What the procession of theft looks like

I've blogged before about bureaucracy and I tend to tweet about it from time to time. Today, I'd like to write about how the systematic inclination towards theft has played itself out.

If you happen to have any assets, you may have noticed that it's generally considered a good idea to put those assets in an LLC, maybe a partnership, a corporation. And you get the same sort of advice for starting a business. Sometimes it isn't necessary, but sometimes it's legitimately good advice.

But what this does, of course, is reduce the number of sole proprietors and individual owners. There's technically no one to steal from anymore, except for 'we the people' and already people are moving from an expectation of owning houses, cars, etc... - to a subscription model.

So the people won't own much. In some sense they will suffer less, because most of the maintenance and care needed will be paid for by corporations. But the flip side of that is that the bureaucrats running the corporations are insulated from the consequences of their actions. We've seen the sort of schemes were there are bonuses for various risky endeavors, which may fall apart in five years, but once the shit hits the fan five years later, the guy that got the bonus for that deal is long gone and his name may not even be attached to the deal.

I've even seen it in non-profit, with a guy presiding over a multi-million dollar deal I know was a dumb idea. But I also know this guy can put the deal on his C.V. and pretend like it was awesome, and although the people who worked with him ended up hating him, they aren't going to bad-mouth the deal, because they'd look bad too.

Nothing will put the brakes on these companies. Family businesses tend to exist for the family- when they grow, they grow slowly, with the family. Corporations tend to try and achieve economies of scale, which happens at two different levels- the first level is a supposed economy of scale around their core business. They get bigger than they need to be even there, but they get even bigger at the second level when they notice the reward they get for sending money (and lobbyists) to Washington D.C.

The government does it too. The modern state generally needs growth, or else people start to notice injustice. Every extra step down this road makes growth more necessary, yet money creation via debt is making it ever more difficult for them to stimulate growth. And when everything is a service, you have nothing to rely on if you can't make your monthly payment.

If the government was a family business, wouldn't it protect individual owners and family businesses more, and not give so many benefits to corporations? Perhaps, it wouldn't cause businesses to incur so many costs, so even a company attempting to reach an economy of scale wouldn't need to get as big as they do today.

But people seem to focus very strongly on the fact that that would mean a small group of people would get to be the elites. They don't appear to notice how we are practically smothered in elites now, although, yes they don't deserve that title. I think it is also possible that they look at bureaucracy and imagine a hierarchy within it, such that those truly high up surely must have some wisdom or at least aristocratic tendencies. I doubt it. I think most people get taught to think like bureaucrats, and it is doubtful those who rise to high places are permitted to display many signs of intelligence, because they would then deviate from bureaucratic thinking.