this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
6 points (87.5% liked)
Asklemmy
54335 readers
178 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Corporations are construct of law. They can’t exist without a government to enforce corporate law through its monopoly on violence.
A government can create unlimited currency via an act of congress. Can a corporation create unlimited money when it wants to?
Anyone can create their own money. Consider Bitcoin. The hard part is getting people to use it.
Corporations can print corporate shares, though the more shares they print, the less each share is worth. You can’t buy a pack of gum with corporate shares, though, so I wouldn’t call it money or currency.
Private banks can print money, but not an an unlimited amount. They can only print as much as the government allows, and it can only be created as the principal of a loan, and the money is destroyed as the borrower pays down the principal.
Governments can create as much of their own sovereign currency as they want. Governments can levy taxes corporations can't.
Yes.
Corporations try to all the time. It's only through an effective use of law that they don't. And lately, it hasn't been very effective.
But also a government can't print "unlimited currency". Eventually it would be worthless. They are effectively only permitted to print currency proportional to what their creditors allow.
Governments can do it, but you’ve explained why they don’t do it.
A government with fiat monetary sovereignty has no need to borrow its own money, because it already can create as much as it pleases. The purpose of government securities is not to fund spending but to give the rich a safe place to park their capital with interest.
Taxes shrink the money supply after the government creates new currency. Taxes help to create a demand for a currency.
Yes. This is covered in one of the YouTube videos I posted in this thread yesterday.
You have a source on this? I find it difficult to believe that it is ever a good idea to just take out a loan for the sake of making the interest payments. Especially using public funds, that sounds pretty close to embezzlement.
Rather, a country's budget should always make use of debt, because its reputation has value and should be invested, not left sitting on the table.
You’re still mistaking a state with monetary sovereignty for a business. It’s nothing like a business or a household or even a province or municipality. Money works completely differently at this level. Previously:
But you understand that everything you linked are examples of why a govt can't actually print infinitely and can't just pay interest to rich people....right?
Also it's a red flag to me that all of your sources are youtube videos.
We already agreed on why governments don’t print infinite money.
We know it can because we know it does. The wealthy buy US Treasuries for risk-free returns on investment.
The reason I link to YouTube videos is because most people don’t read. They’re not going to read Karl Marx or Michael Hudson.
Drug cartels do all the things any corporation would happily do without laws to restrict them. So I don't see any distinction and I don't believe a govt is necessary for a corporation to exist. Just like with any other crime by any other citizen, a govt uses its monopoly on violence to prevent corporations from doing harm.
Drug cartels aren't really corporations. There's no formal structure, shares or board meetings, and sometimes they do just descend into civil war (like in Mexico right now). They're businesses, but in some ways Rome was as well. The thing that makes them a funny historical edge case is that their primary business is transport rather than theft, and that's down to the massive US/Canadian demand, the wealth behind it, and the inability of any recognised state to join the drug trade in their place and get away with it.
This is an arbitrary list of things and I don't agree that all corporations have all of these, but I guarantee most cartels have a formal structure, a clear description of ownership, and what qualifies as board of leaders. Most wouldn't be able to function without it.
They compete with rival cartels in all the same ways corporations would if they could (or already do when they can get away with it).
I'm curious why you're willing to call them businesses but not corporations.
It's definitional, a corporation is a specific legal structure. A single trader is not a corporation, but is a business. Ditto for Rome, which I've never heard called a corporation even though it was all about money.
Civil war. In case you aren't following the relevant news, the Sinaloa cartel is fighting with itself. A corporation can never do that - government laws set out very clearly who controls what.
And, that makes a huge impact on what kind of people run a corporation, and how they go about managing their business. Managing the loyalty of underlings is of little concern, while it's about the only concern for a warlord. If a VP tried to run their own business with company assets, they'd just be jailed for breach of trust.
I admit I am misusing the term "cartel" here, given that it refers to a group of independent interests acting cooperatively, not a single entity. And legally recognized corporations already attempt to form cartels whenever possible, which is the entire purpose of anti-trust law.
And I agree that govt legislations each have their own definitions for what constitutes a "corporation", but it's the same for "marriage". Yet we wouldn't say marriage only exists if you have a govt.
I don't think it's useful or interesting to end the discussion at "a govt defines a corporation, therefore a corporation doesn't exist without a govt". Because I maintain that if the US govt disappeared, all the entities you currently consider "US-based corporations" would not disappear. Similarly, corporations currently operate internationally in many different countries with many different legislative requirements and many different definitions of "corporation". Yet we don't think of them as existing exclusively in the context of any one of those countries.
Corporations do have infighting, and Hostile Takeovers do happen, and we are in agreement that ONLY reason they're not bloodier is because of governments enforcing their laws. But also, I shouldn't have made "cartel" analagous to "corporation", since the analogy for a cartel civil war would be multiple businesses or corporations having a falling out.
But we also already have a sordid history of US "corporations" operating outside the laws of other countries, oftentimes with the help of the US military. So how do we square that circle?
Publicly traded corporations wouldn't really make sense or exist anymore, but certain private ones might manage to go oligarch, and become/set up a new government. Most would be hopelessly unprepared and would be overrun, though. In my own answer there's an anecdote about this.
People know what the Sinaloa cartel is, and might not know about the nuances of corporate structures, or even what a share is, but do have a vague idea corporations are complicated and very dependent on law enforcement and litigation to function. I won't argue semantics.
Money is created by a government. Corporations use government created money to facilitate trade. Taxes help to give demand for a currency.