When left to their own cigaret companies tell congress cigarettes are safe and non addictive. Left alone companies pay in scrip only usable at the company store.
The 'greater good' has arguably PREVENTED much more hurt of people than it has ever hurt. Meanwhile companies have PROVEN time and time again that they WILL hurt people when left to their own devices. In environmental policies. In pay policies. In employment policies. In EVERY aspect possible.
This is the extreme, and it shows how far some (most?) people would go. There are many examples, and more being minted, it can be a drag.
Yes, not just environmental, all kinds of money stuff. The more money can be how it gets on steroids.
But this says a lot here:
>not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic
With greed involved you can follow the money to an extent, you find lobbyists on both sides of every controversy, sometimes chalking up wins, other times losses. But they stay in business and grow by compromising the greater good with as little profit loss from those paying them the most.
They might switch roles when they lobby in favor of ordinary citizens one time, and squarely against in a future campaign. But they never actually switch sides, the least costly thing to compromise is the "greater good", which ideally from their point of view is intangible, versus actual money, which their clients are usually counting before they have earned any.
It's politics, all regulations are hard to pass, but as lobbying has increased, the difficulty of having good legislation in favor of the greater good is becoming less possible.
It just costs too much to have a seat at the table.
If people want to have good things, it might become completely dependent on older regulations which were in their favor before it got too expensive to do that any more.
Lobbyists at this point is just sports 'flood the zone' defense strategy gumming up the process everywhere so they can point and say 'look at it, government doesn't work'. Another form of the Reagan 'starve the beast' strategy to say 'look at it, government doesn't work'. I'm starting to feel the same with speech online. Capitalism and other negative social elements working to undermine the social system that impedes them just constantly flooding the systems that assume/can handle the volume of/when all interactions are in good faith but can't designed to handle malicious flooding.
Our society has an IRC/USENET problem.