The problem with that is that it places a fiscal incentive on the companies to make the government as ineffective as possible, in hopes of exploiting regulations and quashing competitors.

The solution to corporations breaking the government isn't to just say "well, it was ineffective anyways".

We live in a democracy. We pick our representatives. I suspect the East India Company would have not had much success lobbying John Adams, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, ...

The problem is something probably much more insidious. A wide electorate of mostly uninformed voters selecting political representatives is not necessarily going to pick the best representatives. And I'm obviously not just talking about having a reality TV star as president. This deterioration of politicians has been going on each and every election for decades.

We've gone from having politicians who spend their time writing on political theory and philosophy to an era where the only writing they do is having ghost-written self indulgent biographies written for them followed by giving high dollar for-profit speeches in thinly veiled pay-offs making themselves multi millionaires in the process. And I'm also not just talking about Obama there. Paid speeches as a thing began with Gerald Ford. Prior to him presidents actively avoided the activity, considering it exploitative.

Perhaps this comment from one of Podesta's emails [1] from Bill Ivey sums up the situation quite succinctly:

"And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging."

A democracy based on a society where most people are extremely ill informed is going to produce results that are not optimal. You need to either have a well informed population, or restrict voting to those that are. The former is probably impossible, and the latter is also now probably impossible due to the fact that it'd end up similar to gerrymandering - but orders of magnitudes worse. So now we get to see what happens when we set the inmates in charge of the asylum.

[1] - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599

I think you're correct. It does place that fiscal incentive. But can you honestly look at the last 20/30 years and say that private companies haven't tried to make the government as ineffective as possible?

Lobbying is huge. There are innumerable ways for incumbents to secure rents. Healthcare companies keep cashing blank checks from the government. Amazon also basically eliminated a huge chunk of tax revenue by turning retail into a profitless endeavor.

The solution is to make our government respected, effective, and intelligent. That's hard.

The solution seems like it should just be a given, yet at the same time is really asking a lot of America.

It's pretty crazy that the combined market cap of 5 companies: Walmart, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple [0] are essentially equal to the entire GDP of Africa [1].

[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-market-cap-falls-b...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Africa

It's a meaningless comparison. GDP is annual. Market cap is supposed to represent all future income in perpetuity at a discount. It's like comparing the annual income of person A to the net worth of person B.

It won't happen "simply" because our government is drastically ineffective. It will happen because there are a large number of Americans ideologically committed to the notion that government despite what the rest of us believe and know.