I don't know how many of you have been following the EU rulings on Microsoft's allegedly monopolistic business practices. I didn't really understand the concept of “anti-trust” (basically where the government allows an open market, but then steps in to “penalize” to stop monopolies from happening), so I've been doing some reading on it.
One of the things that it's based on is the evidence that you need at least ten solid companies in a given market in order to ensure enough competition to keep the economy favouring the consumer — with less than ten companies, you fairly quickly have one company (or a small number of companies) gain dominance, and then enough market share to snowball into a monopoly… and when that happens, the consumer is the disadvantaged party, as they no longer have an influence on pricing, options, and so on (the monopoly or pseudo-monopoly holds it).
OK, that's pretty obvious and I assume it makes sense to everyone.
Now apply it to democracy.
When you have two or three political parties, when you think about them as “businesses” who “sell” ideas to the voters (their consumers in effect), you realize something scary. Over the past few hundred years, we've come up with some solid and workable models of democracy, but then watched them devolve into pseudo-monopolies which are fundamentally unable to offer competition, “difference” in belief, or service to the consumer/voter.
To be clear — because we've allowed it to degrade into a monopoly or pseudo-monopoly (where there are choices, but they're tightly clustered, and the majority of power players are overlapping — politics in virtually every Western nation), it doesn't work any more… Well, government works for government, I suppose… but government does not work for the people under the model of democracy we've allowed to happen.
Of course, Italians may disagree with me.
PS. Just as a general reminder, if you spam on IAM (posting promotions for various things in unrelated forums, mass-broadcasting ads or promotions via IM, or even just posting entry after entry to stay on the front page), you will get blocked and/or removed from those functions/forums (or IAM).
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