American Democracy Is Drowning in Money
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Lobbying exists because the return on investment is ridiculously high in favor of person asking for favorable treatment from politicians in policy making. It is peanuts invested and Boeing 747s harvested.
If anything the cost of buying a politician should increase multiple orders of magnitude. Currently hundred, two hundred thousands to a senator's re-election campaign can buy really serious attention to your concerns. It needs to be hundreds of millions to buy a senator.
Politicians should start Patreon campaigns to get livable wages from supporters and then just execute on what they stand for. Bernie and Trump was essentially that, self/people funded efforts.
How about lowering the possible returns from buying politicians, say, by lowering their influence on how the republic is actually being run?
But we really should stop to ask whether legislatures should be doing the kind of micromanagement where they routinely divert billions towards one private interest or another. And we should adjust our political rhetoric, voting behaviour and expectations about propriety and the law accordingly.
Weakening the formal power of government officials doesn't make that power dissolve, it just displaces it to somewhere even less visible and answerable to the public.
They'll just seek more and more funds to become richer and richer. This is how corrupt democracies work.
The only people who should be politicians are the ones who'd do it with no campaign funds and median wage. They need to be in touch with realities of their electoral base and have the desire to change it for everyone.
Perhaps a better way to phrase this is to only allow candidates who make within, say, 10% of the median wage for their district, and they would only get paid median wage in office.
I just think that technology has allowed to seek support and sustenance while one fights for a cause. When the support is gone, you go back to earning your living. No strings attached in either direction. Employment of representative, and continuous patronage by the represented, at will.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
Representing people is full time job and must be paid living wages.
People competing to represent people deserve to get funding to support living expenses while they run their campaigns.
Do you want a factory worker delivering pizza at night to represent people like him? If so, then he needs funding so that he can put food on the table while he tries to get elected. If people don't crowdfund it then there is no other option but to seek lobbyist money. No different than soldiers and police and firefighters.
The problem is that there is not enough turn over of representatives. More people being able to get living expenses crowdfunded mean there will be more competition for representatives, competition to win and keep supporters, not a competition to seek and win lobbying funding in support of re-election.
I want a person who is educated and has the desire to improve lives to represent people. The extreme rich are far too detached from reality, the poor are struggling and probably have enough problems to not have had the acumen and experience to deal with issues of others.
A person who was rich or middle class before and is going to continue to earn middle income wages for this new job will only take this job because he/she cares, not because they see this as another path to wealth.
How little do you think politicians make? I don't know of any poor politicians at the federal level.
[0] http://moneynation.com/the-net-worth-of-congress/
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/11...
[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/09/25/how-much-does-the-...
I would like to rephrase that as Representatives among people should start patreon campaigns. People should choose a person among them to represent them and really believes in what they want, not give in to an professional politician looking to represent you no matter what their individual beliefs.
Bernie and Trump were just the beginning, the internet has allowed the people to wake up and field their own candidates instead of just taking what the political old guard give us.
I agree, but there would be interesting ramifications.
Almost like direct democracy but not quite there. So, essentially you have to earn the right to vote. Very close to what founders thought who should be voting. Mind blown!
It was one of a series of early 20th century foundational changes to American government that opened us up for the legalized corruption we're suffering from now.
The 17th amendment[1] is another, which allowed for the direct election (and thus hyper politicization) of Senators.
With 50 states, the country would still have 100 senators, but special interest groups would have to write checks to thousands of state assembly members to influence the election of Senators, rather than just writing a few dozen to influence the Senators directly.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
The time before the 17th Amendment wasn't exactly all roses, that was the age of outright bribery of state legislatures for Senate seats. William Clark's famous quote "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale" was about this and the surrounding corruption of his election brought the 17th Amendment around.[0]
Listen to the 6th episode of the Constitutional podcast for some extra background, it is very interesting. Some states really wanted this because they were unable to even elect Senators due to political parties of the time simply not agreeing on anybody.[1]
In addition to losing the single executive, you'd need to make some other constitutional tweaks e.g. deploying the military would require a consensus between the Secretaries of State, Defense, and DHS (and maybe Treasury?).
