If the problem is lobbying and corporate corruption of the government, I don't see how getting rid of the proxy and putting directly the corporations in charge will make anything better. Regulations may be imperfect and biased by lobbying, but having the corporations directly in charge seems even worse to me.
I agree that putting the corporations in charge of government would be bad. That's why libertarians oppose crony capitalism.
This is a kind of defeatist arguments. Here at Less Wrong, we speak of defeating death itself, conquering the stars, breaking the FAI problem, getting to the "level above" in understanding of the world, and yet, on this specific issue of politics/economics, we concede defeat so easily ? There are countless ways to "actually control the market" that we could imagine. Shouldn't we try to find a political system that ensures the market is controlled in a reasonably efficient way, rather than giving up ? Doesn't sound harder than solving the FAI problem.
Eliezer would probably argue that it's more-or-less equivalent to the FAI problem. Personally, depending on what one means by FAI I think it may well be harder. Specifically it may well be possible to create at FAI capable of managing an economy composed of humans, said FAI would not be capable of managing an economy composed of AIs of comparable complexity to itself, more or less due to the pigeon-hole principal.
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.