This definition is sloppy. If I buy a tacky "In this house..." sign and place it in my yard, I am using my financial resources to influence policy. Restricting that by law would be a disaster.
I think a better point could be made about the relationship BETWEEN financial resources and political connections. We should seek policies that limit the extent to which financial resources can easily buy political connections. This can be done by placing restrictions on public servants instead of restrictions on the public.
Of course, you're never going to totally remove the connection without totally destroying freedom of association.
Also, just to be clear, is the Teachers Union an embarrassment to democracy? Auto workers? Environmental groups? Or are there some forms of lobbying you're okay with as long as your ox isn't gored?
Success is hard of course, but you have the freedom to try.
And in the states, I think people would be very surprised by the kind of impact they can have on local politics - which also happen to be the politics that have the most direct impact on their lives.
Citation needed.
False. An excellent example is the vTaiwan / pol.is platform. It incorporates the interests of all stakeholders:
government, business, AND citizens
[0]: I'm not saying they should be, since that's what political representatives are for.
I don't get this "voting every 4-6 years" story in most past of the world. This leads either to the political apathy or to the riots, like it is now in France and in Belgium.
We have to have a habit of voting in order to be efficient at it. For the same reason, my spam filters are relaxed and every day I read a few spam messages that slip though, to stay alert of what the spam is, and how it changes over time.
So it may be more accurate to say that "a capitalist system that creates an increasing gap of wealth inequality and defines money as speech is a system that inherently tends toward corruption" but that's a bit wordy for a headline
The situation is the same on the other side of the pond. Money, power and algorithmic manipulation power have concentrated enough, that the premise of democracy can be ditched.
Read Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich for an update on the current situation, where tech has replaced democracy.
Or search THN for The Nerd Reich or tech fascism topics and see that most of the topics are flagged here for no reason.
Before you answer, consider all the castles, pyramids and other relics of past dynasties and aristocracies ruled by divine kings living in opulence while peasants subsisted on scraps.
If you notice, I said capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality. I did not however, make a claim as to what level that inequality is at, objectively or in relation to any other system. So your "Compared to what?" response is inane and irrelevant.
Nobody here is saying we should dispose of capitalism in favor of feudalism. Well as long as Musk or Altman isn't in the thread...
If you have your own actual point, feel free to make it.
If 99% of people are naked and starving, and one person has a granola bar and a loincloth, that's still massive inequality, even worse than what we have now.
And if there's one thing we know about people, it's that someone is going to hoard the granola bar.
I think a better summary is that capitalism creates more opportunities for all. Not equal, just more.
It creates more food, more clothes, more libraries, symphony orchestras, skateboard parks, cars, ships, planes, particle accelerators and space telescopes than any other system we have come up with, which means more opportunities for people wanting to be pilots, captains, skateboarders, scientists or violinists.
Whenever someone has tried to remove the inequality aspect of this, it has resulted in a loss in opportunities for all. Including the opportunity to have food every day.
(You've sufficiently established your personal opinion that capitalism > communism but that's kind of irrelevant to the actual claims you were making)
What assertion are you lacking citation for? The hubble and webb telescopes vs the ??? communist space telescopes? Tony Hawk vs the ??? communist skater? John Carmack vs the ??? communist game developer? VW and Toyotas 20 million cars per year vs Trabant?
Maybe you could provide some examples of how communism has provided opportunities to all in a way that capitalism hasn't?
You even get an instant all-inclusive free-trade agreement with the entire United States! All you need to be able to do is produce enough within your society to pay your land tax. By contrast try to start a little capitalist society within a 'social' economic system, and it'd be off to the gulags with you.
This freedom makes it quite difficult to take the hyperbolic claims against capitalism seriously. Obviously it has lots of problems, especially in the current crony capitalist system we have, but if the solutions were as simple as e.g. 'go be socialist instead' then people could prove it even within the system itself.
Money or economy is a social construct. The laws of physics and nature are, ehm kinda constant.
Eternal growth on a finite planet isn't exactly feasible and the planet is getting a mild fever as we speak. It'll recover, but it'll remove the symbiotic beings once they've turned into parasites.
