We live in a democracy. We pick our representatives. I suspect the East India Company would have not had much success lobbying John Adams, Ben Franklin, Alexand

We live in a democracy. We pick our representatives. I suspect the East India Company would have not had much success lobbying John Adams, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, ... The problem is something probably much more insidious. A wide electorate of mostly uninformed voters selecting political representatives is not necessarily going to pick the best representatives. And I'm obviously not just talking about having a reality TV star as president. This deterioration of politicians has been going on each and every election for decades. We've gone from having politicians who spend their time writing on political theory and philosophy to an era where the only writing they do is having ghost-written self indulgent biographies written for them followed by giving high dollar for-profit speeches in thinly veiled pay-offs making themselves multi millionaires in the process. And I'm also not just talking about Obama there. Paid speeches as a thing began with Gerald Ford. Prior to him presidents actively avoided the activity, considering it exploitative. Perhaps this comment from one of Podesta's emails [1] from Bill Ivey sums up the situation quite succinctly: "And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging." A democracy based on a society where most people are extremely ill informed is going to produce results that are not optimal. You need to either have a well informed population, or restrict voting to those that are. The former is probably impossible, and the latter is also now probably impossible due to the fact that it'd end up similar to gerrymandering - but orders of magnitudes worse. So now we get to see what happens when we set the inmates in charge of the asylum. [1] - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599