> Have you considered the possibility that you don't read very carefully?

No. My philosophy degrees prove quite definitively that I do.

> He calls you on the phone asking you to donate.

Joe Politician doesn't personally call you on the phone unless you have big money. The vast majority of voters, indeed the vast majority of (small) campaign donors, have no opportunity whatsoever to trade donations for influence, because they can't even get access to Joe Politician. Joe Politician doesn't know me from Adam.

> You don't understand how deception works.

Ok, bud, whatever you say.

> Have you ever played poker?

Of course.

> Bluffing doesn't work if you do it too often.

When I said, "Is everyone in your life just lying to you about everything?" that was intended as a hyperbole and counterfactual. The point is that everyone isn't trying to deceive you, everyone isn't against you, everyone isn't trying to get something out of you all the time. The optimum poker strategy is irrelevant, because we're not all playing poker against each other. It's not always a zero sum game. Only extreme, unhealthy paranoia and cynicism would make one think so.

> Donald Trump is the absolute master of the craft. He is so good at it that he doesn't even have to hide it any more.

He's not. His lies are blatantly obvious to anyone who cares to fact check him. His supporters simply don't care.

> You're the one who introduced the word into the conversation, not me.

Fair enough, but you didn't ask me what I meant either, and nonetheless proceeded to lecture me about whether free, competitive markets exist, claiming the operative word was "free" without knowing what I meant by it.

I actually didn't mean much by it. It's just a common phrase that I borrowed and introduced casually into the conversation, so there's no point in overanalyzing these words, which I never intended to be precise.

> So you made a claim that there is something that distinguishes politics from business, and that this thing has something to do with the words "free and competitive".

It wasn't just "something". What I literally said was, "What differentiates politics, in large part, is that it's not a free, competitive market; rather, it's a duopoly." The contrast is clearly with duopoly.

There are of course some duopolies in business, e.g., Apple and Google in mobile operating systems, Apple and Microsoft in desktop operating systems. But not every market is a duopoly. Anyway, my point in discussing the political duopoly was that politicians usually need to join one of the two major parties in order to be viable. Even Bernie Sanders decided to run for President as a Democrat rather than as an independent Socialist, which only worked in tiny Vermont. And the point of mentioning that politcians have to join one of the two major parties is that in joining a party they have to corrupt themselves, become corrupt, in order to be accepted into those organizations by the party leaders.

The same kind of scenario doesn't have a good analogy in the business world. As an independent businessperson, you don't join Apple or Google per se. That's not even an option. You can join those organizations as an employee, which is not quite the same. And while Apple and Google have a duopoly over operating systems, they don't have a duopoly over employment; one does not, as a software engineer for example, need to work for either Apple or Google. There are many other employment options. To be sure, it's still possible to become "corrupted" by joining Apple or Google as employee, to drink the kool-aid, as it were. But since employees can come and go as they please, the necessity of corruption is not there like it is in the political parties. You could also "join" Apple or Google by publishing apps in their apps stores, but that's not the same as joining a political party either. As long as Apple and Google get their cut, you can come and go as you please and be as ethical or unethical as you like toward your users/customers.

> Name one.

Sure. Off the top of my head: I reside in Wisconsin, and we have a lot of bars and taverns. Practically one every street corner, it often seems. I believe there are more per capita here than in any state in the nation. And they're mostly owned by different people. The industry is not dominated by a few players. Indeed, drinkers often go "bar hopping", which wouldn't make any sense if they were all the same.