And freedom in America is kinda joke these days at least anywhere else in the world : - )
This statement assumes that there exist a solution to this problem, a system that doesn't create inequality. As they say here, "Citation Needed".
AFAIK, failed experiments at such systems so far demonstrate that capitalism remains the only system capable of improving living conditions of the whole population over time, but I stand to be enlightened with the proof to the contrary.
Simply google the question, plenty of sources.
That’s a situation ripe for corruption.
There’s also no union for “the public” which is a little unfortunate since that should basically just be the government.
So yes, TLDR, first restore democracy and then we can talk about whether we need unions anymore. Until that time however, they are the only mechanism the public has to try to wield some degree of influence comparable to that of capital.
In other words, yes, big oil lobbying bad and auto workers union good.
In other words who would you trust to create a sensible encryption policy, Google executives or Chuck Schumer?
I know who I would pick
In reality, many companies would get Schumer attention on crypto, and other regulators, the companies would use their expertise to craft sensible policy, politicians would work with that, run it by lots of other groups and politicians, and if it passed enough tests along the way, it might come up as a bill.
It’s not like Google, or any company, likely can just put in ludicrous things, and use wizard powers to make laws. If a company breaks trust, they will lose the ability to get ears. If politicians, or parties lose trust, they get unelected. So, in order to have sane laws regarding any complex topic requires huge specialist inputs, and those specialists became expert by working in that field.
There’s simply not a pool of such people sitting around unassociated waiting to write laws to specifications of random internet people.
If we accepted your definition then it should follow that if you have political connections then you cannot influence policy without being corrupt, which seems weird because having political connections probably indicates political interest or knowledge of the issues.
Now you may feel that is an unfair description, that one can influence policy to the same extent as those without political connections and thus not be corrupt, but the problem with that is if you have political connections they will probably hear about your attempts and they will be influenced through that connection no matter what you try, not to mention that often your political connections are exactly the people that should be talked to, and in this way we see that people with political connections must be locked out of the process by your definition if we want to fight corruption.
Locking people out of the process seems as problematic as being corrupt, but luckily I follow the model of there has to be some personal benefit involved with the corruption so I don't need to argue for locking anyone out.
I'm not sure what you mean by financial, for example financial resources to affect a decision often includes advertising on the issue. I agree this can make things unfair, because someone with a lot of money can buy more ads than someone without.
In that case one could put funding limits on political ads, but so many issues are not directly political but still you can move the emotions of the public on them via advertising that it does not seem possible to really control. Maybe it should be attempted.
That said, although I believe it will invariably be unfair, unfair and corrupt are not synonymous.
I might just trust a random redditor more...
"He goes to my church/eats my traditional food/wears the jersey of my favorite sportsball team. I trust him!"
People decide someone is their friend due to some superficial similarity which a charlatan has dressed himself up in (and conversely that others are their enemy due to some superficial dissimilarity), and then their "friend" steals their political power to do bad things.
And people are too committed to their self-conception as savvy judges of character to admit their error. The error becomes a religion, a folkway, and is persisted across generations. You have to keep committing the error in order to honor your ancestors who were first fooled.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
A) Vagaries that most people don't actually care much about.
B) Tradeoffs that didn't go the way you personally want.
No. Modern democracy is supposed to protect the minority and allow regular peaceful transitions of power. That's why we need individual liberties and constitutional rules that protect the individual and prevent the majority to take away their liberties.
Just like the original post, make a definition that mistakes a pathology of the system for its core function (also: structural inequality is not corruption).
If you are a purist and eliminate all resource-backed influence by banning pooling money, hiring researchers, and organizing campaigns to influence lawmakers because "others lack those resources," you effectively ban organized labour unions, consumer watchdogs, civil liberties organizations. A well-organized national labor union has more leverage than a non-unionized gig worker in the EU. Asymmetry an inequity issue, not corruption. Well organized will trump over those who are not.
Corporations should be able to lobby, but they their lobbying should be limited more heavily.
I think that it's very common for people to work for corporations that are actively working to undermine their workers rights, and using the political clout that their workers grant to do i
Edit: Unions do this too of course. That's probably the number one accusation that people level against unions to discredit the whole idea of unionizing labour. The union management will eventually work for their own self interest instead of for the union members
Turtles all the way down