Something like that could end the imperial executive branch with a very simple distribution of power.
I actually half support this idea. Why do we need a President? What powers does that one person in that one office have which couldn't better be delegated to the states?
Just 1/3rd of senators get elected every two years and only handful among those races are balanced where special interest can tip scales with little effort. Same for congressional elections, few places with 50/50 spread where money can easily gain influence.
Presidential election is too big, at the exact same time, for money to wield influence. I for one am glad that we have presidential elections, people have some voice, at least.
That's kind of what CrowdPAC (https://www.crowdpac.com/) already does. Even though I'd say it's more like GoFundMe than Patreon. It'll be interesting if people starting creating campaigns like "Vote for H.R. 9999 and get all the money from this crowdfunded campaign."
if somebody dangles 6-7 figure checks in front of many people, those people will find that their former concept of "livable wage" has suddenly been revised upwards.
If a politician is honest they can be honest within the lobbying framework or outside of it, the issue I think is making it so a honest politician with no access to extra funds can compete on issues against a well funded opponent (meaning getting people to know who they are without having to buy tons of ads): this can only happen if election campaigns are extremely regulated.
Doing that would mean things like no ads for anybody ever, only exposure via live debates, fixed identical travel schedule for everybody with access to the same rallies in terms of facilities etc. etc.
Even with all of this I am not sure it would work in the current social-media society, because as things stand now if you are well funded you could easily drown your opponent(s) on social media just by buying comments/influence and regulating those seems pretty much impossible (how do you distinguish between a genuine groundswell of support and a paid-for one?)
yes, but next serious challenger would be just $4500/month patreon campaign away.
The revolving glass door would remain a problem where someone seeks one time election, votes a certain way and is then given a advisory job at a think tank for couple of years.
But at least, they would be able to burn people just once, instead of what we have now. Plus people may use recalls often.
The Jeb Bush campaign spent roughly 130 megadollars on the primaries alone. The Donald Trump campaign spent less than 280 megadollars from primary to president; where the Hillary Clinton campaign spent about 1.2 gigadollars (along with huge amounts of spending outside the direct purview of the campaign) and lost fair and square.
Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course.
In any case, its clear that Mr. Trump won with less money spent. Bernie Sanders is similarly a candidate who famously spent less money that Ms. Clinton but also had a chance.
The main issue is that these candidates (Trump and Sanders) were far more willing to participate in reality-distortion-field politiking, which is something that the mainstream candidates did not do as much. But that's a different debate... I would definitely argue that money has a role in politics, but it isn't as strong as most people think it is.
Alas, not all plans work out. Our current system is an accident, created in the ignorance / naivete of political parties with little thought or design put into the real operational use.
The only thing that DOES work is that our constitution can (and regularly does) change when everyone is convinced that our rules and regulations are in need of an update. And more and more people are beginning to think that this whole "Electoral College" crap is stupid.
Tribalism, Cheerleading, Echo-chambers, "Fake News", Yellow Journalism, Propaganda... these are facts-of-life in America and no amount of legal writing will prevent humans from being humans. We will always separate ourselves into camps during political decisions.
Its a bad thing for our democracy because our system wasn't designed for it. But alternative voting mechanisms or improved systems can allow us to make progress in spite of the corrupting influence of human nature.
What have we learned in the past 250ish years of this country? And what can we do with that knowledge to improve our country? In general, this country learns to harness human nature, instead of trying to defeat it.
When you try and defeat human nature (say: Amendment 18), you are only met with failure.
As long as there is healthy debate on what is progress, I am all for it. No suppression of free speech.
In this case, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting produces a two-party system. No matter how you structure the electoral college, as long as their vote is FPTP/WTA, the two-party system will change every other rule that they can touch to ensure that only those who will vote for the party can ever become electors.
The electoral college is an order of magnitude smaller than the original constitution would call for. The method by which many states apportion electors has changed since the US's founding. We also count people differently than we used to. Not to mention the 12th amendment.
I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. However Trump won fair and square.
I agree things would have been different. That's not the real issue.
