I’ve changed my mind about corporations. I used to have a negative view of government and a favorable view of industry. Now, I think basically every large corporation is awful – similarly bad to the government. Big companies commit ongoing fraud and other rights violations. They violate laws that would exist even in a fully free market. Therefore, if we had a more capitalist society, that wouldn’t mean companies are left alone more. Capitalism involves protecting rights, enforcing contracts, policing aggression, etc. Our government does a lot of things it shouldn’t, but it also fails to do a lot of things it should. Part of a capitalist society would be a better, more effective government.
I’ve recognized many flaws in specific companies and incidents. But I only recently extrapolated the pattern that all the big companies are bad. Therefore, our government’s failure to police fraud well is a huge deviation from capitalism which a free market society would fix.
I haven’t changed my political principles, like peace, freedom and limited government. Nor have I changed my mind about Austrian economics. But I now hold some beliefs that I haven’t seen anyone else advocate who has similar pro-capitalist principles.
This article is an update on my political philosophy ideas for September 2022. I’ll discuss my principles first. Then I’ll criticize corporations from a pro-capitalist perspective. I’ll focus more on conceptual issues than on the specifics of flaws in current companies, though I’ll give some examples and link to more. I’ll also discuss investors who fund frauds, disagreements with libertarians (e.g. I think capitalism is a limited framework that isn’t meant to address all problems, not a solution for everything), and creative adversaries who don’t initiate force. I also bring up the root cause of the problem (irrational people).
My main theme is that capitalist or libertarian type principles imply a government that actually does enough policing of companies to stop fraud and other initiations of force, not a smaller government that leaves companies alone more.
My principles are similar to classical liberalism. Other terms that apply to me include Objectivist, pro-capitalist and minarchist. I favor Austrian economics. People would generally categorize me as “libertarian”, though I don’t fit in well with libertarians. I also don’t fit in with the Democrats/“progressives” or Republicans/“conservatives”. I’m an atheist who was never religious; I grew up in a left-wing area of the U.S.; and I’ve never changed my mind about some social values I grew up with like opposing racism and sexism or defending abortion.
I favor peace, freedom and individualism, including free markets and limited government. I could conceivably favor having no government in a very different world but I tend to disagree with current anarchists. I used to identify as an anarcho-capitalist and make anarchist arguments, but I stopped years ago. Let’s just start with minarchy, see how it goes, and consider next steps later. Minarchy means a minimal, limited government which basically only does defense against initiation of force: police, military, courts, laws and foreign policy. It would ideally be funded in a voluntary way but it’d still be a big improvement with coercive taxation. A minarchy should also have democratic elections or some reasonable system, not be e.g. a dictatorship.
Ayn Rand is my favorite author and Ludwig von Mises my favorite economist. Some other political and economic authors I like are George Reisman, Henry Hazlitt, William Godwin and Edmund Burke.
Classical liberals believe in the harmony of people’s interests. There are no inherent conflicts of interest between people. Adversarial interactions are unnecessary. Win/win solutions are possible for all problems (win/wins are outcomes with mutual benefit and no losers). People can get along without compromising their values and with no aggressors violating other people’s rights. Every person would be individually better off that way.
I consider it disturbing how cruel and unsafe our prisons are, and I think prison should only be used for defensive purposes, not for punishment or revenge. That’s an example of social disharmony and adversarial relationships, rather than win/win cooperation. Another example is Marxist class warfare, which I regard as a tribalist way to seek win/lose outcomes (when classes war with each other, then some must lose for others to win).
The primary reason to prefer a minimal government is that the government is authorized to use much more violence than anyone else. The government runs the military and sends out armed men to enforce its laws. But violence is dangerous and easily misused. People with the power to use violence face challenges like temptation and corruption. The government must have controls and monitoring to prevent abuse. To minimize violence, anything unrelated to violence is best kept separate from the government, like how you’d give keys to your gun safe to as few people as possible. For example, people who sell food or build roads don’t need violence to do their jobs, so they shouldn’t be part of the organization that deals with violence (the government).
