Most corporations are small businesses owned by the middle class. Discuss.

Being able to successfully conduct almost all of the work of living using a minority of the total resources is desirable according to standard environmental movements and economic models. But in this case, we're not even discussing resources, but rather proxies for resources, all stored in abstract computer systems. At a high level, does the friction come from imbalanced wealth and asset distribution, or with the inversion of the relationship between social and economic models embedded into our management systems. The total resources available more than meet the total needs of potential users. The top-level people in the system do not spend their days actively looking for ways to deprive individuals of access to the necessities of life. At the end of the day, they are all human and have enough of the generic kinds of graces and decencies that they maintain some semblance of generic human social function. The most heated arguments appear to be about how best to reconfigure the rules at the edges in order to conform to (evidently different) perceptions about the core ruleset. (The core ruleset is an implementation of a social model first developed a long time ago and incrementally refined ever since the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Information Age, or other convenient shorthand epoch. It necessarily embeds stated and unstated assumptions, some of which have become irrelevant today.. Rather than arguing how we should conform to the ruleset or model, we might ask if we need this particular ruleset or model to perform our desired social functions. Or failing that, we might consider how to revise the model in order to regain control over the rules we impose upon ourselves.) I don't see any individual in the top tier enjoying more than one set of clothing, one meal, one party, or one habitation at one time. For anyone but the extreme bottom tier, the question concerns degree, rather than having or not having. As we know from centuries of manufacturing, formal rules are very good at restricting variation until something catastrophic happens. If an explicit rules-based society is what we want (in keeping with the mechanistic Enlightenment paradigm), the rules to determine which corporations do or do not operate in a socially acceptable manner must operate repeatably. That is, the standards we apply to one corporation must be uniform across all other corporations of the same kind. In the past, we've designed rules around qualitative differences among corporations (monopoly, public, not-for-profit, charitable, professional, etc.). But under current classifications, it's not evident how Google (which knowingly sells bundles of ads that will mostly not be clicked) is different *in kind* from a firm that knowingly sells bundles of loans that will mostly not be repaid. Closer to accountability, all but the smallest of organisations exhibit some specialisation and distribution of tasks because few individuals have the knowledge, skills, or time to do everything. Hence, each layer of functional or organisational abstraction costs some information and transparency, and hence, accountability. The problem of information and communication gaps is ubiquitous (and possibly scale-free). This, I think, exposes one of the fatal assumptions we've been making: that wealth and assets as denominated or proxied in terms of money are conceptually or practically related to any social dimension. (This is not to say that there is no social dimension to wealth, but that the same social dynamics apply irrespective of particular wealth or lack thereof.) Investment firms, politicians, or profiteers are not socially destructive because they have different bits in some database next to their names; they would be considered socially destructive because they exploit trust and incomplete information in their social relations with other humans. This wealth manifestation is a symptom or outcome, not a cause, of some deeper dynamic that begins with exploiting individuals. tl;dr: If we believe the mechanistic relationship between input reactants (exploitation) and output products (wealth), removing product from the system would tend to drive the reaction forward (more exploitation). In contrast, if we want something other than a rules-based society, we would need to do something different in kind than adding or removing rules at the edges.