> I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair.
I think this is where you and I can agree, and is the more important issue at hand.
As a result, safe-states get safer over time and partisanship might be on the rise. Maybe if Trump did focus on California, and maybe if Clinton did focus on Texas... then our country would better understand each other's viewpoints.
Look at Europe. The seats in EU is regressive representative to the nation population. This mean that some very small nations are allowed a seat while having a population that's a fraction what a seat of a large nation, while large nations still have more total power than smaller ones. If EU followed popularity vote, then a bunch of countries would likely never bother being part of EU and you would get an EU that's just a handful of countries that may or may not even be neighbors.
I think Wikipedia succinctly provides a factual assessment in this case: "The United States Electoral College is the mechanism established by the United States Constitution for the indirect election of the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States. Citizens of the United States vote in each state and the District of Columbia at a general election to choose a slate of "electors" pledged to vote for a particular party's candidate."
One can argue about the merits of the popular vote, but as per the Constitution, elections are won according to Electoral College vote.
That's the rules. That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change.
Mrs. Clinton also had a chance to win a round of Yahtzee, if Rock-Scissors-Paper were used to determine the winner.
The expectation was that each state would deadlock upon "local favorites" and then the House of Representatives would choose the winner.
Clearly, the Electoral College system is not working as designed, and I really do think its time that we start thinking about changing the constitution to make things more fair.
How in the world do you consider the 12th and 13th Amendments and the Apportionment Act of 1911 "little change"?
Which only demonstrates the supreme idiocy of the original system our founding fathers envisioned. Its a good thing they gave us a mechanism to change the Constitution and the rules.
The founding fathers never tried to design a perfect system. They only hoped to make a "more perfect" system, that over time would improve upon itself.
And improve itself it has. Vice Presidents and Presidents now run together, instead of being #1 and #2 in the Electoral College. Black people can vote (and be more than 3/5ths a person), slaves have been outlawed, Women can vote. This country is one of continuous self-improvment (or at least, ATTEMPTED self-improvement)
And what, exactly, would that have changed?
Which means every "close call" vote in the Senate (including the Supreme Court Justice vote, various laws that have been passed this year, etc. etc.) would have only passed at the Pleasure of Ms. Clinton.
For another: Mr. Trump delegates a lot of tasks to the Vice President. The Vice President has a lot of power when it comes to implementing the President's policies.
So far, none of the above have been groundbreaking.
As for your last point: the idea that Trump would delegate anything to VP Clinton in the same manner he delegates items to Pence is utterly absurd.
yes, and last presidential election was such an event.
Why, do you think none of your friends were impacted?
In my own experience, everyone I know who makes their politics known (obviously, selection bias) has been immovably in one camp or another.
Considering how close the election was, those kinds of changes seem non-trivial on a national stage, particularly if they're all in a direction that benefits one candidate over another (and likely were the intended ones from PSYOPs campaigns).
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-mo...
One part of me wonders if we see the correlation because candidates who are more likely to win get more money as sort of an 'advance' for favors? If I knew that my grocer was about to become a sheriff, I'd volunteer to pay $6 for a banana just to be sure we were on good terms. I think speeches work broadly the same way - banks pay politicians 400k to recite a 15 minute stump speech they've already delivered and both parties get to act like it was a legitimate transaction without any additional elements.
the only way I could test that hypothesis is by comparing the money a candidate raises verses their expected chance of victory. But I think I'm somewhat vindicated, candidates in races that are perceived as close seem to haul less than candidates in safe races. Pelosi raises a ton of money and I'm not sure all of it is given to beat the helpless Republican who runs against her. Now there are other factors at play but it's not coincidental that candidates who are the most appealing to the establishment seem to out-raise people who threaten the establishment.
I think the deeper problem is that the political class thinks they can compensate for an unappealing candidate with money.
I love the fact that what they think isn't true, at least not always.
Certainly there is evidence suggesting both..
How about all of the free TV time from the grandstanding and sensational nature of the campaign?
May be she did. She might have avoided unscripted exposure. That actually makes Trump's run that much more effective.
