Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[seven-deuce]

The more integrated we are, the more people have important roles, and the more people have important roles, the more democratic the society ultimately is, and in a better way than the traditional "one man one vote" democracy

"In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population - the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale - they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.

Inquiries of this kind turn out to be dangerous stuff because they can tell people too much about the nature of the society in which they live. So fortunately, Congress has banned funding for them, so we won't have to worry about them in the future."

http://www.alternet.org/visions/chom...our-free-press

Also, I no longer find the idea of "rule by corporation" to have any merit.

If the government is completely removed and corporations are owned privately, decision making will be transferred from the government that is accountable to unaccountable private institutions on the hunt for big profits. This does not seem like a good idea to me. People have no say in how a company should be run whatsoever and none of their information would have to be disclosed to the public.

[wufwugy]

"In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population - the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale - they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.

Inquiries of this kind turn out to be dangerous stuff because they can tell people too much about the nature of the society in which they live. So fortunately, Congress has banned funding for them, so we won't have to worry about them in the future."

http://www.alternet.org/visions/chom...our-free-press



If the government is completely removed and corporations are owned privately, decision making will be transferred from the government that is accountable to unaccountable private institutions on the hunt for big profits. This does not seem like a good idea to me. People have no say in how a company should be run whatsoever and none of their information would have to be disclosed to the public.

30% of people having influence is kinda huge. We certainly don't have an aristocracy anymore. The point was mostly about growing integration, anyways

The point of my "complete removal of government" thing was to show how many of its decisions don't just get taken up by corporations. Most of the decisions end up just vanishing, because no companies have anywhere close to the level of prestige and legitimacy that a central government does. So if you want to go protest the Keystone XL pipeline and not get put in jail and tried as a terrorist, you can, because the Kochs and everybody else would not have nearly enough power to legally bind you.

In this scenario, however, there would arise institutions of legitimacy in some areas, but the amount of harm they could do to us would be far less than the government has done with things like the drug war. I don't say this to support removal of government. All sorts of security threats in all sorts of ways have to be dealt with, and I don't believe the market has evolved to handle those