabotaging Biden, which will escalate through the election, and 3) It is nothing shy of remarkable that the ICJ and UN have now determined, with two independent investigatory bodies, that Israel has committed war crimes. We're talking institutions established in the wake of the Nuremburg trials designed to prevent future genocides saying "actually, so, the victims of the Holocaust that spurred our existence are unfortunately doing a genocide right now, sorry". Score one for the institutions, that is righteous. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention 4) As it was happening, the dem consensus was "serves those anti-semitic stupid students right for setting up tents on the quad" while police cosplayed as a counterterrorism military operation using ridiculous amounts of force to subdue a bunch of people overwhelmingly doing nothing but legally exercising their free speech.

P.P.S. We can get back to trust, it's very much like: Democracy isn't as effective when a threat is d) evaluated in a hyper-centralized structure of trust.

I don't feel an urgent need to get down into the weeds 50 yards off the fairway, at the moment.

As my still having this post pinned to my feed signifies, I'd love to get back to this eventually, but Trump is currently having his caddie surreptitiously loiter around the green with a spare golf ball.

I'll dunk on Huemer or whoever after I finish getting thrown in an internment camp for trolling the "free speech absolutists", or maybe just for being somewhat left-leaning on the European political spectrum.

Working backwards:

If I lie to a corporation about my personal information, nothing happens. If I lie on the census, the penalty is $500. The census has a noble intent, but if I happen to believe public money won't in fact be more equitably and efficiently allocated based on my postcard, why must I be threatened to fill it out?

If you lie to a corporation about your personal information, that might be called "insurance fraud," for which there are absolutely ramifications. Much like an insurance company, the government compels us to pay a certain amount in to promote good behavior and indemnify against the societal risks of bad behavior. That's called social contract. "But what if I don't want to" has never been a compelling argument to me, which is one of the reasons I've never found libertarianism convincing. If you don't want to follow the social contract, then the social contract breaks down. When the social contract breaks down, and corporations (as well as individuals) are allowed to act in their own unfettered self interest, then you get the East India Company.

The East India Company may be a fair example of commercial abuse of power in the 1800's, but it basically was the government in India

That's the point. If you remove government oversight, you don't get better business. You get government by another name.. The difference between modern liberal democratic government and corporate government is that one is ostensibly using monopoly on power to enforce social boundaries and thereby uphold social order and manage use of national resources; the other uses that monopoly on power to maintain profit at all cost, no matter how brutal. I know which rubric of public management I'd be willing to trust more if I "followed the money".

Speaking of monopolies. You opened a previous portion of the discussion describing how Walmart might increase market share simply by improving their overall customer experience. The implication, I presume, was to illustrate how beautifully the market self-regulates through positive interactions to make both sides prosper. But it ignored malfeasance, because malfeasance illustrates how in the absence of regulation, the market cares only about profit by all available means. The means I supplied are absolutely tactics pursued by corporations to consolidate market share and increase profits without having to consider the quality of their product or user satisfaction. And the absence of end user harm cannot be conflated with the presence of end user benefit, especially if we recalibrate our idea of who the end user is. While I, some random Joe on the street might not care about corporate espionage so long as my computer still runs, if I was, say, the inventor of a certain kind of computer chip and I appreciated the revenue that my intellectual property generated, I might be kind of sore if somebody stole that intellectual property, and might appreciate the regulations that curb such bad behavior. As for monopolies, they decidedly don't result in cheaper diapers.

All this is to say, I really truly don't understand this dogmatic trust in corporation over governance. There's too much evidence being swept under the rug indicating how corporations would act in absence of regulation. In my eyes, mistrust is maybe the strongest regulatory weapon we as individuals have at our disposal. That goes for both government and the market. Why do we have to couch it as a binary choice between one or the other?

As for the opinion piece that we're discussing:

The purpose of the article is to ask if our mistrust in corporations is proportional to corporate misbehavior, compared to government or individual behavior.

Pish posh. The purpose of that piece is to present the author's opinion as common sense using a sort of gee-whiz, down-home-country-lawyer reliance on The People's love of a good, simple narrative. It opens:

I would initially expect most people’s attitudes to be pretty closely tied to their personal experience, more so than their book learning or what they hear on the internet.

And then expels paragraphs of hand-wavy opinion such as

I would not, and neither would most people. Maybe a few very unusual people would. But we can hardly be resentful and distrustful of someone for just behaving the way the vast majority of normal people would behave.

without ever relying on so much as personal anecdote. Even the portion on history doesn't refer to any particular historical example. The author practically begs his audience not to consider concrete examples or counterpoints lest it deflate the argument.

Never mind the fact that in the introduction, the author questions the sense of mistrusting the corporation over personal acquaintances, asserts that out of the three provided groups, the corporation is by far the most trustworthy, and then never addresses the enormity of that claim. I should trust the corporation more than my wife? My friends? My mother? It's an absurdity so enormous that the author seems to rely on us just kind of... accepting it?

And here's what I really don't understand. You're obviously very intelligent. And you're obviously well-attuned to historical precedent, and not afraid to buttress your opinions with examples. If I asked you not to consider history or legal precedent, you'd wonder why I'd redirected your attention. Moreover, you strike me as somebody who tailors his argument to the audience- the right tool for the right job to maximize efficiency. This opinion piece you posted- it bothers me because it asks its audience not to consider things too carefully. It requires tremendous faith not only in corporations, but in the authority of an entire stranger (not at all one of the "people I know in my personal life") without that stranger's ever having to demonstrate that authority. To whit, it's written for an audience of stupid people. And you chose this article over others to present to this audience on this site.

Then again, it generated discussion, so who am I to finger wag.