It also depends how you measure the money invested. By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that.
In this way, it seems not to matter what specific opinion the media takes at this point. The vast majority of those three gigadollars were spent on media taking a position against the candidate who prevailed, and the candidate who spent the least doing it.
It's not "lost fair and square", its "lied and cheated like hell and still lost".
In the words of Colin Powell: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”
It creates a huge potential for democracy being taken over by a kleptocracy, but it is not something automatic.
When there exist corporations capable of mass cultural shaping and branches of government that intercept that data, it is inevitable that power will be used to control the masses. Astroturfing is already becoming the norm, even on sites like this.
The democratic ideal is self-rule of the people. The candidate who wins is identified as the most legitimate because we identify the will of the majority with the will of the people. Ultimately, the people affirm the power of the political class. I don't know of anyone who has a concrete way to associate the idea of democracy with a particular method of public will-formation.
However, this does violate the norm of political equality. The choices available reflect natural differences in status among candidates - there isn't an equal or nominally equal path to candidacy for all people. And I think the status quo challenges the claim that America is a liberal democracy.
Rather than creating a democracy that promotes and respects Liberal-Humanitarian freedoms (speech, right to property, religion, safety and security), the elite political community has made American non-elites their enemy (or at least their opposition). Political taste makers are not committed to a State that has the power to protect those freedoms. The GOP fights unions and the DNC-Google fight Damore and both are victories that affirm the right of consolidated power to make decisions for other people.
The question is more whether the average voter would respect someone only on the internet as much as someone making 1000s of campaign stops and printing millions of littering flyers and signs. I think by 2030 there will be a respectable primary candidate that campaigns 99% from the internet spending almost nothing.
For an electorate like this, a candidate needs vary little money. And extra million or two spent on ad buys isn't going to be useful, because people aren't voting based on television ads.
The desire to get more money to buy advertisements and flyers is a symptom of a larger issue - an electorate that votes based on ads and flyers, not positions (the situation is of course much more complicated than just this, but it at least highlights a major issue).
Going on TV will instantly get you millions of viewers. Going on youtube can also get you millions of viewers.
The thing is, there is a lot of viewership on these two that do not overlap. A candidate should be available on all medias, it's not reasonable for anyone to miss millions of people.
> Today, commentators in Europe often describe the American way as “legalized corruption.”
... and ...
> But is it corruption?
Well, maybe not, except that people get elected who further the interests of the affluent:
> This perception is borne out by research from Martin Gilens, a politics professor at Princeton University, which shows that American economic policies over the last 40 years “strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent, but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-income Americans.”
So yes, plutocracy comes close. Or kleptocracy.
But democracy? Not really. Just the illusion of democracy.
Wait, you may say, Trump got elected, as an outsider. Well, outsider or not, he threw a ton of money at the sucker. And his people brought in Cambridge Analytics, and manipulated the disaffected. But he's really favoring interests of the affluent. It's the standard Republican thing.
"Of course, it takes more than money to win elections. In both the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, the candidates who spent the most money lost."
But there is truth to the law of diminishing returns on political spending. The most effective spending tends to be in downballot races where it's relatively cheap to completely swamp the existing spending in the race.
[edited since i had my original order of magnitude too low!]
When the president or politicians in general have so much power over the economy, can we be surprised when people value influencing that process as much as they do?
In other words, if you accuse someone of taking a bribe, you had better be able to back it up. If you hand-wave about "systemic corruption," no proof is necessary.
This has been looked at. It looks like government lobbying has a 400x return on investment. If these corporations weren't benefiting from all they spend, they wouldn't spend it.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-donius/goldmans-great-ret...
Ultimately, markets have a built in bias towards the top. In a theoretical perfectly functioning market the money will accumulate at the top until one person controls all of the money, at which point the economy completely collapses. Despite this flaw, markets are still the most efficient way to allocate resources and grow the economy. So the best solution we've found so far is to have the Government act as a backstop, draining money from the top and feeding it back into the bottom so the market doesn't collapse itself. Unfortunately, governments sometimes forget that and their economies suffer.
