As the governments have grown more powerful and intrusive (in terms of introducing policies which only affect narrow groups), lobbying has grown in importance. I am not sure why anyone is surprised.
It doesn't matter what size government we have, we need one that's just slightly larger than the corporations and is geared towards preventing the corporations becoming to powerful. We _need_ regulations and antitrust, but I don't know how we maintain that. An educated populace would help, but how to prevent the corporations from propagandizing that populace into weakening the government in the corporations interests? This is the situation we've been in the last 50 years.
I would instead optimize for properties that are not conceptually tied to 'weak' or 'strong'.
Have effective state capacity. Have independent corruption bodies. Enshrine the separation of powers and rule of law. Have a monopoly on force. Have an independent bureaucracy. Prioritize both efficiency and effectiveness without seeing them as trade-offs. Create more good regulations and repeal or reform more bad regulations. Separate military from civilian police.
Getting it right is about lots and lots of small details, quality institutions and cultural norms that we need to build over centuries of effort. It's less about a simple patch.
How are you envisioning people protecting themselves against corportations?
If it’s not obvious to you, you have been extremely privileged to be part of the a few percentage who haven’t had to live under horrible governments and their worst experience is having to deal with Comcast.
There is a big difference still. For a corporation to become rich and powerful in an anarchical environment as you describe, they have to provide good and services that people voluntarily choose to pay for, so they have to appease the people, or at least a large subset of them, directly to retain the power. For a big evil government that is not the case at all. Look at all the Communist/Socialist/Islamist disasters. They are impossible to vote out.
> so they have to appease the people, or at least a large subset of them, directly to retain the power.
The biggest corporations would not operate in an industry with a lot of competition, the biggest companies are the ones that can get a near monopoly on some good. Without a strong government to break up monopolies, it wouldn't matter what people think about the companies, they'd still have to buy. Even if that doesn't work, a simple rebranding and a purchase of a propaganda campaign from the biggest media corps will do the trick. Even if the corps in control change occasionally, the people behind them probably don't change as much. The same group of the wealthiest people would likely own many of the corps, so it wouldn't matter to them which one is in control, as they all serve their interests.
And if that's the case how would a less powerful government resist the power of big tech as you seem to be implying?
When political bs starts into enginerring institutions my suspects are:
- companies have too much money to burn
- company organizational maturity has cratered focusing too much on outside noise
- boards have become lost / distracted ... line engineers, tls, middle level engineers who actually get things done don't have the luxury of being pretty boys on tv talking ** or meeting lobbyists and expensive steak places on the company dime
- eventual customer dissatisfaction and financial stress to come
- corporate boards if they had any brains would keep moat between them and Washington
- getting / controlling business on the cheap through gov hook ups ... is what? Were we supposed to applaud the flex there?