The government should be seen as the military wing of society, not as the central planner in charge of everything. You wouldn’t put military generals or police chiefs in charge of the sewers, schools or healthcare. People involved with violence, including their bosses (political leaders), are being trusted with a difficult, burdensome role. They are exposing themselves to the taint of dealing with violence so that not everyone has to. Violence tends to change people and power tends to corrupt people. Laws give orders to the men with guns. When lawmakers make mistakes, violence is used incorrectly, and they have to live with that. Lawmakers should never forget their connection to violence. When they make a law, they should consider if it’s really worth using violence against violators. They should picture, in their mind, armed men enforcing their law against a family with the same race, religion, political party and socio-economic status as themselves. They should picture people in jail due to their law or poor parents being fined money they don’t have. Is that worth it? Maybe they should have artists draw it for them. They should consider if they’d want this law enforced against their friend, colleague or family member. No extra people should unnecessarily work for the government where they have to think about and deal with violence.
I favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in his elections. Why? Contrary to what the mainstream and right wing media both said, Trump was a moderate 1990’s center-leftist who doesn’t hate business and moved to center-right policies on a lot of things. Also he wasn’t a career politician (other actors like Ronald Reagan and Volodymyr Zelensky have done better than many politicians). Even Trump’s immigration policies, which are called far right, largely involved trying to enforce pre-existing laws that 1990’s Democrats favored (there are video clips of some current prominent Democrat politicians saying Trump-like opinions on immigration in the past). Obviously some of Trump’s voters are racist, but I don’t think Trump himself is particularly racist, and some Democrat voters are racist too.
Hillary is an extreme anti-capitalist radical. Biden is a corrupt career politician who doesn’t stand for much of anything. Good examples of government policies I oppose are the Green New Deal and Obamacare.
I didn’t think they would overturn Roe vs. Wade. That was an awful result from Trump. It’s bothered me to see some formerly pro-abortion people say positive things about that ruling.
Trump made some stupid comments on COVID but overall did better than I’d expect from other politicians. He implemented travel restrictions early and accelerated vaccine development. I don’t know why the right turned into the anti-mask party. (I guess it’s because everyone is so tribalist, so both sides wanted to find something to divide over for COVID.) I’m vaccinated, I still wear masks in grocery stores, and I still don’t eat inside restaurants in August 2022.
The large companies that I’m most familiar with are U.S. tech companies. I’ve known for years that many prominent tech companies are really bad and dangerous (like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Tesla). Also the crypto currency companies are basically scams. I liked and respected Steve Jobs, but he was the one special exception, and he’s been gone for a long time now.
What do companies and business leaders do wrong? I’ve posted many examples and details on my forums and I’ve included some links throughout this article. An example is that Mark Cuban did horrifying crypto shilling where he lied to the public to promote a ponzi scheme. I saw that not long after looking into his business history and finding out that he’s a bad person who got ahead financially in bad ways including by bullying people and violating their rights.
I also knew that the large banks, schools, healthcare companies and utilities are awful. Over time, I’ve gradually learned more about ways that various industries are bad.
I recently looked into health and nutrition and found out that the large food companies are horrible too. After learning that, I extrapolated to every industry. I now believe that basically every large company is awful. This comes off as a radical left-wing take in stark opposition to libertarians. You’d expect to hear it from a Marxist, but it’s actually compatible with capitalism. Capitalism is system of economics intended to be good for society, not a way of praising or helping companies.
If you disagree with my evaluation of companies, you’re welcome to debate me or discuss on my forum. Although I’ll give some examples and link to more, this article is not primarily meant to share flaws in companies. It’s more about exploring the implications.
A detail: Some food companies were bought and run by cigarette companies. For example, Philip Morris bought Kraft in 1988 (and separated it into its own company in 2007). It’s shocking to me that no one ever told me that before. I read it recently in the book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us and fact checked it. How could Kraft be run for 20 years by Philip Morris executives and I never saw any anti-smoking people mention it? Philip Morris brought manipulative marketing and other tactics from their cigarette company culture.
Small companies aren’t better than big companies on the whole. But there’s a lot more individual variation, so some of them are better and some are worse. And the awful small companies go out of business more than good small companies or awful big companies do. The result is that some small companies are good while approximately no big companies are good. Departments of large companies may be better or worse than the company as a whole, but they have less variation than independent companies of the same size. Public intellectuals including scientists are mostly bad too, but they vary so there are some good ones (unfortunately, academia reduces variation). Smaller groups have more variance than bigger groups.
A way big companies are bad is they break laws all the time. Laws are more poorly enforced than I formerly realized. This applies to laws that would exist in a fully laissez faire capitalist country. Fraud is widespread.
