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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

I find it strange that citizens of democratic countries agree that democracy in politics is necessary but democracy in economics is not...

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.

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People vote each time they choose buy a good or a service. Isn't it democracy if you have the freedom to choose to whom you give your hard earned money (what is left after taxes)?

Is it democracy if some people are born with an effectively infinite number of votes and others are born with zero? What a silly analogy.

It's just a shitty democracy. Funnily enough, especially since Citizens United (but even way before ofc), that's basically how our government works too.

People say this, but I think you probably aren't clear on what the Citizens United decision meant. It boiled down to overturning a law that prevented groups of people from spending more than a certain dollar value on anything that could be considered campaigning. The law was so broad that it was used against a Michael Moore documentary, and was obviously unconstitutional.

Also the idea that you can just reliably buy congresspeople by spending money on ads is a farce.

> I think you probably aren't clear on what the Citizens United decision meant

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?

A cursory look at Wikipedia would tell you that Citizens United overturned a Supreme Court decision from 1990 called Austin v. Michigan.

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"

If you proposed that people could buy extra votes in elections, at say 100$ a pop, virtually everyone would call it an affront to democracy, as rightly so. Yet it is precisely what happened when it comes to governance of joint-stock companies.

> virtually everyone would call it an affront to democracy, as rightly so

Except that's how our government works too, the votes just aren't official and they're _far_ more effective.

I think you're mixing concepts... It's a free market economy if you can choose who to buy from; it's a democracy if the citizens choose the rules and laws, which may prohibit you from buying certain things.

No.

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.

It's an analogy. There's also an opportunity cost to a vote, insofar as casting a vote for A means you can not cast a vote for B. You also have a fixed amount of votes, 1.

> 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.

This is even more important due to the fact that the amount of power in the political sphere keeps shrinking, while the power in the economic sphere keeps growing.

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.

Most live in representative republics, not "real" democracies, or they'd spend all day every day reading bills and voting on them.

I don't think that's necessarily a widespread agreement. Even within the bounds of basic centrist liberalism, people believe that sufficiently concentrated wealth can rival the power of governments, and deserve to be limited in the way that governments are.

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