So the alternative is to prohibit corporations from lobbying government, but that would be tantamount to removing legal personality from corporations and it is questionable whether the result is a free market system. You would also need to remove the right of people to lobby on behalf of groups of other people, and it is questionable whether the resulting system is free at all, or in any ways desirable.

The system that we have approaches free market capitalism as well as a liberal system can.

Besides, just because we cannot reach perfection is not justification to run the other way. The government is run by people, and people are subject to imperfection, incompetence, and corruption. The more power added to that means the more temptation there is to use that power for personal agendas.

Remember that county clerk who was using her government power to deny marriage licenses to gay couples?

Since when you have become a venture capitalist?

Only a select few win big and often their products are way overvalued. The road to billion valuation is littered with dead startups doing almost the same thing.

Once religion and state were one. Then they separated and now it is hard for the pope to have any real influence.

I think the same will happen with state, money and capitalism.

For that, it needs to get worse for sure thou.

The arguments for changing that were largely of a Progressive (by the timbre of the times) nature - trustbusting and all of that. I don't think that genie can be put back in the bottle.

If information is allowed to flow from corporations to government, what are the rules?

And "blunt competition" how, exactly?

And a wealthy player would be a fool to not try to skew the rules in their favour.

Nobody has proven yet that it is possible to prevent this problem even in a really long term.