(1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
(2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc).
... then someone who is skeptical of abuses of power should be wary of both government and corporate/wealthy power. But that seems like an untenable position — you can't check the one without muscling up the other.
Is there a way to maintain a small, decentralized, local-oriented government that can still check the power of corporate/wealthy/majoritarian impulses and provide a social safety net?
The practical side is substantially harder - the anarchist-communal version of the world requires a citizenry committed to their community, phobic to bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen. Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the bigger practical concern is building an actual durable social contract that people will uphold and enforce over time, even when that means giving up personal glory.
This was basically the state of most societal groups in the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-day existence was within local community groups that had a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere of influence - but the modern world creates the ability to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth than prior means, which renders the whole affair much harder to keep in hand.
But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.
UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)
Oh, hey, the first text I picked from the Anarchist Library answers the question in my previous comment! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alex-stefanescu-rela...
> A revolution would be necessary to topple a political regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of authority, if you don’t need “permission”, you don’t need the revolution either. Anarchy starts not with a bang, but with a whimper — not with an announcement on public television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies, but with our collective work to slowly build something on the lack of the hierarchies themselves.
I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but this bit seems straightforward.
Even Rothbard wrote a pamphlet, I think he later disendorsed, justifying the breakup of any entity that contributes to war or state violence. I dont need to look up Goldman Sachs but I reckon I could justify them being in that box.
>anarchism
Anarchy the leftist tendency is the removal of Hierarchy. It can be debated into how you categorise that, but ultimately they all want corporations gone.
Its the right wing anarchists that are solely focused on the government
I'd say that the most well-developed concrete platform in this sense is Murray Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism", although that is arguably too organized to be properly referred to as anarchism (Bookchin himself, although he used to be an anarchist, dropped the label eventually). But, even so, it's much closer to an anarchist utopia than any state-centric model. And it actually has some practical successes on the ground in Rojava, although the jury is still out on whether it can hold long term.
The legislation limited the power of wealth which made government more willing to police corporations bad behavior.
With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United, we are now in a free for all. Wealth now translates to political power. We are seeing not only de-regulation but the active collusion of the current administration and favored corporations.
At least when applied to Government in the form of "Representative Democracies" I think this overly simplistic view is not useful to analyze what's happening in the real world.
The assumption behind electing representatives is precisely that they will advocate and advance agendas on behalf of the majority - no matter their social status. However, for this to work it requires a populace that is sufficiently informed, educated, and intelligent to understand what sensible solutions look like.
Unfortunately, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and many others were wrong and even after 300 years of putting young homo sapiens through 10 years of public education and teaching them rational thinking this assumption turns out to be false.