Arsthbt

The Hegemony is a welfare state dedicated in giving all citizens: housing, education, basic necessities (water, food, etc), and help with either finding employment or a job assigned by the Hegemony.

The Hegemony is built on the principles: prosperity, security, and conformity (as in equality/everyone has a place in the Hegemony since the Hegemony provides one common culture).

However large corporations still exist within the Hegemony. Some of these corporations like Prometheus step into Mega-corporation territory owning their own regions (company towns, reservations) as well as their own police forces (private security due to the scale of these corporations).

Could a welfare state (a unitary global government) coexist with megacorporations without many ramifications? What sort of economic or political compromises would have to be made?

Note:

Hegemony is still a free market. While any one can apply for state housing anyone can also buy their own housing. This applies to any of the state benefits. Any one can buy private instead of state goods if they want.

Hegemony would be considered "Big Government" since it is a unitary state with smaller regions having limited autonomy and legal authority.

The laws on monopolies have been relaxed with only "harmful" (as in causing stagnation) monopolies broken up.

It's simple: the megacorporations coexist with the government because they're under contract.

Let's say for the sake of argument that the Hegemony was not always a welfare state. Once, it didn't provide such things for its citizens, and then at some point it decided to do so. This is a massive undertaking for any state: it has to study its own people, organize aid disbursements on an unprecedented scale, and add new bureaucracy to manage these functions. Making matters worse, many of the things it's providing are not things it's used to providing. Does the government have the facilities to physically receive and ship massive quantities of food from the farms to its citizens? Does it have nationalized power plants and the highly-trained staff needed to run them? Does it have retailers? Marketing staff to determine which luxuries the people want? Analysts to decide what fields it should focus education on? Very likely it doesn't.

Who does have that infrastructure and those people? Corporations do; that's what they're for. Rather than creating its own government dispensaries for, say, medicine, the government goes to the existing pharmacies and drug companies and insists that they will provide certain products and services to designated standards, in return for subsidies. This way, the Hegemony isn't duplicating existing infrastructure, and its role is limited to regulation, oversight, and contracting - all things governments have more experience with.

Over time, the government and corporations would grow more symbiotically entwined with one another. The corporations can't simply walk away from the government, because they would operate at a loss without those subsidies - not to mention the loss of markets. On the other hand, the government can't shut down too many corporations or it loses the ability to provide for its citizens. This protection applies best to larger corporations and cartels, though; if a small corporation misbehaves, the government can smack them down and rely on their rivals to pick up the slack. So there's a strong incentive for corporations to merge into ever larger, more diverse conglomerates in order to negotiate with the government on a more equal footing.

Absolutely

In fact, it would be in the best interest of the mega-corp to have at least one welfare state hanging around. Somebody pays. Somebody always pays. In the case of a welfare-state, it's the government that pays by taxing everything else under the sun. And it's easier to convince one government than it is millions of people (especially when you have a group of people politically biased toward taxing everything to ensure everybody has everything in equality).

Could a mega-corp exist only within the context of a welfare-state? Probably not. But do they want one or more from many states? Absolutely.

Mega corps are really only interested in on thing profits. A lot of the time they are not even interested in the well being of their employees, outside of keeping them just happy enough for them not to leave. They are definitely not interested in the general welfare of the populace as a whole. Having a government around would benefit the mega crops in various ways. The government provides an atmosphere to do business in buy ensuring law an order, an educated populace from which to recruit workers, a national defense, a source on income in the form of government contracts, a social safety net(health care, basic income), infrastructure(roads, bridges, electricity, water, telecommunications), and protection against foreign mega corps in form of protectionist trade policies. All this helps mega corps maximize their profits. In turn the mega corps provide tax revenue, jobs, products, services, and an economy in general.

Yes. But details depend on who's in charge.

1. Hegemony is in charge. All corporations, mega or not, need to play by its rules. They are allowed a freedom to make profits, but have to pay taxes and should never go political. Hegemony, on the other hand, keeps ordinary people content and takes care of those who didn't find a place to work at mega-corporations. When corporation tries to skirt the rules, Hegemony would make an example of it.




2. Corporations are in charge. Hegemony is heavily influenced by the big money, no decision is made without considering corporate interests. Mega corporations like to make profits, but they realize the danger of large discontent underclass. As a solution, Hegemony acts as a law enforcement and welfare agency jointly run by the corporations.