I'm curious about something. I tend to be quite skeptical, so what is your view on corruption? For instance if I pay you $10 will you say the opposite thing and

I'm curious about something. I tend to be quite skeptical, so what is your view on corruption? For instance if I pay you $10 will you say the opposite thing and start supporting an even greater integration of these businesses and perhaps even bringing more Google entities into government funded institutions? Probably not. $100? $1,000? $1,000,000? You're going to change your tune quite rapidly. I think that everybody, for the most part, has a price. And it's generally quite low. Last year Google's net income was $30,740,000,000. Put another way, 30,740 millions. Obvious of course but all these zeroes often let us lose intuition of just how stupidly much money this is. There are a total of 535 voting members in the US congress. And of course to ensure a company is safe it needn't get all 535 members, just a handful of key players sprinkled about would be more than enough. I'm also certainly not suggesting this is some shady cloak and dagger nonsense as I initially proposed to you; instead, simply a result of completely legal lobbying. I come to you with a presumably poignant pretty pleasant palatable power-point presentation - the undertone of our exchange needs not even be spoken. I, as a mega corporation, am simply looking for politicians that are 'doing the right thing.' You could get a transcript of our conversation and it'd be perfectly kosher. Leave office and, even though we already regularly chat, if you've been a good boy you stand to get paid $400,000 for 30 minute chats, over and over. Got a loser son? You know I think he just has a lot of untapped potential. We're always looking for executive advisors that can offer unique perspectives - pay's about half a million per year. I find it difficult to find any other explanation for the state of business today. The behaviors of companies today are vastly more anticompetitive than those of companies in times past, an increasingly distant past, when the government actually did anything. The difference seems to be that modern companies have just become vastly larger, and they're increasingly interweaving with government. I wonder if this is analogous to how people felt in the days before the separation of church and state.