What more is a government in a Democracy than a cooperatively owned monopoly on violence?
By that I mean humans are born into this world with one vote for every election in politics but in economics people are born with zero votes and must rely on the benevolence of their parents.
There is no minimum access to pollution rights, natural resources, land and perhaps money granted to every citizen equally the moment they are born. It doesn't have to be an insane amount that people can live off, just enough to feel like you are not born as an illegal alien on this planet.
No, I don't mean welfare, I mean real democracy.
Also the idea that you can just reliably buy congresspeople by spending money on ads is a farce.
Should I take this as a prompt to assume random crap about you?
CU drastically increased spending by outside, untracked groups, on the ridiculous premise that money is not a corrupting influence in politics. It was the end of meaningful campaign finance regulations.
> Also the idea that you can just reliably buy congresspeople by spending money on ads is a farce.
Why are companies and groups spending so much then, including spending on both sides of many races?
In other words it did not boil down to "overturning a law" but created a new conservative doctrine that would apply to any law.
If it's not possible to buy politicians with campaign ads you shouldn't have a problem with a law making it illegal to buy politicans with campaign ads, no?
Yet for some reason you are spreading falsehoods about Citizens United, claiming a highly contested 5 to 4 decision turned on what was "obviously unconstitutional" (if it was obvious shouldn't it have been a unanimous decision?) almost like you want people to believe the case's ruling was sounder than it was and are afraid of it being overturned.
You're talking out of both sides of your mouth. "Buying politicans is my right as an American but also doesn't work so stay calm and don't panic over the fact I am buying politicians"
Except that's how our government works too, the votes just aren't official and they're _far_ more effective.
For one, a vote is a right. It costs you nothing to vote. A vote has a single purpose.
Buying an item is not the same. You have a fixed amount of money and there is an opportunity cost to buying anything. Moreover, you need to buy certain items to survive.
If you are poor you are not in a position where you have a choice, you have to buy the cheapest items that you need to survive. If you are rich you have more than enough resources to survive, to buy the items you actually want, and more beyond.
When you are forced to vote in a certain way because you cannot afford not to, that is not democracy.
> If you are poor you are not in a position where you have a choice, you have to buy the cheapest items that you need to survive
This is a really dull and tedious way of looking at things. Poor people make choices based on preference all of the time. Especially because food in the US is dirt cheap in historical terms. Sure you aren't buying organic grass fed meat, but you can pick from a wide range of cheap foods. Are your choices more limited, sure, but you still have choices.
The amount of real power politicians truly have is laughable compared to the state of affairs even 50 or 60 years ago. If you think about it there is almost no decision of substance that can be made without deference to economic power (in the person of un-elected, in-accountable actors), i.e. the amount of power that political actors have is very small, compared to say pre-wwii times or the couple of decades afterwards. Historically this has never been the case, to this extent.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition The State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California Press. p. 54.
<https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...>
There's an excellent explanation of the common misunderstanding in this episode of the Talking Politics podcast: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
If the number of entities in a society with discretion over violence is not equal to 1, what is the optimal number?
It's kinda like having write permission on a file.