You’ve probably heard of fraudulent goods being sold online. It’s a big problem that e.g. Amazon is choosing not to police effectively. Many people see it as primarily an online shopping problem when buying from sellers they’ve never heard of. They trust recognizable brands at large chain stores in person like Walmart, Target or Safeway. But if you visit those stores in the U.S. and buy a branded bottle of extra virgin olive oil off the shelf, you probably have over a 50% chance to be defrauded. Organized crime like the Italian mafia is making billions of dollars by defrauding olive oil customers and governments aren’t stopping them. Similarly, Study Finds 82 Percent of Avocado Oil Rancid or Mixed With Other Oils. Grocery stores and governments both know this is a problem but don’t fix it. Selling a bottle labelled as one product, but actually full of something else, is egregious fraud (and can kill people with allergies). I’d like to live in a society with effective anti-fraud enforcement to stop this so that I can trust product labels in mainstream stores.
When I imagine a minarchist state with a free market, I now envision more government enforcement actions against companies than we have today, not fewer. Capitalism requires the defense of people, property rights and contracts, and a prohibition on initiating force including fraud. A capitalist free market includes some kind of system for police, laws and courts which prevents people’s rights from being violated by aggressors.
I’ve never heard of any other person viewing minarchy as implying more effective police, courts and lawmakers. I’ve never seen a libertarian tell a concerned anti-capitalist that, in a free market, companies would be policed more vigorously by the government than they are today.
Libertarians virtually all strongly disagree with that; they want companies to be left alone more. I want companies to stop initiating force and follow the non-aggression principle, and the minarchist or libertarian solution for that is supposed to be government enforcement.
Libertarians advocate “minimum necessary force”. They assume that means less government force than today against companies, less meddling in the economy, etc. But it means enough force to stop rights violations. Since rights violations are ongoing today, we need more force used for defense (or perhaps less total force if it’s used more effectively and properly targeted).
Some anarchists want competition between private police forces instead of having government police. If that worked out well, the result would be basically the same. The private police forces would do policing actions against companies until every big company stops doing lots of ongoing fraud. But I’ve never heard an anarchist say: “The problem today is that the government police let companies get away with fraud. My rights are not properly protected by the government. If we had private police forces, then they would actually protect my rights and stop all this fraud.”
Libertarians focus their complaints on governments doing bad things, not governments failing to do good things that they should do. Both matter.
I think that neither our government nor our large companies are very compatible with capitalism. They’re both very different than the libertarian ideal. It’s common to imagine a different government with the same companies. The result is a capitalist government with capitalism-incompatible companies that keep violating the rights of customers and workers. So the government in that scenario would start doing its job and policing the fraud, the broken contracts, and the other rights violations. But the only message I’ve ever gotten from libertarians is “government bad; companies good; a free market means the government leaves the companies alone”. But capitalist principles like “rights violations are prohibited” or “initiation of force is prohibited” imply that awful companies should not be left alone because they aren’t leaving others alone.
Companies put a lot of work into manipulating customers. That’s not as important as fraud but it still matters. And sometimes they fraudulently mislead customers when they’re trying to manipulate them, so this is a driver of fraud. Trying to make your marketing super manipulative, instead of focusing on honesty, leads to crossing the line into fraud more often.
I’ve complained a lot about the video game industry, particularly predatory microtransactions, gambling, manipulation, and pandering to “casual” players who don’t want to think much or learn skills (who’d often rather pay to win than learn to win). The tricks they use to try to get people hooked and spending too much money are a good example of manipulation. For example, they add incentives to play the game every day and they put time limits on a lot of stuff so people fear missing out if they don’t do it before it’s gone. They also fill their games with many different currency systems with many different confusing numbers that work on many different timers. People often don’t understand how much they’re actually getting for how many dollars they spend. This started primarily with mobile games and is spreading to all video games. It’s also basically a way for game companies to run online casinos without following the laws about casinos.
There’s a broader problem where companies put a lot of effort into manipulatively controlling people instead of seeking mutual benefit. Any time a creative adversary has an agenda for you that you don’t want, that’s dangerous. For any complex system with a set of fixed rules (such as “don’t initiate force”, or the security code in some software), a creative adversary with enough resources will generally find a way to beat the rules. Even if companies never initiated force, they would still be dangerous when they had adversarial goals, just like computer hackers can break into pretty much any computer system with enough time and effort.
