Oddbean

in between the time of mercantilism, where only one guy could get a license to do some business (with a letters patent and cosy relations with the monarch) and the arrival of the warfare modality of espionage, there were companies but they didn't register themselves not long after monarch started hiring spooks, about 200 years, we saw the beginning of the modern liberal democratic state, and shortly thereafter, the wide deployment of fractional reserve banking, insurance, and income tax at which point, multi-person enterprises were required, and much propaganda was made to make everyone think that doing business in a structured way required you to register for taxation guess what the real reason why they do all this is because it gives them a lever... once you are a publicly registered corporation, the spooks can come and talk to you and make you do things and at threat of death you must not tell anyone about this, and you must obey their commands not only is google a NSA- and CIA- funded operation, so is Facebook, and before this, the spooks captured Apple, Microsoft ... and so on... and let's just say that in many cases, a lot of the money for these behemoths came from dark places that nobody really talks about and very few have even tried to find out the entire situation is the most literal realisation of the allegory of Plato's Cave that you can imagine, they are controlling enough people's minds that the rest who are not sure, just go along with it either to fit in or out of fear sooner or later, the human spirit will break out of this enslavement so, yeah, don't be fooled if the government approves it, or a faction of the government is trying to cast it as an enemy it's part of the government if it's a publicly registered corporation it can effectively become part of the government at any moment, just waits on a bunch of MIBs to go out and have some conversations and make threats and give orders to the entrepreneurs involved and yes they are a competitive bunch, there is at least two factions in every government, and they compete to increase the amount of control with their differerent philosophies of how to achieve it nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzq3svyhng9ld8sv44950j957j9vchdktj7cxumsep9mvvjthc2pjuqqspmzej4afu6h6hq2q0gjgr63rkr0w4zeyfg2ryq5rynna27huz8hqd4xnqu