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.
That's the thing, it wouldn't be corporations in charge of setting prices, there wouldn't be anyone setting the prices. Except in the case of monopolies, it would be the combined market.
It seems to me by looking around the world than when a reasonably democratic government starts providing real services to the population (universal healthcare and education, social safety net, ...) the people become less apathetic towards the government, and will get more involved with how the government is runned. It also seems to me that countries with higher wealth redistribution, like Scandinavian countries, have lower corruption.
Okay, if that's true then that's a good argument for those forms of government control. But, that doesn't argue for involving the government in the other parts of the market.
As to the third point, I'm not sure we know how to reliably make changes to the market that results in positive changes. I'd appreciate the input of an economist here, but from the basic econ I've learned, except in the cases of monopolies or other failure modes of the free market, government intervention mathematically always results in a net loss. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss)
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.