Your life and mind are like a complex computer system with a bunch of security measures, and manipulative companies are like hackers trying to find a glitch or security hole that lets them take (partial) control of you. The only way to keep hackers out of computer systems is with active defensive efforts. It’s an ongoing race where software companies try to stay a step ahead of hackers. Software that’s never updated is highly vulnerable. What that means for you is that you have to spend your energy and creativity to avoid being manipulated by big companies. If you just don’t think about them at all, and do nothing to defend yourself, then they’ll find some flaw in you and exploit it to (partially) control you. So even if they don’t initiate force, when companies put a lot of resources into being adversarial, they do harm and it requires resources to defend against them.
You do have an advantage. It’s easier for you to control your life than for corporations to. To defend yourself, you don’t have to match them with an equal amount of resources used. For every $1000 they spend to find a way to manipulate you, you might only need to spend $1 worth of defensive resources. Perhaps less. Plus, there are some groups that try to help defend the public, e.g. by educating people about manipulative tactics or monitoring companies for bad behaviors. However, big companies have huge budgets. They spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year trying to adversarially manipulate the public.
To give one example, food companies have spent a lot of money researching how to get people to eat more of their products. They’ve scientifically studied what makes people feel full and stop eating, then designed foods to avoid triggering that biological mechanism for avoiding overeating.
Social harmony and cooperative relationships matter. Even if people don’t initiate force, acting in an adversarial way is bad. When people believe there are conflicts of interest, and act accordingly, they do harm. However, preventing all rights violations would dramatically help with this problem and would be a great start. Also, I think creative judges and law-makers are needed on an ongoing basis – just creating ideal laws and never making adjustments wouldn’t work well because people would find holes in the laws.
Today, besides breaking laws, companies find loopholes and exploits to get around laws. A lot of the bad behavior by companies is not because the government pushed them to do it; it’s despite the government trying to prevent it.
There aren’t a bunch of heroes as CEOs and villains in government. The people who run big companies are similar to the people who run the government. They aren’t significantly better people. The incentives people have are somewhat different between industry and government, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference.
Most people are pretty bad. The main types of badness I have in mind are irrationality and dishonesty. People are bad at thinking and reasoning, make lots of mistakes, and do a poor job of finding and fixing those errors (or listening to critics). Most people also have a partially adversarial mindset instead of thoroughly seeking and expecting win/win solutions and only trying to ever deal with people in cooperative ways for mutual benefit.
Just reforming government wouldn’t fix society because it wouldn’t fix the bad people problem. And the government isn’t to blame for all the problems. Sometimes the government puts a lot of effort into making and enforcing some reasonable policy and companies fight over it and do bad things instead of following the reasonable policy. Companies don’t just break bad laws. The underlying issue is irrationality, which is what my philosophy work tries to help with.
It’s not primarily the government’s fault that many companies are bad. It’s not just due to having a mixed economy or government interference in the economy. It’s because companies are run by people, and lots of people are bad. Changing the government won’t make company leaders into good people. That requires education.
Some of the ways companies or their leaders are bad could be described as being selfish, greedy or profit seeking. There are, as Ayn Rand explained, positive meanings for each of those terms. But there are negative meanings too. The words have multiple meanings. There are short sighted or irrational versions of those traits which are bad. If done in a proper, rational, thoughtful, long-term way, then they’re good or at least non-bad (compatible with good outcomes). That’s because win/win solutions are possible. Pursuing self-interest or profit effectively should lead to win/win solutions (making others lose is not actually the best way to get good outcomes for yourself). Trying to help others effectively should also lead to win/win solutions (self-sacrifice is not actually the best way to help others). Large companies broadly aren’t looking for win/win solutions. They’re broadly customer-hostile and worker-hostile.
Favoring win/win solutions – and denying there are inherent, insolvable conflicts between people’s interests – is the attitude of classical liberalism (and Objectivism). It contrasts with e.g. the Marxist idea of class warfare. It also clashes with how almost everyone takes a tribalist in-group vs. out-group approach to politics. The attitudes of conservatives to people accused of crimes, immigrants, pregnant women, homosexuals and many other groups are broadly adversarial rather than seeking win/win solutions. Calling right-wing people racists, xenophobes or deplorables is also an adversarial, tribalist attitude rather than an attempt to find win/win solutions or to engage in rational, truth seeking debate.
