Tuesday, January 26, 2010

A nuanced and highly principled argument against lifting restrictions on corporate lobbying

Mark Roe, Financial Times:

[I]f a populist Washington decided to attack the foundations of capitalism directly, business interests would better be able to defend themselves now. But even if there are whiffs of populism in the air today, none of it threatens core capitalist institutions. With the corporate campaign finance ruling, it is even less likely to do so. In that dimension, the Court’s decision is good for American capitalism.

Can you imagine a day when the American people demanded a government that represented them? It sure would take a lot of money to stop that!

Thankfully, there's not much chance of anything like that happening soon. So: How best to divvy up the spoils?

3 comments:

Ethan said...

What I love is when people in newspapers talk about what's good for "the economy," as if unemployed, underemployed, generally poor people give a shit that "the economy" is doing well. If the economy isn't people, what good is it?

JRB said...

Totally. "The economy" has an explicit class connotation; it describes the health of that process which robs us in the event that we get paid.

drip said...

True enough, but only because you read it in the "Business" section of your paper. Turn to the "Labor" section and you'll get a different answer. Oh. There is no Labor section? Read a different paper.

Can you imagine a day when a democratic president could announce an economic recovery plan before he nominated a secretary of labor? Referring to the wonderful LP's next post, can you imagine the New Deal without Frances Perkins?