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Your assertion seems off... Sure, the US federal government may spend far more money than any individual corporation or mega-wealthy person today, but who contr

• dmix 8y ago
  Regardless the power has still fundamentally shifted from the private domain into public top-down control. Just because there are areas where lobbying has been influential in getting gov to help them doesn't make this not the case. If anything the corporations are then not private corporations as they were in the 1800s/early 1900s, but merely an extension of the government. They are being handed monopolies/oligopolies top-down, much like state owned corporations are sanctioned market power centrally. So no, it's not the same. The corporation in a modern state-capitalist context doesn't have to provide value to the public to gain power and wealth, merely influence the right people in politics. That's way different than private industry, and potentially far more destructive and wasteful of resources (see: "private" prisons which depend completely on government for survival and have little of the benefits of market functions like competition and growth via customer value). Not to mention special interest groups, unions, influential individuals, etc also have significant pull in the government as well. It's not just corporations. There have been plenty of economic intervention by the government, politicians have hardly been monopolized only by (pseudo private) corporate interests.