the_dunk_tank

Companies A - F, the six largest companies, form a coalition because they realize if they take out the competition, they will be able to corner the market and generate more revenue for themselves. first they use their capital reserves to undercut the competition, selling at a loss to drive most of the others to bankruptcy in a battle of attrition. once the competition is sufficiently degraded any stragglers can be taken out with military force if necessary.

Companies A, B and C the three largest companies, form a coalition because they realize if they take out the competition, they will be able to corner the market and generate more revenue for themselves. first they use their capital reserves to undercut the competition, selling at a loss to drive most of the others to bankruptcy in a battle of attrition. once the competition is sufficiently degraded any stragglers can be taken out with military force if necessary.

Companies A and B the two largest companies, form a coalition because they realize if they take out the company C, they will be able to corner the market and generate more revenue for themselves. first they use their capital reserves to undercut the company C, selling at a loss to drain company C's capital in a battle of attrition. once company C is sufficiently degraded they can be taken out with military force if necessary.

Company A, the largest of two companies, realizes if they take out company B, they will be able to corner the market and generate more revenue for themselves. first they use their capital reserves to undercut the company B, selling at a loss to drain company B's capital in a battle of attrition. once company B is sufficiently degraded they can be taken out with military force if necessary.

Company A is now the de facto government

Love to casually drop the phrase, "thousands of other security companies" in my explanation of why there won't be warlords.

Also, what's stopping them from doing this now? The state is too powerful? One organization seized enough power by force that they can now stomp out any competition that challenges their authority? How about that.

They're literally describing how WWI happened lol

These are the guys telling you that communism only works on paper.

Someone in one of the other libertarian threads said like "70% of people in libertarian societies work as private security, investigators, lawyers, and bureaucrats" and I've been thinking about that a lot. It's like how the American founders assumed everyone would be a lawyer with a slave plantation.

risk of warfare, which is financially untenable

Winning a war can be very lucrative, actually

I'm in love with all the ancap dunking these last few days. I forgot about most of this shit since my lolbertarian phase. Absolute toddler levels of comprehending the world

There can't be any warlords, see, because all the warlords will stop it.

This is a bunch of wild assumptions, the system breaks entirely as soon as any one of them fails.

This is basically describing how feudalism would work if the King didn't lay down rules on lesser rulers and said "You can just all defend each other out of mutual interest :) ". One lord would slaughter their way to be the new king, then lay down some rules.

Brb gonna tell the cartels they can't exist

So it’s “rules based international order” except between armed corporations instead of armed countries. I can’t see how that would ever lead to problems /s

Already wrong from the first sentence, lol.

One company isn't afraid of larger firms. The largest one. They'll expand their monopoly position and dominate unless the others start merging. Then you get just a handful and they fight each other.

It's called a gang and it's how this shit goes down when you leave capitalism in place and then leave violence as the means of resolving disputes.

Motherfucker has literally never seen, hear, or contemplated a single cyberpunk story. MGS4 was literally about this.

why would Charles insist upon his claims to Naples? if he does that he'll be against thousands of italian city states!!!

ARBITRATION BY WHOM YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING DWEEBS

Why there are no Warlords in the Roman Republic:

If one of the generals crosses the rubicon, the senate parliamentarian declares it to be illegal and all other generals strike the offender down.

Libertarian: you see all you need is a mutually agreed upon organizing structure between independent parties

Me, an idiot: like a government?

Unions for companies, not people

other than all the obvious shit, i love when ancaps think everyone behaves rationally. the people controlling these companies are humans and humans aren't always perfectly rational.

how is this any different from a Euro explaining how the UN would stop a war between countries, right before the fascist invasion of Ethiopia?

Getting my brains blown out in the McTrenches, because down the line some guy said his burger didn't have pickles on it.

Man... its a shame that World War 1 never happened...

if they all have to be worried about the other larger firms, uhh, whats the largest one doing and why does it exist?

your brain on utopianism

That hilarious. Do they really believe this kind of thing?

An interesting question I've never seen answered is: how do ancaps propose to bring about their vision of society? It would require the overthrowing of the government and the destruction of all current corporations, but I have never once seen them call for revolution.

Who puts a wall of black text on a bright yellow background? I'm not reading that

And what happens when one company buys so many other firms to merge them into itself in the pursuit of more capital (as incentivised by the system) that it ends up with more power than all the other firms combined?

Does it still allow all the other firms to exist or does it just crush them and exert a total monopoly?

Anyone that achieves a monopoly on violence becomes a defacto government and state. I companies are incentivised into monopoly over time under capitalism then this is an inevitable outcome of this system too.

4. is weird to me because it's patently not true in the vast majority of markets that even a large company would be "a drop in the ocean" compared to the remaining market. A handful of companies would be expected to pretty quickly own more collectively than their thousands of competitors, so one of those companies going "rogue" or a few of them forming a trust would most certainly not be "a drop in the ocean."

Lenin used publically-available statistics to demonstrate this in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and wealth has only gotten more concentrated since then. Here's an example from that text, for those who are unfamiliar:

In Germany, for example, out of every 1,000 industrial enterprises, large enterprises, i.e., those employing more than 50 workers, numbered three in 1882, six in 1895 and nine in 1907; and out of every 100 workers employed, this group of enterprises employed 22, 30 and 37, respectively. Concentration of production, however, is much more intense than the concentration of workers, since labour in the large enterprises is much more productive. This is shown by the figures on steam-engines and electric motors. If we take what in Germany is called industry in the broad sense of the term, that is, including commerce, transport, etc., we get the following picture. Large-scale enterprises, 30,588 out of a total of 3,265,623, that is to say, 0.9 per cent. These enterprises employ 5,700,000 workers out of a total of 14,400,000, i.e., 39.4 per cent; they use 6,600,000 steam horse power out of a total of 8,800,000, i.e., 75.3 per cent, and 1,200,000 kilowatts of electricity out of a total of 1,500,000, i.e., 77.2 per cent.

Less than one-hundredth of the total number of enterprises utilise more than three-fourths of the total amount of steam and electric power! Two million nine hundred and seventy thousand small enterprises (employing up to five workers), constituting 91 per cent of the total, utilise only 7 per cent of the total amount of steam and electric power! Tens of thousands of huge enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing.

Dear Company B,

We recognize the unfortunate circumstances you find yourselves in, and understand your concern. After careful review of your request to invoke article 69 of the non-aggression contract, we have established a committee to review the fluid and rapidly evolving situation to ensure that the appropriate conditions are met to invoke such a serious response to the actions of Company A, in full compliance with the articles of the contract. Currently, this committee is set to meet at a date so far in the future that your assets will already be fully occupied and operated by Company A, as well as ourselves under the auspices of preventing occupation by Company A. We are unable to provide any further information at this time, as it is Company policy to not comment on ongoing arbitration.

Now I'm an anarchocapitalist, I've always wanted to be a warlord

I'll just lie

Yeah... But what if like in magic: the gathering, specifically commander, they're literally too big to be crushed. People talk about "oh well if there's a super expensive deck the whole rest of the table can dogpile them" and it works okay-ish if their commander deck is modern lite, buuut what if it's more akin to a legacy deck. What then? Plus it's not like someone will disclose their deck cost, so what is to stop an anarchist capitalist firm that may or may not be dabbling in criminal activity from looking like a smol bean then quickly liquidating other firms that rise against it. This reads like someone who has never played poker with their cards hidden from the other players, like they were taught with cards face up to get the hang of things and never played again. Imo anyways. Also we've had two world wars what's to stop a third corporate one besides n.a.p. .