Your post could lead to a hundred issue arguments, and a thousand comments.

So let me just deal with your initial premise: bilionaires running our lives.

The simple answer--the ONLY answer--is absolutely they are.   But if we choose to focus on the impact of their money on individual election years, you bypass the wider truth.  They don't come out of the woodword every four years and stupidly start throwing money around.  They have worked for decades, day by day, to influence every person in America on their view of their own goverment.  And that view is one that is uniformly friendly to their personal and corporate interests.

Let me use this analogy.  When we're seven years old, and start hearing the words of the pledge of allegiance, we are absolutely convinced that America is great because we believe in 'liberty and justice for all.'  Now, you may come to the conclusion in later years that you have no liberty if anyone takes one tax dollar from you...or that justice only applies to white people.  Whatever.  The point is that if something is repeated enough to you when you're seven, you're probably going to believe it.  (Same holds true for the words repeated by school kids in every other country).

What the Koch brothers and associates have done is work assiduously, day by day, dollar by dollar, to (one must say systematically and ingeniously) infiltrate the processes of electoral politics and communication to make us all seven years old again.  

There is talk about a 'third party' candidate.  But we already have a third party--it's the oligarchs.  The ones Sanders warns about speech after speech.  We see the RNC and the DNC humbled and wonder what in the world is happening.  It should be obvious--the oligarchs have taken over.

So I guess this really comes down to your personal depiction of 'Big Brother'--is it those pernicious socialists...or the oligarchs?  

Because people were trying to control the amount of money used in voter education (or influencing, vote buying, dumbing down, whatever, choose your term). Whatever your solution to corral the evils of money in politics, it will likely create a problem even worse. SuperDEdooper Pacs maybe. Or Cuba.  

George Will likes to compare, quite regularly, the amount of money spent selling Tortilla chips compared to influencing an election. I haven't seen his reiteration this year, but Tortilla chips, potato chips, whatever he uses, the lowly product always comes out ahead. Hey, people's jobs are dependent on the product being sold. Even Bernie Sanders has thousands of folks who would LOVE to be paid to spread his message. Is it right to deprive them of this opportunity?

On a personal note: I recently took my frustration on the politics of resentment on poor LR, and you, gentle readers. Nuff said there, if you don't know what I am referring to, consider yourself fortunate. But if you do, then for that, I apologize.

That it's hard to find a good starting spot. Great post, fairly asked questions, and you summed mine and Ricks particular problem up pretty well. Regarding influence as you've described it, here's what I think most of America believes.

Your Q1. I wasn't talking about whether Trump (or Hillary or Cruz) should or shouldn't have a microphone. The prime, first principle I kept driving at is that corporations shouldn't get to pump unlimited money into the electoral process. It' unfair, period, and over 80% of the country agrees with that principle. The rise of Sanders and *Trump against the establishment is a clear signal that a lot of people understand what's going on and don't like it. We KNOW that advertising works. I'm guessing you didn't stumble into an Apple store one day and buy an iPhone on a whim. So do we agree then that people are influenced by adverstising, whether consciously or subconsciously?

This leads to your Q2, is Suzy capable of making her own rational decisions. Sure some Suzys are. Let me ask this though. Are there Suzys and Johnnys out there that have a hard time sifting through advertising (or propoganda) and coming to the *right conclusion? The answer is clearly yes. And Pepsi and Soros and Koch know this. They've known it for a loooong time.

We're sitting down to eat, so I'll leave it at that. I'm sure others will offer better insight into the other questions you raised anyway.

LR writes (actual quote): "Are there Suzys and Johnnys out there that have a hard time sifting through advertising (or propoganda) and coming to the *right conclusion? The answer is clearly yes. And Pepsi and Soros and Koch know this. They've known it for a loooong time."

You can bet, however, that Pepsi and Koch are truly believing they are leading people to what they believe is the "right conclusion." Free markets are better than regulations, Pepsi is better than Coke.

Koch is concerned people are not getting the whole truth and thus coming to the wrong conclusion. So they spend the money necessary to make Suzy and Johnny more knowledgeable.

And they may need a little more money to do so than allowed to spend. But if they are kept from spending it on elections, they will go elsewhere.

Instapundit blogger Glen Reynolds has suggested they would get more bang from their buck if they bought media outlets instead of campaigns and advertising. In particular Women's Magazines like Ladies Home Journal, Cosmo, etc.  But struggling newspapers might be good buys as well. These outlets subtly (and overtly) educate their readers into the, ahem, right conclusions.

I think the concern, for me anyway, is more about the influence the money has on the elected, rather than the voters. Certainly some big money donors are ideologically driven, but I am guessing, with no data, that most of the political money prefers front running and is party agnostic, concerned almost exclusively with rice bowl breakage prevention, and only if they are really lucky, rice bowl enhancement.

I get the example of ads and the iPhone, but if the iPhone was a crappy product, ads won’t give it legs. The movie industry has known this for a long time.

