phavoc said:
I could see how some of this could work, such as privatizing all government services. In theory a company can run them as ineffeciently as the government can...
If they were sufficiently motivated (that is, didn't have a local monopoly on their service).
Though it's almost hard some times imagining them being less efficient than government.
phavoc said:
But some of it might be rather difficult to do where there was overlap between different controlling companies. The issue with having a single entity control all of an industiral sector/industry is that businesses are in it for theirselves. Competition is bad, and therefore they would, I think, be constantly warring with one another. Which would suck for the populace.
On Vanejen, the technocracy grew on top of an existing group of "Great Families" after contact with interstellar civilization was renewed. I imagine that they parceled out control of the new spheres of power that offworld technology brought, though I suspect the process was not a peaceful one.
Since each "holding" would be a monopoly, there would be no competition. Anyone who tried to compete would find that the other "peers of the realm" would not do business with them. (Or if they did, things could get interesting militarily and politically, since such an action would be seen as equivalent to invading another's country.)
I personally don't imagine an FT world as being progressive in any way, since at least with Human populations, competition seems to be required to drive innovation. But greed is a good motivator too, and there are other worlds out there to trade with....
The traveller wiki's definition of FT doesn't agree with my assessment of Vanejen's description. The wiki's definition sounds WAY more like the "minarchy" mentioned, though calling it a "Feudal Technocracy" has a lot of connotative baggage that does not match the "minarchy" concept.
My interpretation of Vanejen's "Great Family Monopolies" government sounds more like a Self-Perpetuating Oligarchy, though one with a Feudal flare.
How would you rate a place that was ruled by the equivalent of the Sicilian Mob? Totalitarian Oligarchy?
phavoc said:
There would have to be some sort of governing structure/council that everyone answered to in order to prevent chaos from destablizing the entire economy. Today most companies only pay attention to the laws because they have too, not because its the right thing to do. They and their leadership have been conditioned that breaking the law costs money (and rarely jail time). And you still hear every day of big companies breaking the law in the name of profit. I would suspect that having an entire planet run where all corporations are essentially competitors with one another for profit would be a nightmare!
Agreed. But if you aren't required to turn a profit because there are no shareholders and no competitors, then you wind up running your "business" (if such a thing can be called a business) so that your customer/constituents are at least minimally content to avoid revolution and you and yours can live in luxury. And in a fully realized Feudal system, there would be either a King or a House of Lords who could pressure you to behave on pain of losing your status or even life.
Plus, in the Traveller sense, few planets exist in a vacuum (ha ha). The Imperium would probably exert influence to the extent that they would award contracts to the more successful nobles and apply political pressure to the other nobles to further their agenda when necessary.
