Kroger and Albertsons prepare to make final federal court argument for merger

One interesting thing about traditional democracy is that there isn't supposed to be an individualized monetary incentive for one particular vote or another. That's because if ever there is, then it can sometimes create a prisoners dilemma scenario, where people recieve collective punishment when a non-representative, but well paying official is elected, but recieve individualized rewards in the case that they voted.

If you think about is, this sort of phenomenon is very hard to avoid. That's because, in order to represent the people, a public official NEEDS a direct line of communication to the people; especially the people closest to, most knowledgable about, and most affected by a particular issue. People need to be able to call their representative. Employees and business owners need to be able to talk with their representative. As a side note, I challenge you to come up with a definition of lobbying that excludes these forms of influencing politicians.

In its most extreme form, we can imagine special interest groups paying individuals to contact, and lie to their local representative about what they truly desire. If you value democracy, if you complain about "monopolies" or "corporatism", then you HAVE to present a way to address this at it's source.

This is an amazing thread. I'm going to read every reply.

Snapshots:

https://apnews.com/article/kroger-albertsons-merger-ftc-83245c5cb38a99e329e439af01d2a2e5:

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)