alt Hacker NewsYeah, the economy is basically a bunch of oligarchical/dictatorial command economies, or what we like to call companies. It's funny, a lot of leftist people use them as examples of how a larger command economy could work (usually the reaction a lot of leftists I know had to People's Republic of Walmart), whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
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Isn’t this how conglomerates work? Like Samsungs memory division refusing to sell to Samsungs phone division recently.
I imagine it might look something like a company-internal gig economy; someone puts out a request for a code review and a bunch of fellow employees bid on doing the job, and the requester provides a tip for good service at the end, etc.
> whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
There are a few small examples that come to mind (co-ops and communes mostly), but I can’t think of any that have been successful at scale. Running an internal market would be almost pure overhead, so if it worked it would really have to be efficient to be worthwhile.
Well, at the extreme end of free market, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert drew from Objectivism and had his company's divisions internally compete with one another:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inte...
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-h...
> it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
I was wondering the same after PRW lol. Recently I had the chance to ask a friend of mine who worked in Google Infra (years ago) if they had ever tried to 'liberalize' their infrastructure planning; something like having internal business units bid on space, power, and compute instead of distributing it top-down. He said that yes, this was actually something like their original operating model, and the outcome was that YouTube basically bought up every piece of hardware in the company and then leased them out to other verticals at a profit.