Uraniun235 wrote:Yes and no; the impression I get from such fictional settings is that everyone prefers to maintain at least the superficial appearance of legitimacy, which directly attacking a government certainly undermines. It also makes business dealings that much messier and volatile, since now instead of attempting to entice the government and politicians with sweeter deals, contracts might now be decided based on "which corporation has more guns and is likelier to breach security and manage to put the hit on me?". It gets even worse when multiple corporations bidding on the same contract threaten committee members to choose them or else, and they follow through; now you've got politicians dying no matter who they chose. It is in nobody's interest that naked aggression against the 'legitimate' government of a major power be tolerated, because in the end it will be bad business for everyone.
Yeah I remember you talking about this when tuxedo brought up some RPG setting about corporations getting enough power to replace governments in some kind of medieval fiefdom with city states.
In the words of the Doctor, "He's just a businessman." If a military corporation had enough power to replace a national army, it would pull a John Lumic and just take over. If it didn't, it would be stupid to try and ultimately would fail. Either a coup d'etat happens and the security corporation
becomes the government and national military, or it doesn't happen and the nationalists crush the corporation breaking the line, perhaps with the help of other corporations if it comes to that.
I would also suggest that escalation against a government which was pissed enough to rub out an entire corporation is not necessarily in the best interests of any megacorp, since a major government can always ultimately win a cycle of escalation by sheer force of arms; sorry, but even the biggest corporation is going to take a massive stock hit (if not be fatally wounded) by their headquarters collapsing under the weight of airstrikes or going up in an atomic fireball. Granted, at that point things won't be going well for the government either, but at least it still exists. Granted, this might well trigger an escalation of armed response from other governments which ultimately leads into World War 3, but it's not like that's an implausible scenario either; nobody ever said governments had to be rational and reasonable.
EDIT: Also, "security corporation" is sort of vague, and doesn't necessarily denote that it's one of the elite handful that indirectly control the world; it could well be the equivalent of today's Blackwater.
Well you can imagine something like this happening: a loose federal government, increasingly restricted by what laws can be passed and especially restricted in terms of tax which is the major advantage governments have over corporations (governments can force you to pay, and corporations have to convince you to buy their product.) This could happen through unrestrained democracy, with citizens tying politicians' hands and blindfolding them with propositions on ballots.
Rule by opinion polls, and nobody likes taxes so eventually raising taxes could be banned and perhaps taxes all together. With soaring inflation, tax could eventually become trivial and insufficient to pay the soldiers. There could be mass desertions. The national army consumes itself, a pittance of its former self with collapsing infrastructure and only the Presidential or Imperial guard reliable at all (since they're the only ones at this point who have anything to lose defending the old regime.)
The problem is obvious though: any situation which fucks up a government will fuck up a corporation.
