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@ Comte de Sats Germain
2025-06-12 17:21:36
That's a lot. Good leads. A bit more than I can process right now.
I think the most important thing is probably to separate resource acquisition from leadership. Information is always asymmetric. Debatable, but that's what I'd argue.
If leaders can't enrich themselves, then they are less likely to try to hold on to power. Better yet, make the power too costly to hold. The other side would argue that you want to keep good leadership around - to which I say, that's only true if you depend on leadership for distribution of resources, which makes that argument tautological.
Corporations used to be fairly aligned with this thinking. At the beginning of the US' history, corporations were temporary things that formed ad hoc to complete a specific project - building a bridge, establishing a settlement, digging a canal, etc.. Corruption crept in via the traders on Wall Street - literally there, they just gathered there, similar to how bankers originally gathered on the banks somewhere around Venice. They had a vested interest in maintaining ownership (which is fine if that's all it is) and a corporation that didn't shut itself down was more valuable than one that did. Then the corruption really got going when there was a congress to bribe, a dollar to kickback, treasuries to finance more corruption, and then credit money / fiat to externalize the real cost of debt.
Maybe the lesson is that good ideas get corrupted, so make sure you **_don't_** build things too permanent. Idk.