Buying democracy is bad enough, but it's a Leveraged buy-out

[cthulu2016]

The injury is that our government is for sale. The insult is that it is for sale for peanuts.

Say Wisconsin has a projected $3.6 billion deficit in the state budget. (They did. I don't know if they still do.)

That means that $3.6 billion will come from somewhere. It will be gotten from higher taxes, or gotten from slashing spending... but one way or another that $3.6 billion will come from somewhere.

What is it worth to control the disposition of 3.6 billion dollars?

Walker spent $30 million.

Of course there is much more than $3.6 billion in play. That is only the deficit! I was using that as a tiny example of the point.

The sums spent to buy government are paltry, compared to the level of control gained. And that is classic "leverage."

You put up a small sum of "at risk" money to gain control of a large entity, then rape the entity to get your money back, and then some. That's what the 1980s was all about, but in retrospect they were thinking small back then.

[firehorse]

1. good points

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. I would prefer Demarchy.

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Demarchy

Demarchy is a term coined by Australian philosopher John Burnheim to describe a political system without the state or bureaucracies, and based instead on randomly selected groups of decision makers. These groups, sometimes termed "policy juries", "citizens' juries", or "Consensus Conferences", would deliberate and make decisions about public policies in much the same way that juries reach verdicts on criminal cases.

Demarchy attempts to overcome some of the functional problems with conventional representative democracies, which in practice have often been subject to manipulation by special interests and a divide between professional policymakers (politicians and lobbyists) vs. a largely passive, uninvolved and often uninformed electorate. According to Burnheim, random selection of policymakers would make it easier for everyday citizens to meaningfully participate, and harder for special interests to corrupt the process.

More generally, random selection of decision makers is known as sortition. The Athenian democracy made much use of sortition, with nearly all government offices filled by lottery rather than by election.

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. Exactly. It's the K-B toys model of capitalism.

Get on the board, give yourself tax cuts. Use the proceeds of the tax cuts to get more like minded folks on the board. Borrow money from... yourself, use the deficits to justify cutting salaries and aid programs then divert the savings into services outsourced to your companies.

They're mining the country for wealth, fully expecting to leave a bankrupt shell. Vulture capitalism.