[continued from previous message]   
      
   parties cannot do anything without money.  But they're not companies:   
   they produce no product in the typical sense of the word.  So where do   
   they money come from?  It comes from corporations.  Who makes decisions   
   in a company? The owner or the employees?  (Who makes decisions in   
   society?  The goverment or the real owners?)   
      
   So when people say that governments don't seem to work in favor of the   
   population, I remark precisely the above---if you owned a company, would   
   you let your employees have the final say in the decisions?  That'd be   
   absurd; it's your company; you call the shots.  Similarly, corporations   
   (who invest in most of the government officials' careers), should have   
   the final say in nearly everything.   
      
   What do corporations want?  Almost nothing.  Because they're in power.   
   The desire of those in power is to keep things as they are.   
      
   We can make a parallel here with the relationship between monarchies and   
   the church.  The church partnered with kings because they were useful to   
   each other: kings won their power by the use of force, which attracts   
   the interest of any other entity of some meaningful power (such as the   
   church).  Their partnership is then natural: the influence of the church   
   on the people was useful to install the idea that the power of kings had   
   divine origins.   
      
   The very idea of a constitutional monarchy comes from the industry: when   
   the industry realizes that it was their time to be at the top, they   
   naturally make up a system that reduces the power of the monarchies,   
   with the brilliant argument that individual guarantees are needed.  So   
   republics arise and we can make the parallel that governments take the   
   function that the church had in their partnership with kings.  People   
   now are busy trying to organize themselves by interacting with the   
   bureaucracy of governments---this is the civilized, legal, democratic   
   way of living.   
      
   There is, therefore, a natural conflict between public policy and the   
   interests of corporations.  The reason governments have, in principle,   
   nearly all the power and still are so ineffective against corporation is   
   a fact that's very illuminating.  No fact is a contradiction; all   
   paradoxes are only apparent.   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)