Comment by radicalbyte
8 hours ago
Having worked on the inside: this is by design. You know for 100% that Pepsico and Coca Cola unleashed an army of lobbyists to make sure the laws were written in a way where the single market only worked for large business.
It's comforting to believe that large corporations with the greed of the rich and powerful is what makes these inefficiencies but really it's about a million little political negotiations, primarily driven by voters dislike of change.
It's comforting to believe that actual voters have that kind of political influence over these things, but really it's about a million little talls, primarily driven by lobbyists commanded by big companies
You are about 20 years out of date. Modern politicians get almost all of their funding from small donations, in other words, from passionate partisans who care about culture war issues.
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People still in bubbles in the big 2026
How is that comforting? The phenomenon is entirely negative.
Because if it's just a few evil people making the world bad then that's fixable. The truth that it is it's an extraordinarily complex stew of incentives means its harder to fix.
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Lobbyists don't do this. Regulators/lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.
You need lobbyists to pull on one side and the general population to be too uninformed or too non-caring to not pull enough in the other direction.
That removes the culpability again from the people being lobbied, who are for paid by mandatory taxes, so they don't have to win work - their only job is expertise and honesty.
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You need both, and both are responsible for the current state.
To stop this, you need to try to stop both until one doesn't exists.
> lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.
Not really
Lobbyists get to talk into the ears of the powerful. It is literally their job. They make very sensible arguments for their point of view. So it seems very sensible, for the legislators, to make laws that aid the powerful and impede the weak.
The legislators are very busy with pressures from all sides. The cognitive load of considering views that you do not hear is enormous. It is not "incompetent or corrupt" to fail.
The system has the corruption baked in. It is one of the mechanisms, of many, that wealth and power concentrate in "democracies "
I have seen this process from the inside, good people making terrible decisions
The lawmakers are: in the EU you have a block of right-wing parties. The large part are funded by large companies and make laws which favour them. Same thing as in the US.
There are other right-wing (and left-wing) blocks who are funded by the Kremlin and Kremlin-supporters who just try to break things.
At the EC they're not corrupt, they try their best, but they're often given bad advice and are themselves not experts. And their power is limited (they can nudge but not push).
> a block of right-wing parties. The large part are funded by large companies and make laws which favour them. Same thing as in the US.
You need to be mad to think it's the right wing parties in the US who get the most funding. E.g. [0]
> The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024, the most recent date for which Federal Election Commission filings are available
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-v...
So lobbyists did do it then?