Plus, despite what many economists may think, money isn't everything. Money is only a means to and end, where efficient distribution of resources provides the greatest overall happiness in the population. A system where half of the population is abjectly poor and 0.01% are so rich they have no idea what to do with their money except to use it to make more money has failed.
If the price is so low, why are wealthy industries like tech companies so ineffective at buying influence?
The old "people won't buy stuff from companies that are dicking them over or killing the envionrment", always conveniently ignores the fact that if one company is behaving badly but getting better profits (exploiting their workers for short term gain, dumping toxic waste into the rivers, etc...), they will ultimately consume any well behaved competitors.
Unfettered markets are pure dog eat dog territory, and frivolities like environmental protection and human rights do not survive. We know what unregulated markets look like, they are cities filled with factories churning out toxic smoke, hospitals full of terminal cancer cases, people dying on the street, and everything else you read about in the Industrial Age. Or go to any factory city in China. They're making tons of shareholder profit and they're dying at the same time.
Libertarians are the worst at not fully thinking through the ramifications of their positions.
All people, whether they work for a massive corporation or within the government, make most of their decisions based on personal self interest. Give corporate entities unfettered power, they will stomp on people. Give government unfettered power, they will stomp on people. It's all about channeling the individual's drive to improve their own life towards the best interest of the collective. A free-market and a government whose sole purpose it is to protect individual rights, is the best way to do it.
I don't believe in unlimited corporate power because people are fallible. I don't believe in unlimited government power because people are fallible.
I think you may not be in line with mainstream libertarians.
Fun fact: the government and the largest corporations are made up of exactly the same thing - people looking out for their self interests. There is nothing more sinister or more benevolent about either of them (in composition).
The government should prevent bad things from happening, but they won't have any framework or enforcement mechanisms for doing so.
What do you think corporate (and other) regulations are for? How do you think they are enforced? You want the government to stop people from dumping poison in a river and killing people and animals hundreds of miles downstream, and do it without an EPA or environmental regulation, not even a definition of what "poison" is, much less written penalties for putting it in the environment uncontrolled. If you don't agree on something and write it down you'll be stuck arguing the details for years and years every time there is a dispute.
"You are poisoning the water and killing people!" "Nope, this stuff isn't that dangerous, it must be one of the hundreds of other factories dumping in this river." "We know your stuff is dangerous!" "I don't see that anywhere on here. I say it's safe. You want to spend the next 10 years in court arguing over this? Because I will, and all of your plantiffs will be dead before the case is over and I'll win by default."
"Simplifying the tax code would remove the government's ability to tax!" <-- analogous to your claim
I'm saying shrink, not eliminate.
Look, there are things that can't be avoided. And most people like to be lead and kept in an illusion of safety. That disgusting fact may actually be what makes us stronger than all other current participants on this planet.
"People need rulers!"
We wouldn't get along.
For example, states hold a limited power to seize property. I'm pretty sure that no one wants states to have an unlimited power to seize property. The states power to kill is similarly curtailed.
One power that that different levels of the government seem to be expanding more and more, is what I like to call 'Special Consideration'. Whenever a city pours huge amounts of money in the form of bonds and tax breaks into a sports stadium for their local team, that's special consideration; it's a financial transfer for a specific private entity that is not automatically available to other private entities. Special consideration can be hugely hugely profitable for the private entity and incentivizes lobbying.
There are two points to keep in mind. Not all special consideration is bad, and not all forms of corruption fall under special consideration(obviously), but I do think that curtailing government's power to grant favors to individual private actors, and thereby distort the market, would decrease the value of lobbying.
Trump actually spent less than his competitors and managed to win both the primary and the election. It wasn't a budget campaign, but he did seem to get good bang for his spent dollars.
Our current world system and world view has long overcome it's peak. There is not much to gain, and the whole system slowly breaks and falls apart. That means there are not many true opportunities to grow value anymore. And the old profit and safety providers are getting rarer and rarer. For instance putting your money on the bank or buying index funds is no guarantee for safety anymore.
In that time of decline of course people pay more and more to get the same level of safety, which really becomes more valuable by becoming rare, and also becoming more pricey by the money having less internal value.