Despite having some ideas in common with them, I don’t like most libertarians or Objectivists. Their understanding of Rand and Mises is usually superficial. And they tend to be biased in favor of companies and just as tribalist as everyone else. They also tend to think capitalism would automatically solve most political and economic problems. I think capitalism is just a starting point – a good framework that offers a situation where people can work to solve problems without being actively prevented from problem solving by force. I don’t think prediction markets are very effective and I don’t think stock market prices are very efficient or rational. Libertarians and Objectivists also tend to defend advertising, whereas I think a lot of ads are manipulative, predatory or fraudulent.
I think big tech censorship of free speech and deplatforming is bad and that capitalism-compatible arguments can be made against it. Libertarians and Objectivists tend to defend and rationalize deplatforming because “private companies” are doing it, instead of looking for ways it involves the initiation of force. They do this even though they personally favor free speech. They should expect that if a positive value (free speech) is being harmed, then there’s a solution which is compatible with the free market. Then they should look for that solution. But that’s not happening. Something is going wrong. They seem to be so biased in favor of companies that they don’t bother to look for ways the companies violate their principles like not initiating force.
Libertarians often have similar, positive attitudes to many other things about companies that I dislike besides speech restrictions. I don’t know why they seem to assume companies are run by Hank Rearden or Dagny Taggart, not James Taggart or Orren Boyle (those are characters from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand). Or they seem to assume that if companies do anything bad, then they will quickly lose to a competitor unless the government screws up the free market, so therefore only the government is bad.
Here’s an example discussion I had with an Objectivist who had some typical pro-company ideas but was unusually willing to listen to my arguments.
I think the main problem is bad people, not bad government. Societal problems are mainly because most individual members of society are irrational, not because the government ruins everything. Our government is already good enough to be compatible with a much better society and it has mechanisms to allow reform and progress. (This applies to countries like the U.S. but not to dictatorships or communist dystopias. Extremely oppressive governments do make things worse than the general level of merit of their populace.)
Even in a fully free market, if a company does something bad, there is merely an opportunity there to be out-competed by another company. That won’t happen automatically. People have to realize it’s bad and also run out of better opportunities (that give more benefit per cost). Usually, people who already have leadership positions in the same industry have to recognize an error for it to get fixed. If a low level employee recognizes an error, he’s usually ignored by his bosses. If an outsider spots an error, he’d probably be ignored too, so he’d have to start a new company to correct the error, which is generally only worth it for huge errors.
Issues need to be analyzed on their merits. You have to actually look at what a company or government is doing in a particular case and think about whether it’s good or bad and why. You have to use reasoning, analysis, arguments, critical thinking, etc. It’s bad to decide by “government actions are all bad and private company actions are approximately all good” or by any other simplistic, tribalist mentality. The actions of private companies (and governments too) should be evaluated on their individual merits instead of being judged in a collectivist or tribalist way.
That doesn’t mean that outside interference (e.g. from police) is merited whenever a company does anything bad. People should be free to make mistakes. And you’re free to argue with them and try to persuade them (on a voluntary basis: they don’t have to listen to you or consider your arguments if they don’t want to). People and companies should be interfered with only when they initiate force, such as violating rights, breaking contracts or defrauding others (this is the capitalist view which I agree with). If you examine what big companies do today, I think you’ll find that they do a lot of the things that warrant interference.
I’ll briefly mention one more relevant political opinion I have which I’ve never heard from an Objectivist or libertarian (or anyone).
I think large investors should have responsibility for the initiation of force their companies do (unless they were defrauded and lied to by the companies despite doing reasonable due diligence). For example, I think the big investors in Theranos should be facing potential jail time. Instead, it looks like even Elizabeth Holmes is going to get off pretty lightly.
Assume for a moment that a human life is worth 5 million dollars. I know that’s problematic but bear with me. I know you can’t just pay some money to make up for killing someone. My point is that if Theranos destroyed a billion dollars of value (which is a low estimate), then it’s kind of like they murdered 200 people. The point is that bad actions involving huge amounts of money are really bad. Large white collar crimes are worse than small street crimes that we often treat more harshly. Objectivists who value money, and believe that “money is the root of all good” (as stated by Francisco D’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged) should be open to this sort of perspective. Anti-capitalists should also be open to the perspective that large financial crimes are partially like mass murder. This is something that some of the strongest supporters and opponents of capitalism might be able to agree on, which I think is notable.
