Comment on The System does not work.
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 5 days agoI think if donations to political parties were limited to a couple of hundred dollars per person and no corps or other funding allowed - or better yet, paid for only by a public fund based on the number of votes last cycle, then the system would have a chance. We’d need much more anti-corruption systems for politicians too. And this stuff would have to be constitutionally protected. The goal would be to make it so the politicians can only game for votes from the people. And Corp/capital owners could only game the system writhin the rules set by the government which is actually beholden to the people. People could innovate and take reasonable risks/work hard and be rewarded for that. Of course decent education is part of the equation too.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 4 days ago
If you keep capitalism no amount of political donation/lobbying regulation will ever fix the problem. The problem being that having money affords you influence, even without donating directly to political parties, or by lobbying and legally bribing politicians with cushy jobs after they leave politics.
If we allow wealth to be amassed and concentrated in the hands of a few (who extracted that excess value from the workers who actually produced it), we hand control of the economy, and thus society to an unelected oligarchy.
If you control the wealth of a nation, including capital, you control the workers who are economically forced to work for you, as they lack enough money to compete with you.
When you control the capital, you decide what projects are invested in, you can influence elected bodies to bend over backwards for you with tax reductions (see, Amazon and basically getting cities to bid for them to locate parts of their business there).
And oh so much more that I am too inarticulate to make concise here.
You can’t regulate your way to capitalism working, since the profit motive will always work to undo them (see the fact that Anti-Trust is barely being enforced anymore in the US, and the rest of the world generally)