What is money worth if the amount of islands to stay on gets smaller and nobody being willing to trade his island for a few slices of paper?
> there are not many true opportunities to grow value anymore
There are more opportunities than ever in human history. The knowledge and data are extremely accessible. The amount of spare money people have is near all-time-high. You can literally become a multimillionare without leaving your basement, simply by pressing keys on your keyboard.
> buying index funds is no guarantee for safety anymore
It never was. There's never a guarantee, your bank can go bankrupt, so can FDIC. But it's still one of the safest ways to invest.
Your investment options are extremely diverse as well. Only 50 years ago you had to call your broker to buy a stock. Now you can do that with a few mouseclicks. You can invest into foreign markets, cryptocurrencies, ICOs, you name it.
It's not true though. The reason it seems that way is because the human species is so rich, that you can make a good living for 2-3 more generations by screwing other humans over. And if you're not one of the screwers the blog article you read is certainly tailored to screw you.
Maybe if space flight becomes more available, but here on this planet all of value is already controlled by someone. And they don't intend to share it with you.
Without growth there is no stability in society, exactly because people need to screw each other to stay floating. So the system is on a downturn. And you can be sure that no matter what we find next to exploit, it will require another system to stabilize on.
(No. They have a board of directors who appoint a CEO-person with wide latitude and therefore real political will to implement improvements. Shareholders watch or they can revolt, but not much else. Thankfully.)
If you want to do democracy, the best way to do it would be as bottom-up. The more distributed things are, the harder it is for money to make a mark.
The best democracy would be one where people care fiercely who their local politicians are, and are more or less disinterested in who the president might be.
If you mess up in a way that steps on too many toes, too many people are going to do what they can to get you out of office. If you don't, most people won't care all that much about the election.
In modern corporations, there is a distinction between those who have stake in the future of the firm (shareholders), those who are trusted to act on their behalf (board, executives, and employees to a lesser extent), and those who receive services from the firm in exchange for revenues (clients and customers).
Customers do not make managerial and strategic decisions for the firm, and for good reasons. Indeed, does anyone really care exactly who is running walmart or amazon or apple so long as their products and services provide value? Why do people tend to see governments, essentially massive corporations, as inhabiting such a different realm, expecting them to follow entirely different laws of human behavior?
The millions who like being misled by mainstream big money media are doing it wilfully at least. They believe what they want to believe. The only problem I see is how many of them have never been presented with an objective choice between being rational and skeptical versus blind trust of major brands that were pressed upon them from youth.
Is it speech? I would say so.
Does it tend to happen at a quality level for free? Empirically no.
Once I've made my movie, would trying to tell people about it be considered speech? I would say yes.
Does that typically happen for free? I would say empirically no.
This is a simple example of the argument, and in fact the one that went before the supreme court.
I was not attempting to change your mind, but to point out that your equivalence was mere opinion, dressed up as fact.
If present trends continue, it's not so far fetched...
It'd be an oligarchy if the rich people decided it should be an oligarchy. Right now though, the rich don't pay much in taxes. A few software engineers probably pay more in tax than their CEO. The CEO would have to stop taking aggressive deductions and tax-advantaged compensation if they wanted a 'louder' voice.
Also, it says "Fuck you poor people, you don't get a say in government. If you want a voice you should have been born rich or got some one in a million opportunity." That's a quick road to corporate government ownership.
Walmart has paid some 40 billion in income taxes since Amazon went public. Amazon has paid ~1 billion. I think Walmart should get more of a say in how the country is run since they're paying for ~40x more of it.
I think the shareholders should direct the company's votes because the shareholders own the company and they're the natural party to get the money.
Though I support a 0% corporate income tax like most other economists which would render this moot. and the only way walmart would pay taxes under a 0% corporate tax paradigm would be at the direction of the shareholders.
No, you don't, and I would wager that any corporation operating that way would be run into the ground extraordinarily quickly.
Some people do get to make those decisions, however, but they are all people who are taking real risk with real, tangible resources in order to acquire equity in those firms.
