Yes indeed a pleasure as always
, Apologies for coming in late like this but I hadn't had time until now. I'll try not to drag it on to much more
I don't disagree with you on the state being a problem, but I do believe that its the money men behind everything that are the real problem. Before I head to business I want to touch on the concepts of state first.
I don't disagree with the need for strong checks and balances for the governmental system, but I'm not sure it would be enough to stop the corruption (It seems able to worm its way into any system)
The biggest problem with most forms of modern governance is the lack of true accountability and transparency. This is especially problematic on the large scale as all the forms we use tend to work best at very small scale (populations of a few thousand). At the small scale (say the greek city states) its very difficult for corruption to form, for one thing the difference in wealth in the populace would be much smaller, second its much harder to conceal corruption, and third its much easier to remove problem people from the system of governance. But the larger it gets the less and less the above works.
Unfortunately I can't think of a way of disentangling corruption from large countries as almost everyone is vulnerable to being corrupted and the big money people will always be there corrupting and manipulating things to their gain. I do generally agree that the state should not have too much control over the populace. But someone needs to keep the money making machine in check or it will run rough shod over us.
Perhaps the best (and most extreme) example of what happens when business runs with out any restriction would be Victorian England at the height of the Industrial Revolution. At this time period, business was running completely out of control. Conditions for the workers was unimaginably bad both at work and at home. Disease and pollution was rampant, injury and death common place, and there were regular periods of no work lasting years. Basically the industry worked on a cyclical base, the industry would start up, demand for workers would be high, wages would be high (relatively, most wages were barely above subsistence levels during this period), and the industries would be pumping out as many goods as possible. Over time this would slow down as the industry flooded all the markets with goods, prices would drop with demand, and wages would fall below starvation levels before the industry closed its doors. People would rapidly run out of money and starve to death, the population would drop dramatically, and then when the goods were finally consumed a year or 2 later the cycle would start over again. The industrialists were literally making themselves incredibly wealthy by working their workers to death and exploiting every little bit they could get out of their workers (some of the most unscrupulous companies payed workers company money that was only good at the company store where the prices were heavily inflated).
Now Walmart... Yes Walmart is more efficient, so efficient that no small or medium business can even hope to compete with them. This is exactly why they are so destructive, because they set up, kill virtually all the local businesses and force most of those people to work at Walmart for minimum wage. They also don't tend offer more jobs (it takes less workforce to operate 1 giant store then 20-30 small stores) and the jobs they do offer are much lower paying then before (particularly since they refuse to allow unions and use all kinds of dirty and hardly legal tricks to do it including even closing the store in question). They are also notorious for sucking all the wealth out of smaller communities then closing shop and pulling out. The lowest prices are not always a good thing.
Back to corporations, the biggest problem with them is they lack any form of a moral center. They lack it because there is no ultimate person who is responsible for things, and so they can pass the moral buck around. The ability to excuse ones actions by being "unaccountable" has lead to some of the worst examples of humanity, including genocide, as the people who did the actual killing could say that they were only following orders. It's this sort of thing that enables large corporations to do all the horrible things they do, not because the people inside them are inherently evil but because those people are not directly connected and responsible for anything.
My main concerns are that business needs to be regulated to prevent monopolies, price fixing and other unfair business practices. And they must offer fair wages, and prevent destructive practices (environmental and community related and being overly greedy). Last they must offer safe work environments without long term long term harm to the employee.
Personally I would prefer fair governance and fair business practices. It would be nice if some day we could get beyond exploiting each other. Shame it is almost certain never to happen with our species.