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I don’t understand- are you saying that if you had a limited government, you could have a situation where the people with the power and the people with the money were different people? Because I feel like that’s not what you’d get. If Emma Goldman and others are correct though, you might get a situation where the both power and money were distributed fairly equally. But they’d still be in the same hands.



Let's start with the assumption that you have people with money. Let's even suppose that they're probably the people who end up in power. If you have a limited government, they don't have much power.

If you have a federal government with the power that the US government had before 1930, you don't have as much money being spent on campaigning and lobbying, because the influence isn't worth as much, because the government can't do as much.

Back to your comment that I was replying to. What I meant was, with a limited government, if the bottom 90% of the people want to take all that the top 10% have, if "taking all that the rich have" isn't one of the things that the government is allowed to do, then the 90% can't do that. ("Allowed" in the previous sentence means "allowed by the constitution", not "allowed by the people in charge".) In a country actually ruled by law, there are genuine restrictions on what the government can do...

... until there aren't. The US Constitution can be amended. It was amended to allow for income tax, for example. If the 90% wanted it badly enough, they could probably get it, but it would take more than just yelling at their representatives. They'd have to actually go through the process.

Then there's the problem that you seem to be talking about in your reply, that the representatives tend to be from among the rich. That puts another obstacle on the peoples' ability to just take what the rich have...

... until the people get tired of it all, take over the streets, and just burn it all down.


You are too stuck in the present time with the present form of government- look at this like you were an alien from outer space. To an alien there’s no hard dividing line between a corporation and a government. And throughout human history a myriad of political forms, permanent and temporary, have existed, and all of them wield political power in one sense or another.

In the example you just gave, with the government just standing by, political power devolves to the major corporations acting in the area. Early US corporations historically had their own police forces and armies (the pinkertons). In the late 1800s strikers fought many gun battles with private security hired by barons such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, using in some cases artillery and machine guns. Does that not count as political power?




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