Why risk your own money, when you can risk others'?

US median household income is at an all time high.[1] The pandemic caused a decline for a few years but it's recovered now.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...

Tough shit, Mickey D's, that's the cost of doing business.

Smallville is entitled to a no-exceptions policy.

OTOH, if Smallville seems too unfriendly to developers, the latter may decide to build outside the city limits. Which might become a problem over time, by holding down Smallville's commercial tax base. Forcing the voting citizen to make unhappy choices between high taxes on their own homes, and Smallville having too little money to afford nice things that they want.

If McD builds outside of Smallville, they don't get any of the services that Smallville taxes subsidize. Smallville taxes serve Smallvillians, not corporate villains.

True. But McD may decide that the services in developer-friendly Small Township are just as good, for their use case. And Smallville residents may be content to drive another 500 yards down Smallville-Littleton Rd., to spend their money at the new McD out in Smallville Twp.

In public policy, everything is a tradeoff.

In which case, one might expect Borger Kong to build in developer-unfriendly Smallville, because they will capture the people driving outside of Smallville. All your arguments are easily countered by basic supply and demand hyoptheticals.

There is no reason that McDonald's shouldn't own the risk of developing a McDonalds, and instead make secret deals with local governments to offset some of that risk. Thats a cost that should be borne by the business.

Municipalities should not be bidding on corporate benefaction; this is exactly the opposite of how the relationship between the public and private sector should be.

> the municipality could just say that they don't want the project and they won't submit a bid. That's fine too.

Governments should not be allowed to make deals that are kept secret from the people; the government is an arm of the people.

>Palantir was used to prevent terror attacks in Europe

...according to an unsubstantiated claim by the CEO of Palantir while on a PR tour.

The private sector is good at being a wealth extraction machine, that's all. The other things it does are merely incidental to that. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the private sector is now in its enshittification phase. I'd point out that this is likely because the marginal wealth extraction of improving things is lower than the marginal wealth extraction of enshittfying things: making mature products better is harder than making mature products worse. Capitalism rewards no morality; it rewards wealth extraction.

The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.

You are correct, but the way you word your comment makes it seem like you are an apologist for Karp. I can't tell if that's why you are being downvoted, or the HN Fascist brigade.

These kinds of mass surveillance data ops should be illegal, regardless of who is doing it.

Snowden should have been the warning shot.