but there will be voting; all of the elected officials will have to face elections at some point, and voters can put their feet down right now: everyone is voted out.
And then those companies can give them their due ~~bribes~~ totally free and unrelated gifts out of the goodness of their hearts to such illustrious paragons of American governance, as legalized by the supreme court recently.
That is how everyone decision works, yes. That's why you want limited government. Voting where you can't vote with your money is a very low-quality, delayed signal.
If you assume that decision makers operate entirely in silo from their constituents then yes, that's how this works. Howver if you are operating in the normal mode of democracy where decision makers consult impacted parties through town halls, solicited feedback, subcommittees, etc etc then there are ample opportunities to obtain high-quality, low-latency signals. "Voting with your money" is (IM personal O) a scapegoat for government leaders to avoid doing their due-diligence (not to mention the massive power imbalance that results from people with lots of money 'voting' way more than people with less money).
> If you assume that decision makers operate entirely in silo from their constituents then yes, that's how this works.
Most places have two parties, each of which has a position on several thousand issues. You have two choices: combination A of the several thousand issues, or combination B. You don't get to choose with any more granularity than that.
> not to mention the massive power imbalance that results from people with lots of money 'voting' way more than people with less money
This is a power rectification. If you have two streaming services and one is bad, that bad one will fairly quickly receive far less money as people vote with their wallets. That's not rich people with thousands of accounts "voting" for the winner, it's just a more direct system of people choosing with money.
Politics has a far stronger link to an individual's money swaying decisions than that.
You're underestimating just how much damage conservative mindsets can do to a state/country/world. From a US perspective, Donald Trump isn't the problem. The tens of millions of American citizens who are willing to vote for someone like Trump in 2024 are a huge fucking problem that will outlive Trump. Even today he has something like an 80% approval rating from conservatives. Some people cheer the concentration camps. And if your only hope is to outvote them, welcome to Nazi Germany.