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> companies can take what I make, without my consent

Welcome to "democracy". Of course, _we_ decide what "democracy" is and how (and if) we apply it in your unfortunate, individual case.

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The multinational companies are a fair bit outside democratic control. If one country bans or restricts them they can operate from some other one.

But in the present moment, it seems like countries are themselves even more outside democratic control than multinational companies are.

The mechanisms of democratic accountability in political institutions are today are demonstrably dysfunctional and broken, if they ever really worked at all, whereas multinational companies are at least somewhat beholden to market pressures. Sure, they can engage in jurisdiction shopping when that's viable for them, but it's more often the case that they seek to influence those very governments in order to insulate themselves from accountability to the market.

And many of the bans and restrictions that firms try to avoid by switching jurisdictions are themselves the result of some other industry or special interest group managing to exert stronger influence over the local political institutions, and not due to any sort of "democratic" consensus. Look at the recent cluster of nearly identical age-verification laws passed by jurisdictions around the world, which there was near zero "democratic" impetus for, as an example of this.


Dunno. In democracies you can still vote the bastards out, even if the process is imperfect.

The age verification thing was initially a UK project and people there broadly support it https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54405-eight-months-on-thre...

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