Hi Erin!
ERIN: I never thought of it as a conspiracy to tell you the truth--it is
just
being aware of the environment that I am living in.
RISKY:
Yes, I agree.
Sorry for the rude tone of my retort on your inquiry into the separation
between corporate America and government.
What I am getting at is that James Madison outlined some critical thinking
that went into the US Constitution in Federalist Number 10. In it, he
addressed the issue of competing interests and how best to deal with them. He
starts off by suggesting that there are various ways to control the
"mischiefs" of interests:
1) You can eliminate the freedom to have an interest.
2) You can require everyone to have exactly the same interest
He of course quickly dismisses both of the above as solutions that are worse
than the disease itself. Constraint of pursueing one's interest is
equivalent to constraining liberty itself.
3) You can build a diversified, extended sphere of representative government
with checks and balances across parties, branches of government, and between
local, regional, state and national levels. This is one reason why the
different levels and branches of government are selected in different ways
(popular vote, appointment, electoral college, etc), for different time
frames representing citizens of different geographic scope.
The conclusion that Madison comes to is that the best solution to competing
interests was to maximize the scope at which they compete with each other.
In number 51, he states that "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."
The spirit of this quote is evident throughout the way the US government was
constructed and in its scope.
Sorry for the long intro, but the point is that Madison and others were more
supportive of interests counteracting each other than of restricting the
freedom of individuals or organizations to pursue their interests. To apply
this to your issue of campaign contributions, the idea is that the interests
of AOL may be the opposite of Microsoft. The interests of steel
manafacturers is often quite opposite that of car manufacturers. Doctors
rarely see eye-to-eye with lawyers or insurance companies. Unions rarely
align completely with their employers. Newspaper editorials may contradict
all these interests. Inner city voters may reflect another view. Wealthy
individuals yet another. Farmers vs landowners vs industrialists vs
environmentalists vs feminists vs libertarians vs gun owners vs ...
There are large numbers of diverse contributers with diverse interests giving
money or labor toward the funding of campaigns. Be careful about upsetting
this balance and moving in the opposite direction from that framed by those
that drafted our constitution.
By the way, I am pretty sure that corporations are prohibited from giving
money to election campaigns. What is usually cited is money collected by
political action committees within the corporation. This money has to be
given voluntarily by employees, and cannot be reimbursed by the company. It
is not dissimilar to Union dues that go toward political action committees.
ERIN:
Maybe coporate America may or may not be evil but what I was trying to figure
out was if there was really a democracy.
RISKY:
Madison would argue we are a representative republic, not a democracy. The
problem is with the common usage of the terms. Representative republics are
considered "democracies," but they are not democracies in the sense of
simple MAJORITY RULES governments. The Constitution's framers tried hard to
diversify government and build checks and balances against both governmental
abuse and abuses of popular mob rule.
The issue isn't whether government is influenced by corporate interests. It
is, and it was specifically designed to be responsive to these (and other)
interests. However, it is also responsive to very powerful non-corporate
interests. Furthermore, corporations do not have many common interests.
Risky
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