On Sun, 30 Aug 2020 10:13:34 -0700 (PDT), Thomas RUX <xxxxxx@comcast.net>
wrote:
>IIRC on a small scale governance by company/corporation would be something
>like the early coal mining industry. The company/corporation owned the
>houses, stores, schools, churches, etc. The employees had no say in their
>pay, working hours, benefits, or working conditions. As long as the
>company/corporation did not break local or, in the case of the USA, federal
>laws they could and did get away with a lot of shenanigans.
Even if they were breaking State or Federal law, companies with 'company
towns' were often able to avoid legal problems, provided that they were
able to
* keep the law from noticing it - one way of doing this, unfortunately,
was often to silence the potential troublemakers, in ways designed to
cow others;
* co-opt the law into supporting the company, or bribing them to take no
action;
* make sure that they had enough power, politically and sometimes in a
paramilitary sense, to keep the state from interfering.
If you've read the Sherlock Holmes stories, you can get a good idea of the
sort of thing that _could_ be "company government" by reading _The Valley
of Fear_, specifically the "flashback" portions that take place in
Pennsylvania coal mining country.
Note to tc: FWIW, I've never seen anything either way on this theory, but I
could easily see that portion of _The Valley of Fear_ as an attempt by ACD
to write a detective story that *wasn't* a Holmes. That it got wrapped into
a Holmes story suggests that perhaps his editor/publisher said "Sherlock,
Arthur, the public wants Sherlock"...
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