> Corporations are actually held accountable. If they screw up, the owners can lose out massively. Executives too through incentive programs.

Ha! Is that why climate crisis is being driven by 100 companies? What's your excuse for that? Some outdated Malthusian analysis of it being the consumer's fault for not "voting with their dollar?" which is an outdated and foolish libertarian argument Marx eviscerated long ago? A system where each person has one vote will be more democratic, even if corrupt, than a corporation which is not. You talk about centralization of power as if you cannot decentralize economic control democratically, which is exactly what the socialist/Marxist prescription is (please don't bother replying that "socialism/Marxism is when the government does stuff, like owning all the business," because that's an all-too-common misconception).

We have regulations because businesses often will do whatever they can get away with and are not accountable due to how much money they can make and are ran entirely undemocratically. Child labor laws. 40 hour work week. Safety regulations. Prohibition of leaded gasoline and leaded paint. Etc. These are examples of the state enforcing some degree of accountability onto businesses and it has been for the greater good of society. Without the state doing this these corporations could get away with anything (and often do get away with pretty much anything, anyway, due to material conditions, but removing what little protections we do have under liberal democracy would make things even worse [just look whence we came]).

Even in your own example of "corporate accountability," that accountability is coming from the government. Moreover, what's left of your argument is just saying "vote with your dollar," which hm:

> In 2019, families with net worths exceeding $1 million owned 79.2 percent of all the household wealth in the country. The bottom half of American families held just 1.5 percent of the wealth.

I could cite statistics like that all day. If your answer is to "vote with your dollar," then it's plain to see who has the most voting power! What's left then? To out-compete those with a dominion over material and the means of production?

Is that why the few billionaires who run the show, because they ultimately they control the material conditions, are able to control the means of production and basically make everyone bow to their demands to an extreme degree, barely curtailed only by a dwindling bourgeoisie democracy which the working class can only faintly tolerate. Why they pour tons of money into influencing electors and politicians? Also, I hope you don't give the libertarian argument "well corporations only get big an evil because the government exists!" Due to the way commodity production/the commodity form works, it is something which consolidates over time, and as we have seen some examples in history, enterprises which get large enough eventually establish their own rules and become the de facto state.

Is that why less than ten corporations own almost all the brands people are familiar with? That is not how commodity production works. The evolution of the commodity form has been one of competing commodity producers, where one will always lose out and have to sell their wage labor to the winning commodity producer and the existing commodity producers absorb the labor power, means of production, and continue expanding in a way which someone starting from 0 can not overwhelm. This is the economy of scale. You can cherry pick "disruptive" technologies all you want, but if you look at who holds most of the wealth in the world (a handful of billionaires), and their control over various industries, what I'm saying becomes extremely apparent.

Also your example doesn't even make sense--the war indeed had massive support--we're talking about democratic accountability as in doing what the people want. You're simply playing with words at this point, you're asking if we can try an elected official we elected into office for something that had popular support at the time? Does corruption in the state happen? Yes and often. But by default, corruption is the name of the game in corporations whose sole purpose is the profit-motive under dictatorial/elite rule, or at the very least, rule by profit incentive.

When you leave the devices of power out of the hands of voters, you just let the profit incentive and a shrinking minority of billionaires control things--we literally made a device that separates rich people's heads from their bodies over this (to establish liberal democracy).

The answer is not more totalitarianism, but more democratic control over the economy and government, not less.

What a load of rubbish--shame to see stuff like this on Hacker news so often, likely due to out-of-touch petite bourgeoisie (as many programmers are), lending them to reactionary bents.

It's extremely reactionary to look at the over-centralization of power and say "ah, the solution is to give more power to corporations which already dominate the material conditions!" Again the solution is to further decentralize power by making the economy and enterprises democratic (and to increase the level of democracy present in the government). You can just gather that from a basic anarchist and Marxist analysis.