I didn't mean to sidetrack into democracy vs. representative government (separate discussion!). I may have used the term democracy in my above post a bit loosel

I didn't mean to sidetrack into democracy vs. representative government (separate discussion!). I may have used the term democracy in my above post a bit loosely, to mean the people's control of the government. It would be more accurate for me to say I'm concerned about the outsized influence money has over the government (corporations, unions, trade associations, and the rich) have over the government, versus the influence people have. It seems that we enshrined political contributions as free speech in this country, and I'm not sure that right, allowing pac and dark money to buy mass media advertising to manipulate voters at scale. That just seems a way to subvert one person equals one vote. This seems to get worse and worse every decade. We're just starting to see what international companies larger than most governments in the world can do with petabytes of personal data and algorithms designed to take advantage of all that. I may still misunderstand, but you used Toyota as an example, the political lobbying the company does on behalf of its customers and workers. When I read this I think that they are lobbying on behalf of shareholder profit, often to detriment of their workers (anti-union, for example), customers (less mandated safety), and the public at large (less pollution regulations). it seems more and more that the deck is stacked in favor of large corporations and the rich. I know that our conversation has drifted around a little bit. I appreciate being able to refine my thoughts on this. Do you think that some method of publicly funding campaigns would better than what we have now, more in the spirit of one person equals one vote? Also limits to how long campaigns last and how they are conducted? There are other countries that do this. In fact the U.S. seems to be an outlier in how we allow money to influence politics. I grant that this would need to be done despite the establishment not wanting to change. I also grant, like you said, it may be near impossible to eliminate the effect of money on politics. But it scares me to think what will happen if we continue on our current course.