Comment by RajT88
7 days ago
Indeed, government regulation is decried mostly because of all the cases where it got polluted by special interests, instead of following the interests of general consumers.
This is how you end up turning a chunk of your food supply into fuel to subsidize crops which aren't all that good at being distilled into fuel in the first place...
This is mostly because Americans keep electing total morons.
I would actually suggest this is symptomatic of the real problem: money in politics.
Elected officials (and some appointed, like SCOTUS) keep changing laws and precedents to allow more and more money in politics. They can't quit all that dark money - without a lot of funding, you don't get elected. Usually the best funded candidate wins.
There was an anonymous oped from a congressman some years back which bemoaned the reality - that 60% of their time was dedicated to meeting with donors for reelection campaigns instead of working on real problems.
> that 60% of their time was dedicated to meeting with donors for reelection campaigns instead of working on real problems.
This is the same story told by Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against the Machine (at the end of the early life section): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Morello#Early_life
Key line: "He had to compromise his entire being every day."
Part of the reason money has such a big influence on elections is that first-past-the-post election system you have over there in the US. When voters have to make a binary choice between two participants, low-information campaigns like hit-pieces are able to make a big difference and are cheap to communicate en-masse. When voters have a actual choice between four parties on the left and four parties on the right, hit-pieces will only make a voter switch from, say, one left-wing party to another. So since the return-on-investment on political advertising is much lower, much less money will be spent on it and there will be less of it. And what will be there will be of higher quality.
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When one party will violate every norm and law to the greatest extent that they can get away with it, it's pretty much impossible to compete with them. I want good things for people. I can't compete with fascists because they will cheat and lie and employ violence. My positive intent is almost impossible to out thwart their dirty deeds if they are willing to break laws / change laws and I won't.
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Yes yes yes. Dark money. Nepotism. Corrupt courts. Gerrymandering .... anything to deflect from the fact that so many voters still put thier mark beside the biggest idiot. And i mean that literally. American voters like tall people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_presidents_and_pres...
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It is also because corruption is called lobbying in America. Corporate lobbying should be illegal and punished severely (including capital punishment for directors and confiscation of the corporation).
This. Came here to say this. People completely forget about this supposed nuance when comparing US and Europe, but this is exactly what leads to fundamentally different outcomes in legislation and, by extension, people's expectations of their governments. That frog is long-time cooked.
As an ex-expat to US, I never could stop smh over how Americans are not making it a number 1 issue for themselves. Private prison, private healthcare, gun industry, all types of small industries keep US government in their pockets and the society, as a whole, in a complete gridlock, unable to meet its actual expectations.
… and legalized bribes as lobbying.
People believe whatever authority tells them. It's one of those bug/feature things.
People believe whatever they want to be true. If people were just slaves to authority the US would have far fewer covid deaths. Some people really are bootlickers, but even then they tend to choose whose boots they bend over for. It's rarely blind obedience to authority itself.
Not that most other nations do dramatically better, alas.
There's actually few that are this bad. Generally we refer to them as developing countries or war torn.
It’s not like “privacy first EU” didn’t just try to pass Chat Control
The EU did not pass Chat Control is the key message here. Your framing is strange.
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