[jondubois]

I keep seeing this idea of an incompetent government come up repeatedly.

What people don't understand is that it is precisely this incompetence which allows corporations to manipulate the government so well. Laws and regulations do not originate within governments. They originate from lobbyists who are working in the interest of corporations and other large financial interests.

When discussing the economy, some people will keep insisting that capitalism is the most intelligent collective system possible, yet when it comes to politics, they will make it seem like capitalism is the dumbest system in the world, utterly incompetent at implementing perverse economic agendas... So I guess the view must be that capitalism maximizes the extraction of value from every kind of activity except when those activities relate to the government?

Clearly this makes no sense. Why would capitalism's efficiency at leveraging the collective intelligence stop at politics?