Accountability to the electorate isn't just theoretical. Politicians are faced with elections every 2, 4 or 6 years. No, this isn't a perfectly efficient model of accountability, but there's been this meme going around recently that electoral accountability simply doesn't exist, which is just ridiculous. You don't even have to go hunting for examples: the dramatic shift in who held the power in the recent debt ceiling/shutdown hostage negotiations was 100% because of the way polls were shaping up. Contrast that with the 2011 shutdown when 1) Obama was facing an election and thus had to tread more carefully and 2) public opinion was split roughly equally against both sides. In that case Republicans were able to extract relatively significant concessions based entirely on the fact that Obama didn't want to blow up the world economy (depending on your level of cynicism, perhaps because he knew that he'd get flak for it in the upcoming election).
tl;dr: Gov't isn't assumed to care about the people's needs "because it's chartered to do so", but rather because they have specific and explicit dependencies on public approval. By contrast, companies have an explicit dependency on their customers (and shareholders). Everyone else and the externalities that they face are completely irrelevant as far as incentive structures for a company.
Well for what it's worth, I don't think it's a new meme, it's probably as old as libertarianism itself.
I'm glad your argument isn't about how the government is supposed to represent The People "at least in theory", I find that one rather funny given how people of my stripe are usually accused of only thinking in theory.
As much as I want to, I can't convince myself of the aforementioned meme wholesale, there must be some counterbalance or we'd all be slaves. But I want people to break out of what at least seems to me to be the notion that while private companies are selfishly motivated, they can invent the institution called government that's free of perverse incentives and selfishness just because they think society needs it to function.
Your point about nationwide approval of the government versus specific approval of companies is a good one. Consider some counterpoints: 1) the politicians need not pander to everyone, only those who care to vote. 2) expanding on the reluctance to bother voting, there's reluctance to be informed, since your vote had miniscule chance of effecting your life. It's known as rational ignorance, Bryan Caplan has a lot to say about it if you're interested in looking it up. In contrast, choosing one company over another always has immediate effect.
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Accountability to the electorate isn't just theoretical. Politicians are faced with elections every 2, 4 or 6 years. No, this isn't a perfectly efficient model of accountability, but there's been this meme going around recently that electoral accountability simply doesn't exist, which is just ridiculous. You don't even have to go hunting for examples: the dramatic shift in who held the power in the recent debt ceiling/shutdown hostage negotiations was 100% because of the way polls were shaping up. Contrast that with the 2011 shutdown when 1) Obama was facing an election and thus had to tread more carefully and 2) public opinion was split roughly equally against both sides. In that case Republicans were able to extract relatively significant concessions based entirely on the fact that Obama didn't want to blow up the world economy (depending on your level of cynicism, perhaps because he knew that he'd get flak for it in the upcoming election).
tl;dr: Gov't isn't assumed to care about the people's needs "because it's chartered to do so", but rather because they have specific and explicit dependencies on public approval. By contrast, companies have an explicit dependency on their customers (and shareholders). Everyone else and the externalities that they face are completely irrelevant as far as incentive structures for a company.
Well for what it's worth, I don't think it's a new meme, it's probably as old as libertarianism itself.
I'm glad your argument isn't about how the government is supposed to represent The People "at least in theory", I find that one rather funny given how people of my stripe are usually accused of only thinking in theory.
As much as I want to, I can't convince myself of the aforementioned meme wholesale, there must be some counterbalance or we'd all be slaves. But I want people to break out of what at least seems to me to be the notion that while private companies are selfishly motivated, they can invent the institution called government that's free of perverse incentives and selfishness just because they think society needs it to function.
Your point about nationwide approval of the government versus specific approval of companies is a good one. Consider some counterpoints: 1) the politicians need not pander to everyone, only those who care to vote. 2) expanding on the reluctance to bother voting, there's reluctance to be informed, since your vote had miniscule chance of effecting your life. It's known as rational ignorance, Bryan Caplan has a lot to say about it if you're interested in looking it up. In contrast, choosing one company over another always has immediate effect.