PF Topic for December 2011:In the US, current income disparities threaten democratic ideals.

I would like to start my arguments stating that I share the same concerns about the increase in income disparities in the United States, but I do not agree that those disparities ought to threat the democratic ideals as established by your description. I also do not reject the fact that these democratic ideals are currently in threat, but that is not a result of income disparity. Contention 1 Money is not the currency of democracy, but votes are. The fact that only 7 of the 422 seats won with a financial disadvantage does not mean anything. This follows into the logical fallacy called: cum hoc ergo propter hoc. Or most well-known as: "correlation does not imply causation". The bestselling economics book, Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner has a section on the quickly diminishing marginal returns of election campaign spending. In this, they disprove the widely-held truism that 'money buys elections'. First they admit that there is a correlation between money and politics: those candidates or parties that spend the most often win. But they dispute the commonly held assumption that the spending causes the win. Instead they point out that anticipated win - or possible win - will often attract the campaign money. When candidates obtain large amounts of money it is usually because they are seen to be the best candidate or the one mostly likely to win. Based on Levitt's study of campaign spending by the same candidates against the same competitors over decades of US congressional elections, it was found that 'the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1% of the vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1%'. The Freakonomics authors conclude that campaign spending has a very small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending. If money has the influence you suggest it has than in 2008 the elections would have been Hillary Clinton vs Mitt Romney. Contention 2 I agree with your argument that congressmen are loyal to those who give them money, but you failed to acknowledge why there is so much motivation for big companies, such as BP, to spend their money "buying politicians." President Woodrow Wilson understood that "if the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don't you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don't you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? They have already captured it." So why big companies spend so much money on the government in the first place? Because the government changes the rules in order to pick winners and losers, the government tell big business how to run their business. There is an economic theory called "regulatory capture" put forward by Nobel laureate economist George Stigler, that affirms that regulatory capture occurs when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce negative externalities. The agencies are called "captured agencies". So basically, the more the government expands its power, more is likely to be captured by big business. And nobody wants to see big business conducting the market by governmental force and not by voluntary transactions. Just remember of the anti-trust case in 1998 when the federal government went after Microsoft for being too competitive, charging nothing for the Internet Explorer browser on the new Windows 98 version. Before that Microsoft was too much busy revolutionizing the software industry, and they spent zero dollars on lobby. After the case Microsoft learned their lesson, if they don't pay their dues to the government through lobby, they might face another multimillion case like that and the threats to be divided into two companies. In 2011 Microsoft spent $7 million dollars in lobby and has captured agencies such as the Patent and Trademark Office and the Immigration Service. So if you want less lobby and control of the government by big business, you want government limited and small. The founders understood that, this is why they created a limited government with so many checks and balances that it is unpractical, slow, and dysfunctional. But that is how they intended, otherwise, power could be concentrated and nothing is more dangerous to liberty than power at the hands of few. Contention 3 The fact that the majority of the people want tax increases on the super-rich does not make it right. Remember, the United States is not a democracy, it is a republic. It is not a country of men, but of laws. If the majority of the people want slavery, that does not mean that slavery should be implemented. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch, a free republic is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote. If the founders intended for the country to be a democracy they would have created a parliamentarism, without a constitution, division of powers, checks and balances, two houses of congress, and federalism where the voice of the majority would always be the law. But they wanted a do-nothing government, they wanted the government to be a stage where many factions could fight each other for power and in the end accomplish nothing, because in that sense liberty would be preserved. It is somehow very ironic that you are concerned about first principles established by the constitution and the founders, and at the same time advocates a tax increase on very rich people. First principles do not allow an income tax, but that is for another debate.