So how does voter-as-consumer discern whether the political product their vote bought them is a good product? I think here it is helpful to look past rhetoric to actual results.

Let’s do a quickie high-level overview (like from space, through binoculars with a wobbly focus knob) of the favorite greed-is-good poster child, the financial industry. Way back in the 90’s, Clinton and Greenspan set the regulatory table so that banks consolidated and got very big (and this was an international phenomenon). Couple that with those marvelous financial “innovations” of securitization and derivatives. The former is supposedly regulated by the ’33 and ’34 Securities Acts and the SEC, to insure market transparency and prevent fraud.  But as things turned out, securitization, particularly of debt instruments derivatively sliced and diced, was rampant with fraud. The derivatives “shadow” market was never regulated, thanks to the neo-liberal/neo-conservative “free market” mantra. (Here’s a clue – an opaque market with no price discovery is not “free.”)

After a decade or so, these so-called masters of the universe managed to blow themselves up so badly that not only did they lose everything they had made over the past 15 years (oh wait, bailout), but they came very close to blowing up the world’s financial infrastructure.

Now, here we are, almost a decade later, and there has been no prosecutions for fraud, no jail time, no derivatives market regulation, no end of the too big to fail banks that remain incredibly fragile. Plus, as a bonus, we have suffered a dismantling of our industrial jobs base, unprecedented income and wealth disparity, and a rapidly shrinking middle class. And that is after 3 different presidents representing both parties. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Personally, I think many people realize they got stuck with a crappy product. Hence, the crazies are leading the pack. Bernie scares the financial establishment because he has painted a bullseye on their forehead. Trump scares them too, I guess because he is self-funded and therefore uncontrollable, but even worse, he is unpredictable – can’t you see him breaking one or more of their rice-bowls just to see the look on their faces?

What is great about this campaign, to me, is that both of Bernie and Donald have the means to get their message out and reach the voters, and they seem to have more than a puncher’s chance at the nomination(s). That to me is the sign of a system on its way back to health.

The Kochs truly believe their message is correct. Objectively so. Now, Pepsi may either think they nailed the formula, or they may just be creating an impression that helps folks subjectively prefer their product. I'll grant the latter.

So, it is strange that we are willing to allow Pepsi to spend as much as they want to sell their dubious proposition: that Pepsi is better than Coke. BUT, we are going to limit the ability of people to give what they believe is valid information in determining important issues because it is in some way "unfair." Unfair to who? Not the voter. His vote counts as much as Koch's. Each gets one vote. But equality of vote does not mean equality of outcome. Some people are more persuasive than others. Should they be made to shut up? Suppose they are *correct?  

Most voters want to make right decisions. To do so, they need information.  If more money is spent to provide *correct information to the voter, likely no one would object.  That's why we have schools: we spend a lot of money to educate, and we assume *correct information is provided in them. And this belief allows us to make the funding compulsory. I imagine, for some people, the idea that some people get more *correct information than others, because their schools are superior, is so unfair that they would prefer to equalize the amount of *correct information. And if this meant providing less to the superior school to level the playing field, then so be it. My hunch, however, is that people want access to more, not less, information to discern truth so that they can exercise their vote correctly. But they will also like to see fewer TV ads and yard signs littering the byways. Well, we do have laws against unsightliness. But free speech is a tricky thing.

This all assumes politics is a civic endeavor to promote the general welfare, and people earnestly wish to do so by voting.

But politics is also, and perhaps foremost, a struggle between factions for power and control. So we truly fear when one side is able to exert an unfair advantage.

Strange that we contest with argument and reason then. Why not just separate factions and split power accordingly? Because people have reason and will use it to change their minds and their factions. We honor that. But it happens when we provide argument and information. 

If the voter is wishing to vote as a civic duty to properly shape the course of the nation, then he wants more, not less information. He wants good information, of course. That's why he trusts his neighbor's opinion. Or his Facebook friend's. Probably moreso than the TV ad, which makes a strong case as well, but is untrustworthy - who hasn't bought a piece of junk that worked like a charm on TV?

I suppose we could boil every race down to 100 words, shut down all debate, and pass out voters pamphlets. Would that be fair? Would that be preferable? 

Most political advertising I find detestable, and a waste, at least for my vote. But in Thomas Jefferson's age, newspapers were partisan rags - completely devoid of objectivity. No doubt some rags were better funded. Still, this man of the enlightenment is reported as saying that if he were to choose between government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter. I am not sure how *that* works, but it suggests that Jefferson saw the importantance of a very open and wild process of disseminating information. Perhaps it was because the King of England saw no reason for the colonies to be filled with false ideas regarding the *correctness of his position.

