Corporations are fucked up. They will never allow the state to be abolished because they need to collect taxes in order to bail themselves out of trouble and in order to fight wars for them at the taxpayer expense so they can reap the profits... a corporation will never go to war alone. War is fucking expensive and is rarely directly profitable. They want to socialize expenses and privatize gain, which is impossible to do without a government of some kind.

It's even better: a lot of essential or close to it things are pretty much monopolies or cartels (for example, Internet access in most of the US) so people have no actual choice but to pay a specific entity whatever they chose to charge.

It's like tax but without the upside of taxes (which is that they're money that's supposed to entirely end up benefiting you, even if most of it indirectly) because when you buy a product or service from a monopoly or cartel only part of it goes to cover the cost of the actual product or service you're getting and a large fraction or even most of it goes to shareholder dividends, which has zero benefit for you.

I've taken to call these things Taxes Paid Directly To Private Companies.

Monarchists 🙄

It's deliberate. Left-wing ideologies are basically "we don't really benefit from these traditional hierarchies and we'd be better off if we didn't concentrate resources in the hands of a small number of owners so much", which is hard to argue against.

So those who want to keep their power in the current system try to misdirect the debates themselves with "libertarianism" and "neo liberalism" which are both economically conservative ideologies that try to separate the idea of personal freedom from economic ones and ignore that any "freedom" in business is against a background of negotiation leverage, so more freedom in business gives more advantages to those with more leverage.

That first paragraph is also why conservatives put so much attention towards making it difficult to vote, get a good education, or find various supports. They know trying to argue that they should have control of most of the wealth is a losing argument so they go for confusing as many as possible or keeping them busy with their own survival.

What about .gov?

What are your views on sword-based governance?

I went to elementary school when whitehouse.com was still a porn site. I remember a class in the computer lab where we were supposed to do research on the government. Our teacher was very clear about going to the .gov website and absolutely not the .com one.

Whatever adult content blocking they had set up did not work.