Nobody has yet solved the “who watches the watchers?” problem. Because of that, I believe every system of government is doomed to fall to corruption and capture given time.

I know that there are a lot of mechanisms that can be put in place to mitigate that problem, such as adversarial branches and divisions of authority, but I haven’t seen one yet that does anything more than prolong things and delay what seems to be the inevitable. Until something big changes, the pendulum seems destined to keep swinging back and forth.

In the meantime, I haven’t seen any way to prevent companies from unethically exerting their will over the public that works any better than involving multiple parties in it that are not necessarily aligned and do your best to prevent collusion, like making the government a party to the transaction by way of regulating the process, though that’s admittedly far from fool-proof, either.

I’m just trying to lay out the available options at our disposal now as I understand them.