The Left fears Big Business far more than they fear Big Government, even though the government is far more powerful than any business and has the guns to enforce its will. They see government as inherently benevolent, and any corruption is the result of nefarious outside forces. That means the Left sees corporate influence as a root problem that needs to be addressed directly. In reality, corporate influence is a symptom of Big Government. That is, the whole reason it is worthwhile to spend millions of dollars to support certain candidates and lobby the government is because the government is now deeply involved in every aspect of our lives which means there is a huge potential payoff to getting involved in politics. If the government only concerned itself with policing the streets and putting out fires, the tax code was super simple with no deductions or loopholes, and there were no regulations, subsidies or mandates, then there would be no point in spending money on politics because it wouldn't get you anywhere. The idea that you can have Big Government that is free from corporate influence is a fantasy. On the contrary, the bigger the government, the bigger the corporate influence. If you try to regulate the corporate spending, businesses will find new avenues to get money to politicians (as they did when campaign finance reform was passed in 2002). If you outright ban it, then the influence will be done illegally (just look at any Communist country).

Let's take ObamaCare as an example. This law has a massive amount of regulations, subsidies, mandates and so on. For instance, not only are people required to buy health insurance from private companies, but those insurance plans are required to cover a whole range of things. Insurance companies are also required to accept anyone who applies, regardless of their health status, and the amount that the companies can spend on administration and advertising is capped. Now doesn't it make sense that insurance companies are going to try to be heavily involved in how such a major law is written? Does anyone seriously expect them to just sit on their hands and let themselves be regulated without doing anything at all? Of course not! And really, wouldn't it be extremely unfair to allow the government to heavily regulate insurance companies but not let the insurance companies take part in the politcal process?

The simple fact is that you can not talk about the degree that special interests influence our government without discussing the scope of government. The two are not separate issues, but inextricably connected. So to answer the question in the headline, No, billionaires are not running our lives, the government is. Billionaires just get a bigger say in how their lives are run.

As someone whose exposure to American politics is limited to this site, maybe some facebook headlines and a few comedy shows I have a question. 

Articles like this one... the-dnc-superdelegates-just-screwed-over-bernie-sanders-and-spit-in-the-faces-of-voters

Whats the deal with the whole deglegates situation. I have some vague recolection of an election where maybe Perot? won the publics vote but the delegates voted Bush? in to be President instead... 

Is this related at all to the 'rigged' elections? What purpose does superdelegates getting to vote however they please serve?

The current primary process drives me nuts!  Candidates pour huge amounts of cash and resource into (rather) insignificant states as the nation's voters and press-types live and die on every quote or vote by every Floyd R. Turbow*.  

No insult to either great state intended, but you catch my drift.  

And somehow a few hollering caucusesers in Iowa and fewer wool-coated New Hampshire-ites get to set the political agenda for the nation.  On a rational basis, it makes no sense.

Truthfully, I would rather we go back to the smoke-filled rooms at the convention than this method.

Or, with more sense, schedule 4 or 5 multi-state super primary days, with ALL states in, perhaps even regionally, and let us see candidates appealing to multi-state voters, rather than camping out on the Turbow doorstep, kissing hands and shaking babies.

*You Carson fans (Johnny, not Ben) will remember Floyd well.

Keith

I get the focus on advertising dollars, as it's the most visible manifestation of money in politics. It's also the least effective. Consider this - when Dick Cheney convened a group of folks to craft energy legislation, was there anyone in the room that wasn't representing major campaign contributors? When Democrats tossed out Obama's "opt in single payer" system in favor of a plan that poured metric tons of $$ into the insurance companies, does anyone really think they did that for altruistic reasons? Or that the flood of insurance comapny money into Democrat coffers had nothing to do with that legislation? When the Koch's fund a "policy institute", draft "model legislation", then get that legislation that they wrote passed into law, does anyone really think that would happen without the money they can pour into the Republican party, individual campaigns campaigns and SuperPac's that support the politicians who sponsored the bill? 

Maybe this is how it's supposed to be. Roberts certainly believes so and has said so repeatedly. One thing is for sure - money now matters far more than votes and my personal opinion is that paradigm violates the "one person, one vote" foundation of our democracy. Sure, we still get our one vote - it's just mostly irrelevant. Welcome to the age of Oligarchy in America. 

Krauthammer on Sanders and Trump:  Superb!!!

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431183/donald-trump-bernie-sanders...

I don't get some of Ameria's fear of socialism, is it simple ignorance? Maybe thats easy for me to say being from a country whose incorporation of socialism is a few steps further than Americas.

Like in the article above:

The young Democrats swooning for Sanders appear unfamiliar with socialism’s century-long career, a dismal tale of ruination from Russia to Cuba to Venezuela. Indeed, are they even aware that China’s greatest reduction in poverty in human history correlates precisely with the degree to which it has given up socialism?

There are many many different forms of socialism, including American socialism (public schools, highways, librarys, military, postal service, student loans and grants, the prison system, social security, national parks, corporate subsitys and bailouts, food stamps, he sewer system, vacines etc,,,). Just look around the world and see the many differnt ways in which socialism is applied and practiced, Venusala, Denmark, New Zealand, Nazi Germany, Canada...

Doesn't Sanders claim Democratic Socialism which is diferent by very definition? Maybe you think it doesn't matter because it will lead to some loss of personal liberties but it seems strange to not allow for at very least, difference.