| Your appeal to history being cyclical is a statement of blind faith. The past is not necessarily a good predictor of the future - corps have an unprecedented amount of power over our government. I'm making a rather specific argument as to why things are going to keep getting worse. I do not accept your general appeal to history as a counter argument to this - we are in new territory. Why specifically should we expect the trend of increasing corporate power over our legal systems to reverse? > Civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women's suffrage, the rise of the middle class, worker's rights... I could keep going. LGBTQ is the only recent development, no corporate interest to fight there and it was still a ridiculous struggle. I think that the kernel of my disagreement with you is that your argument is rooted in appeals to history. And I think the kernel of my disagreement with this notion is simply that we suck at government. All of the modern amenities we enjoy ultimately came out of a very effective way of finding things out about the world: empiricism and the scientific method. Until we bring that to bear on systems of governance, I will not be satisfied by any appeal to our current knowledge of how these things work. Because we don't know shit. The aviation industry is my favorite example of how much we can accomplish with empirical systems engineering. The industry has collectively achieved an absolutely ridiculous standard of safety by carefully analyzing accidents at a systems level. From mechanical failures to user interfaces to pilot training - they consider each level on its own and how they interact. And the result is absolutely incredible. We could bring these same techniques to bear on our societies. But we don't. |