Obama and allies working to tilt public opinion on gun control

I wonder if you think through the implications of your arguments. You know how much a campaign costs, you know how much advertising space costs, you think its socialist to give every candidate an equal access to media or federal funds. And yet you suggest that the way to avoid political corruption is for politicians to simply not take corporate campaign contributions? How does that work exactly. Every politician unilaterally agrees that they will not take corporate money in their campaigns? And what do you do when the ones who take corporate cash win elections? Throw up your hands and say “that’s capitalism for you.” You are essentially proving the argument as to why a “free market” election system rewards corruption rather than integrity. If you want politics to be about a pure battle of ideas you have to actually create structures which make it easy for different ideas to enter the public arena. Capital, in the form of media corporations controls which ideas enter the public arena. Unless there is a set of equal access to cash (based upon a politicians ability to reach a certain threshold of small donor support pershaps) then all you have is the same cycle repeated over and over again. There is no remedy for corruption via bribes without state regulation or wishing that everyone simply become moral.

libfreeordie on January 10, 2013 at 11:04 AM

It’s also funny that you mention media corporations. They almost universally shill for liberal causes and Democrat candidates.

You actually didn’t respond to any of my arguments, but lets go line by line.

You’re also talking about integrity is laughable. The Obama campaign had no integrity. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have no integrity either. If these bright lights of the Democrat party and the liberal cause which supposedly cherishes integrity can’t manage to run any political campaign with integrity then who can?

My post was about the relationship between capital, the cost of campaigns and politicians. It was not partisan. Inserting evidence of Democratic party corruption doesn’t disprove my argument which is that our corporate based election system not only fosters, but DEMANDS that that people who end up winning office be bought off by corporations. Its not unique to the Democrats or the GOP and if you’re honest you’ll admit that’s true.

You want government involved in almost every aspect of peoples lives

Hyperbole. However humorous it may be I can’t really defend an argument I have not made.

and to hyper regulate institutions and corporations but are then surprised that these same institutions and corporations actually want a hand in steering that regulation.

Oh I’m not “surprised” that corporations want a hand in steering regulation. Of course they do. Because regulation is about asking corporations to sacrifice profit for broad public good. It is cheaper to dump toxic waste into the water supply, than to transfer it to Yucca mountain, but regulations force them not to do that. Its cheaper to send atomized particulates into the air, but it leads to widespread lung disease, so regulations work against that. And there is *NO* evidence that corporations were ever going to independently come up with regulations around:
-worker safety
-equal pay
-not hiring children
-gender and racial discrimination
-pollution
etc. etc. etc.

Its not in a corporations interest to do anything different that may increase overhead. So when you say that corporations want to “steer” regulation, what you mean is that they want to be less accountable to society as a whole. We have had laissez faire capitalism in this country, particularly in the period between the Civil War and World War I. And let me tell you, it wasn’t an awesome time for a lot of people in this country. It wasn’t a time of upward mobility for the masses, it wasn’t a time of increased life expectancy, it wasn’t a time of greater freedom for oppressed minorities. It was a time of massive accumulation of wealth at the top of society. Believe me, you have *no interest* in being a part of that society, it looks nothing like the world you enjoy right now. A world that, in large part, emerged because of the modern state’s regulation of corporate excess. But you should be happy. We’re returning to that previous era and, as you can see from the decreasing benefits and wages offered to workers, and the reconcentration of wealth at the top. So congrats I guess.

libfreeordie on January 10, 2013 at 12:03 PM

Von Hayek and his fellow Austrian aristocrats who were forced to flee from the fruits of their economic programs, did a complete revision of history and retold that same story as if the very opposite of reality had happened. Once they were safely in England and America, sponsored and funded by oligarch grants, hacks like von Mises and von Hayek started pushing a revisionist history of the collapse of Weimar Germany blaming not their austerity measures, but rather big-spending liberals who were allegedly in charge of Germany’s last government. Somehow, von Hayek looked at Chancellor Bruning’s policies of massive budget cuts combined with pegging the currency to the gold standard, the policies that led to Weimar Germany’s collapse, policies that became the cornerstone of Hayek’s cult—and decided that Bruning hadn’t existed.

libfreeordie on January 10, 2013 at 12:40 PM