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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

American companies are also extremely corrupt. The difference is that they operate through loopholes in the law, and pay armies of lawyers to find such loopholes. They also pay a fortune to lobbyists to maintain and expand these friendly laws.

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It's amazing once you start looking into it and realize industry lobbies are the ones who create a lot of the draft legislation that turns into law. Not directly, they'll have people from their industries be on "working groups." It's all legal too. A lot of effort is put in to pass laws to legalize corruption in the US.

I'd suggest looking up the group behind the Anti-Corruption Act. They have some interesting ideas for solving corruption.

What could be worse than unjustified authority and private capital? Only their combination.

I agree with you, but I have to say it's probably better to have transparent corruption within the law, than opaqueness. In America, most of the corruption is open, people are just too busy with their own shit to worry about it.

> most of the corruption is open, people are just too busy with their own shit to worry about it

And this is reason, why Basic Income won't come easily. They (government, corporations) don't want people to have too much free time, to worry about theirs wrong-doing.

Basic Income is intended to be a more efficient and fairer way to provide social support and to eliminate the poverty trap that makes some people worse off if they get a job. It's actually designed to encourage more people to work and thus reduce aggregate free time. After all, the money to provide the Basic Income has to come from somewhere.

To the contrary, Basic Income means consumers will have to spend their money purchasing things from for-profit entities which were previously provided by the government. Except for the corporations which are government suppliers for existing social services and goods. They will oppose it.

tragedy of the commons, I suppose

When the only objective is money and profit other things such as honesty, moral, environment and public health become non-goals. The businesses prefer to reap the benefits and leave the messes for the public to pay. Good example is the food industry in the US that is costing billions in healthcare through obesity related sicknesses.

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