Why should someone who is effectively a customer of a government (taxpayer) make the managerial decisions of that corporation?
Yes, I buy things. I'm a shareholder in Apple, I trade options on Walmart and I don't touch Amazon - so I do have some input into Apple, and conditionally I have some input into Walmart (usually if a position was 'in the money' during a voting period). I'm as much of an activist as I can be, I vote in every election for every security in my portfolio.
Why should someone who is effectively a customer of a government (taxpayer) make the managerial decisions of that corporation?
It's not just the customer, it's the vendor. I know the best way to spend my money, I think other wealthy people do too. We could create a government that does the bare minimum and free up private money to be used as its owners see fit. FWIW, I pay more in taxes than I spend on myself. My tax liability is about 50% higher than my yearly expenditures.
What I'm trying to point out is precisely this: you purchased shareholder rights independently from whatever shopping you've done at these places. In purchasing stock, you have given up the ability to purchase an equivalent amount of consumer or luxury goods. This is commendable! You own part of these companies and have some vested interest in their future. You should absolutely have a say in their governance, proportional to the fraction of the company you own.
These rights are yours because you own shares, not because you shop there.
> I know the best way to spend my money, I think other wealthy people do too. We could create a government that does the bare minimum and free up private money to be used as its owners see fit.
With governments, a rather poor distinction is made between people who are really and tangibly invested in the operating of the state and those who consume government services.
I would agree with you that a sanely-run government would focus only on things that it can do better than other firms and outsource or privatize ruthlessly.
> FWIW, I pay more in taxes than I spend on myself. My tax liability is about 50% higher than my yearly expenditures.
Commendable! I have not done the math but I would not be surprised if my own tax liability/discretionary spending ratios are similar. I would not yet say that I am a wealthy man, however, but I am a patient one. The children of those with low time-preference shall inherit the earth!
If you haven't done so already, make sure that your investing is tax-advantaged to the best of your abilities. I really put a lot of sweat into managing my Roth IRA and it was scary for a few years because there was no room for error in a portfolio that small but I've hit a few home runs and it's been enormously vindicating.
The children of those with low time-preference shall inherit the earth!
It better turn out like that. I kinda hide my financial situation from most people IRL - most of my peer group still has student debt and I could buy a house cash - but I accidentally mentioned that I want to celebrate my next hundred thousand with a used Prius and got a heated reaction. Oh well, some day I can just drive away from the haters on nothing but electric power.
I'm convinced that the first sovereign start-ups to take full advantage of modern corporate structures and capital markets will be able to deftly out-maneuver the lumbering beasts that governments have become both financially and militarily.
Is that much better though? And is that the system we should be content with? Or should be strive for an improved, more equal democracy?
At the end of the day the "money vote" greatly skews the "one person, one vote" principle, which is supposed to give everyone (or those who choose to take it) equal opportunity to influence government decisions. Clearly wealthy people have much more influence than a "single vote" in the U.S. plutocracy or than some random person in the U.S.
Do you actually believe that all people have an equal stake in the future of the country? To me it is blatantly obvious that a party animal of an adolescent, say, does not have the same stake in the future a country than a land-owning parent of three children. I would much, much prefer a system wherein those that have sacrificed real, tangible resources in order to secure voting rights have a voice in the governance of the institutions of state, and those that have not do not.
Thankfully, examples of institutions that function this way abound: It's simply how all modern corporations are structured.
This is no wonder, the index is only about perception. In richer countries like Germany corruption in high politics and big companies is rarely seen by the population as corruption.
http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling
Voting is susceptible to many things, including voter turnout and gerrymandering.
Polling can be strictly better, and in fact it is what statisticians use who actually figure out what the population as a whole thinks.
More important is the method of how each citizen chooses, and how the choices are counted.
https://onelections.net/2017/09/06/electoral-reform-movement...
[1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9595714...
[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/politics/20obamacnd.htm...
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Note the stability in spending starting in 1976 when public funding was introduced.
Barack Obama was the first candidate to reject public funding for the general election, and the spending limits that come with it, since the program was introduced in 1976.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...