| Nope. An association of people is not a person. For an excellent exposition on the subject, see Reinhold Niebuhr's book, Moral Man in an Amoral Society, 1932?, where he points out that a corporation is not capable of moral judgments because they are the most complicated things we do, since they arise from evolved socialization. (At the time, mirror neurons were not known to scientists and moral philosophers.)
If the associations wish to exhort their members to donate privately, that's fine by me. The association should not have that power of aggregation of interests toward the legislators. Nowadays, the legislators can easily keep track of who cares about what with an Excel spreadsheet. I would also limit individual contributions rather severely. We're way too far from democracy.
The campaigns are too long, the lies told are too egregious. We need to look into the psychological manipulation of the population, a subject I'm sure will meet with disingenuous objections from those with axes to grind, and lots of money to spend. But then, that's the problem, isn't it?
There's a point where an evolved government protects us from the emergence post-Dunbar of destructive influences. Put simply, humans aren't evolved yet for groups above ~150 (see Dunbar number), and I'd guess that one of the main jobs of culture, broadly defined, is to augment the brain's socialization capacity, comparable to how a calculator allows us to multiply bigger numbers.
You can think of various forms of government as different kinds of calculators. I suspect that simplistic notions like "the less government, the better" are incapable of expressing what we need in a globalized world of billions. But people have been brainwashed into thinking that they are born self-governors. I think history teaches otherwise. I'd be glad to discuss governance at this level, but not at bumpersticker slogan levels.
What's your take on this? |
