| Government elections are pretty close to the free market in the real world for many things. The better funded candidate wins 85% of the time which virtually guarantees every political seat is bought [in the free market]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/... Simply because you don't personally have the wealth to purchase a congressional seat of your very own doesn't change the fact that when 85% of them are essentially decided by the money spent that they are basically "buying" the win at that point. So to claim the free market doesn't create an Orwellian total surveillance society is pretty much false across the board. 1) In the "free market", you have Google, Amazon, and a number of other businesses that try to build that sort of capability to profile their customers for advertising and sales purposes. 2) In the "government where majority power is purchased through the application of money", we have the NSA which engages in both commercial and military espionage. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...
http://www.bbc.com/news/25907502 etc. So when you say the NSA is divorced from the free market, I think you are delusional and/or ignorant. I find it scary that people don't seem to understand that the majority of power in government is essentially paid for and if your sponsors don't like you...the money dries up. So unless you are independently wealthy [on the scale of being a billionaire] and can just self-finance every single campaign, you aren't really an independent agent but instead doing your best to balance who "bought" your vote to minimize the damage. |