[AnthonyMouse]

> That's not really an example of evil government as much as it is an example of evil corporations

It's the corporation's job to advocate for favorable regulations and the government's job to enact regulations that benefit the general public rather than special interests. Only one of them is bad at their job.

> although it does illustrate how much work is needed to limit the influence of money in politics.

It's actually the perfect example of something where "money in politics" isn't the problem. The companies that lobby for the DMCA are the media companies. They donate their share of money but by far the largest source of their influence is their ability to run sustained unfavorable coverage against politicians who cross them, which would continue to be the case even if they couldn't transfer a dime into the politician's own coffers.

[account42]

Corporations aren't wild animals that just happen to have an anti-social nature. They are fictional entities / groups and people and are allowed to do whatever we want to allow them. It's perfectly valid to say that corporations that keep pushing for anti-society legislation get shut down entirely instead of having the government and voters have to continually resist them. We don't allow individuals to do whatever they want to further their own interests either and lock up or even execute the worst misbehavers.

[AnthonyMouse]

Corporations are like wild animals.

Individual people are diverse and creative. The behavior of large organizations differs because that individual behavior is getting merged into an aggregate. The choices of any given individual are diluted to such an extent that the organizations then behave stochastically in response to incentives, and therefore the same as one another when they're operating under the same set of incentives.

Which corporation would you propose to shut down? It would have to be all of them, and then the ones that replace them again. And the government itself, since it too is a bureaucratic organization that will engage in regulatory capture to expropriate more funding/power.

You cannot prevent the incentive to seize power, which comes from human nature. What you need is a system which is structurally resilient against its concentration/centralization.

[autoexec]

> It's the corporation's job to advocate for favorable regulations

Bribery is not advocacy.

> the government's job to enact regulations that benefit the general public rather than special interests.

No argument there, but so far companies and corrupt politicians have conned a large percentage of the public into accepting that it's okay and that any constraints on what a company wants to do is a terrible thing. We're currently under a very pro-bribery admin.

> The companies that lobby for the DMCA are the media companies. They donate their share of money but by far the largest source of their influence is their ability to run sustained unfavorable coverage against politicians who cross them

I'm not entirely convinced that media coverage is more influential than bribes, donations, and the revolving door. That argument also only works for the media industry and not the other countless industries which bribe government. The oil and gas industry have been getting their money's worth https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/05/10/energy-indu...

[AnthonyMouse]

> Bribery is not advocacy.

The revolving door is bribery, but now propose a solution to it that doesn't preclude every member of a politician's extended family from having a job in private industry regardless of whether that person had any say in their relative running for office.

Running issue ads pretty much the definition of advocacy.

> That argument also only works for the media industry and not the other countless industries which bribe government. The oil and gas industry have been getting their money's worth

The industries that it does work for are some of the biggest problem ones. Media consolidation is a major long-term problem that the government seems entirely incapable of redressing, and the same issue presents with tech companies. Twitter/Facebook/Google at this point have more influence over what people believe than CNN/MSNBC/Fox News.

Moreover, influence over the media is only one way that corporations influence politicians. Let's take your example. From soup to nuts, the US oil and gas industry employs more than 10 million people, and those people are concentrated in specific places. (This is also why coal in the US is dying and never coming back; employs less than 1% as many people.) The auto industry employs another 10 million Americans and has a strong preference for cheap gas.

The major alternatives to oil and gas are electric vehicles (majority of worldwide EV batteries made in China) and solar panels (made in China again). The US could make those things, but it would require significant taxpayer subsidies, since China subsidizes them too. Moreover, it will never be the same number of jobs because EVs and solar panels are simply less labor intensive. EVs are mechanically simpler and require less maintenance/repair than ICE powertrains and solar panels are essentially semiconductor manufacturing, which is not a major source of blue collar jobs.

Meanwhile the main argument against oil and gas is CO2, which is a huge international problem that countries have a poor incentive to tackle individually. So the political incentives to address it in the US are screwed regardless of whether the industry pays the politicians a cent, because the politicians don't want to lose millions of jobs and billions in tax revenue (which, despite the subsidies, the oil industry still pays on net).

More to the point, it's the media that keeps telling people that it could be fixed with campaign finance reform, even though it can't, because that's the one that privileges them as the ones who can run advocacy pieces without paying a third party to air them.

Whereas to actually make a dent in the part of the problem related to money being used to pay for attention, you need something more like antitrust so that you don't have megacorps like Comcast NBCUniversal, Google and Facebook in control of what such a large proportion of the public believes. Which is exactly what the media corporations don't want, so they redirect blame onto something else.