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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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Asklemmy
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Could the paramilitary unit fund itself without legal tender laws from a state and government created fiat currency?
Sure.
They could even do it today simply by paying in Bitcoin.
I expect though that the future will see private currencies backed by the-entities-formerly-known-as-corporations.
Governments don't monopolize currencies because nobody else wants to issue one, but because it's in their interests to monopolize them, and they have sufficient power (for the time being) to enforce their monopolies.
Governments have courts to enforce contracts and settle disputes. Corporations don't have their own impartial legal system to settle disputes and enforce contracts.
So?
In the first place, a "corporation" could set up a legal system easily - draft some laws, build some facilities and appoint some officials, and done.
But they wouldn't even need to do that. They likely would, because an impartial system wins voluntary compliance and thus promotes stability, but the only really necessary part of a legal system is sufficient power to enforce its dictates, and with enough armed professionals, that's relatively easy, at least within secured borders.
Who is bankrolling all this?
isnt this your hypothetical?
Whoever wants in on it really.
Primarily I presume it'd be the corporations themselves, but banking is certain to change to accommodate the growing independence of the "corporations," and I expect that to some notable degree, the two will merge - that the largest "corporations" will have their own banking sibsidiaries and will handle most everything internally.
There's a broad point underlying all of this - all that's really necessary is that enough executives/owners at enough institutions have a desire to divest themselves of associations with governments and establish their own "states." Once the will is there and they possess enough wealth and power to enforce their will, the rest is just details. They have entire staffs who are employed to figure out how to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, and they will figure it out.
Maintaining a large private army would be expensive and time consuming. What stops another corporation with a private army from coming in and robbing them of everything they have?
Where is the corporation getting their funding from? Someone's got to be paying them. So, they are using a sovereign currency created by a government using a central banking system chartered with the government.
So is maintaining a large workforce and infrastructure, but they do that as a matter of course. And already, there are corporations with operating budgets larger than some countries. That's only going to become more the case with time.
The same things that generally stop countries from doing it to each other - insufficient forces and/or unacceptable losses and/or a preference for stability and/or established alliances and/or any of countless other considerations.
This isn't rocket science. Realpolitik is a fairly straightforward thing.
From the sale of goods and/or services.
Duh.
Yes. Consumers of whatever goods and/or services they provide.
Duh.
Or more likely not.
Here's just one quick idea - accept local currency with a handling fee sufficient to cover any potential losses on exchange (which are unlikely, since at that point their currency will likely be harder than about any government's), and advertise a discount for the use of their private currency, accompanied by the offer of free and automatic currency exchange with an account at the corporate bank.
So you promote your currency, avoid the hassle of dealing with competing currencies and gain new bank accounts, all at the same time.
And that's just one idea, off the top of my head.
The funding they would get still originates from government spending or banks chartered by the government and consumers are using a government currency to facilitate trade.
What would be the medium of trade with another countries?
You can use your private army to gain currency and other assets by stealing them from other entities. Governments typically don’t like this but if you’re a big enough force they will negotiate.
It kind of seems like what you're describing here is just a new government. If they've taken on all the powers and responsibilities of a government then what separates them from a government? Isn't the term Corporation meaningless at that point?
That's part of why I've generally been putting quotation marks around the word "corporation."
It's not meaningless though, because the underlying structure will likely remain essentially the same as it was when it was merely a corporation. And the relationship between the "government" and its "citizens" will have evolved from a relationship between a business and its customers/clients, and will undoubtedly retain some aspects of that. Most notably, the whole concept of public servants will vanish. Instead, the "government" will offer some specific services to potential citizens-as-customers, who can take them or leave them. Or, additionally or possibly even alternatively, the "government" will demand specific things of citizens-as-employees who will have the "choice" of following their demands or seeking employment-as-citizenship elsewhere.
In either event (or any other - this can't possibly be an exhaustive list), the basic dynamic between "government" and "citizen" will be notably different from any of the ones we've seen before (though likely broadly most similar to feudalism).
In an anarcho-capitalist city-state you could have a fiat cryptocurrency system that has software for electronically programmable sanctions. Everyone is given a basic income from the local treasury organization and pay fees when purchasing products and services. The community programs in fees to pay for basic infrastructure, a legal system, and financing public projects. A percentage of the fee revenue goes back to the local treasury organization.
There could be a hypothetical society that has ai ran corporations that have programmable ownership shares. Replace all executives with ai agents and program the earnings to be equally divided with the workers of the company. Everyone would get paid once with a salary and once with a share of the earnings.
Conventional companies would have to compete with a company that pays their workers twice and gives them equal ownership in the business.
Snow Crash becomes truer by the year.
Yes.
And specifically one of the things that impressed me about Snow Crash's predictions was the idea that federal governments didn't get overthrown or cease to exist - they were simply irrelevant. The "corporations" had amassed enough wealth and power that they could, and did, simply ignore the governments.