The Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to use their vast resources to directly influence the political process shifts the business playing field away from competing in the marketplace with products and services, to purchasing government/legal/reguatory advantages, subsidies and monopolies.
The marketplace is now irrelevant - only company size matters. It is just more efficient to beat your competitors by buying legislation than it is by competing in the marketplace. When you can purchase $1 billion in tax breaks, subsidies, mandates, contracts, whatever by spending a few million on candidates/influence, etc. it just makes more sense to do so. The return on investment is just so much higher than building factories, spending on research, paying employees, and other tedious, time-consuming, capital-intensive work.
For some time companies have recognized that the rewards from lobbying outperform the rewards from competing in the marketplace, and this ruling just amplifies that. This 2006 New York Times article, Google Joins the Lobbying Herd, discussed how Google felt it had "no choice but to get into the arena" to start "spreading its lobbying dollars" around to politicians and quotes Lauren Maddox, a lobbyist for Google, saying the "policy process is an extension of the market battlefield." This supreme court ruling just clinches this shift away from markets.
The game is necessarily going to be to use the superior resources of larger companies to purchase barriers that block smaller, innovative companies from getting anywhere, and force them to be absorbed.
Companies that think they can opt out of this and continue to compete with innovation, superior products and services are just mistaken. Any company that doesn't see this change will find that their competitors are working to buy legislation/rulemaking against them, and won't last long.
It's going to take a little while for this to sink in, but it is inevitable now.
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I live in Europe, and aside from our respective national and regional governments, we have the European Union rules that break up oligopolies and mafias for the benefit of free enterprise. Is this stiffling "government intervention" ? no ! we all benefit, and companies of all sizes benefit the most.
Recently there was a E.U ruling that imposed a huge fine on Telefonica of Spain, for abusing its control over internet lines. Thanks to this ruling and huge fine, I have been able to switch my internet service to a smaller new company and now pay 40 euros less a month on fixed costs for telephone and internet.
This is a good example of government ( we the people elect them or fire them ) acting for the benefit of free enterprise. This is the opposite of what is happening now in the U.S.
I wish the American people were better informed of how things work in Europe. Right now we are being told that the only alternative to crony capitalism as practiced today in the U.S. is "socialism"
Government is the people banding together to protect themselves from exactly this sort of corporate-rule world you dream of.
But I do look forward to the NASCAR-like, corporate decal-covered business suits for DC pols.
The people, especially in California, can start this wave with a proposition on their next ballot. Will President Obama support this? It will certainly make him popular.
Such practices in most other situations is politely termed as 'conflict of interest'; and more truthfully as bribery. The later is also classified as a 'crime'.
I would like the people to be able to vote on who they actually want, not just one person that the "party" has determined to offer us.
I absolutely agree with your stipulation that no other source of money, etc. be made available or accepted. I really like the idea of prosecution for the briber and bribee (is that a word?). Where do I sign up for your plan?
Bottom line?
We are doomed.....
This is going to get so ugly and it's going to hurt real bad!
It is Republican heaven. First money is power, now money is speech, soon money is the master.
It goes against the entire history of occidental rationalism as well as common sense. It is dumb as shit.
and without proving their currency has value, they have been able 'buy' most of the world.
This Supreme Court Ruling is HORRID!
but at the same time we need force China to prove its MONEY is worth the paper its printed on, before the world becomes Chinacorp. the Fabled one giant octopus corporation that will be the end of man, because MAN isn't 'efficient' enough of a lifeform.
Monopolistic privilege rent seeking is one of the furthest things from a free market system and it will not long for our nation’s economy to devolve into one of the most inefficient economic systems in the world.