August 1st, 2011, 3:52 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: outrunQuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaQuoteOriginally posted by: outrunNo I don't think they are lobbyist, but in general you'll need 1B to run for president, and you'll owe that to your investors once you get the seat, they want ROC. The mechanism results in a bias of presidental actions that please the opinion of wealty lobyists instead of the will of the people. Wealthy institutes are wealthy becasue they are able to get the money flowing from others to them, (and sometimes beyond the level that socially acceptable). That's the behaviour that reinforces. It more capitalistic and less democratic: e.g. you need to have money to become visible.That assumes that only companies (and their capitalist owners) have money. Trade unions make up 11 of the top 20 largest political donors. Only 2 of the top 20 donors are companies (AT&T and UPS). And, whereas unions tend to give almost all their money to the left, the other top donors tend to split 50-50 to maybe 40-60. The point is that most of the biggest of the big money donors are arguably non-capitalist.Indeed! I should have said "power owners" instead of money owners. The point is that it's skewed towards clustering power hierarchies, and that the president makes debt when running. (and the president doesn't realy matters at all, a much larger group has the power ) Btw interesting hedge the 50-50, those can maintain power no mater *who* gets elected!Very true! If 100,000 people each give $10 to a campaign, then the politician's sense of reciprocal obligation will be so diffuse as to be negligible. If 100,000 people each give $10 to an organization that funnels that $1 million to a campaign, then the politician's sense of reciprocal obligation will be significantly sharper. It's a kind of second-tier representative democracy by which people give money to their unions, associations, interest groups, and companies (by buying that company's products) who are then de facto representatives in the campaign/lobbying process. In some ways, one might argue this system is economically efficient because no politician could easily listen to and aggregate the will millions of individual voters. But if voters pool their money/power/political capital, then they can create a noticeable and concentrated message. For better or worse, a politician can handle a dozen or a hundred big donor/lobbyists much more effectively than a million voices.
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Traden4Alpha on August 1st, 2011, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.