Charlie Fell Economics 1010: Economics as a Social Assignment

12/05/2013

ePortfolio Signature Assignment

Reading the article made me realize that corporate control over the government is much, much worse than I had thought. This really concerned me given the fact that current and future health care costs along with the corruption in the financial markets are the two largest things that threaten the stability of our economy. The fact that they are the two largest contributors is a major concern. It seems like we no longer have a Capitalist Economy, but rather more of a Socialist Economy, but one where the government redistributes the wealth so to speak, to the corporations rather than to individuals. The enormous amounts of money that the corporations spend on lobbying would not be spent unless the corporations felt that they would end up recouping the amount they spend and then some in order to increase their profits. This is particularly disturbing considering the amount of money spent is in the trillions.

This means that these corporations expect to receive some sort of benefit that is larger than the trillions they spent on lobbying. This means that a ton of taxpayer money (or money borrowed from China or Japan, or just printed by the Federal Reserve) will be spent in ways that are not in the best interest of society as a whole, but rather for the benefit of the corporations that donated money to the elected officials. Finally most of all, I realized that even though I understand what the article was saying better than I would have if I had not taken this course, I still dont understand how all of this works well enough to try to do anything about it. Also I feel as though even if I did understand it completely, I dont have the resources to compete with these corporations, and that it would just frustrate me more and more the more I learned about it. Basically, I feel like in this case ignorance is bliss, and I will just hope that things dont get so bad that our country falls apart. This may not be the best approach but it is the one I am going to take.