Investors who put 100 million dollars into a company should be careful a little bit like how they’d be careful if they were responsible for 20 human lives. I don’t think people should get in legal trouble merely for losing or wasting money, but they should take reasonable actions to ensure that their money doesn’t fund initiation of force. (This is taken seriously for e.g. funding terrorism. That’ll get you in serious trouble today.) Theranos’ investors’ money paid for and enabled fraud, and I think the big Theranos investors could and should have done more due diligence and known that. Ignorance due to your own severe negligence and bias should be an inadequate legal defense.
Similarly, I think venture capitalist companies, such as Y Combinator, should be in legal trouble for funding crypto ponzi schemes. They appear to use (predominantly younger and move naive) startup founders as the front men, patsies or fall guys who get their hands dirty by initiating force. The investors keep their hands cleaner but profit if the startup gets away with fraud on their behalf. If the startup fails and police enforcement happens, investors blame the founders and say “we lost our money” as if they’re victims too. Actually, they’re purposefully gambling on many companies to find a few big winners and they don’t mind losing money on the majority of their investments. Venture capitalists openly encourage founders to use risky business strategies that have a chance for huge profit. Fraud is just the sort of high-risk, high-reward strategy that they incentivize.
So my biggest change in political perspective over the last decade was due to gradually learning more facts about big companies. With more information, I’ve judged corporations negatively. And recently when finding out that food companies are awful, I realized in a clear, conscious way that the problem extends to approximately every big company in every industry. This somewhat parallels my previous discovery that approximately all the intellectuals in all fields are irrational (e.g. unwilling to engage in effective forms of truth seeking debate).
The problem isn’t government nor big companies. They are made of people. The underlying problem is people. What’s wrong with people? They’re irrational. They do social climbing. They have bad ideas. They persist with mistakes.
I’ve learned more about this over the last decade as I wrote more about rationality and tried to help people improve. My philosophy work has exposed me to how flawed people are, how resistant to good ideas they are, how irrationally they argue, how biased they are, how they misuse emotions, how unwilling to practice and study they are, how little effort they will put into self-improvement, how dishonest they are, how often they interact in bad faith without actually wanting win/win solutions, how they get stuck, etc. Big companies are led by people with the same flaws that I encounter in intellectual discussions. Actually, company leaders are mostly worse because they’re selected and self-selected differently than the people who participate in online rationality communities.
Politics is a bad area to focus a lot of attention on because it’s just a symptom of an underlying problem. Politics is downstream of the philosophy of rationality. Trying to do political work, while ignoring the irrationality problem, is not going to be very effective even if you get extremely lucky and actually happen to advocate good policies. (If you don’t study rationality, then you’ll be one of the irrational people too, so it’d take very good luck for your conclusions to happen to be good – rationality isn’t just an issue for other people or the other tribe). This is one of the reasons I research and write about rationality.
If the concepts and principles in this article made sense to you, and you only disagreed about the facts and negativity towards companies, then I’d suggest looking into the facts more. You can learn negative facts about companies from links in this article and from anti-capitalist writers (for example, Matt Stoller). You can also find criticism of companies by libertarians, but libertarians don’t cover all the same issues that anti-capitalists do, and they have some pro-company biases. Anti-capitalists have anti-company biases, so you’ll definitely want to fact check their negative claims about companies, but I think you’ll find that many negative facts are pretty uncontroversial.
You can also keep these ideas in mind when reading or watching the news. Big companies being caught doing bad things is a common news topic. And, reasonably often, there’s little controversy about whether they did it – there are paper trails, confessions and other great pieces of evidence. For example, it’s uncontroversial that Wells Fargo fraudulently created millions of accounts for people who didn’t sign up for those accounts. Another example is big package delivery companies using unrealistically aggressive schedules (too many deliveries per shift) which incentivizes driving too fast and therefore, statistically, leads to more traffic fatalities. Although news providers seem more interested in rushed drivers peeing in bottles, there’s also coverage of deadly traffic accidents.
If you agree with me regarding facts and you dislike big companies, but you disagree on capitalist principles, then I suggest you reconsider the principles. The reason you dislike capitalism may be because most capitalists (like most people) are irrational, unreasonable and tribalist. But classical liberal principles themselves may actually be compatible with your values.
Update: I wrote followup posts: Fraud By Companies That Don’t Serve Consumers, Casinos as Creative Adversaries and Non-Violent Creative Adversaries.