One thing I've wondered is how is it that anti-trust laws don't apply to political parties? Shouldn't the near monopolistic Democratic and Republican parties be broken up in order to both promote and foster competition amongst governing philosophies? Right now they're like the sanctioned cable monopolies almost every town and city in America has to deal with. The introduction of satellite TV and high-speed internet (where available) have helped erode this once powerful take-it-or-leave juggernaut but the fact is, your local cable television company still has a powerful share of the market. If you view political districts as markets, they too are sanctioned monopolies.
Political districts are carefully designed so as to maximize the number of voters for a particular party thereby guaranteeing a seat to that party...the so-called "safe seats". This is why, despite record hatred of Congress, the incumbency rate is still ridiculously high...like 85%. In nearly fifty years, the incumbency rate has not fallen below 85%. That means only 3 out of every 20 seats actually changes hands every two years. And yet, Congress's approval rating is below 20%. Seems a bit out of whack, no? Except for some brief spikes, the approval rating for Congress trends in the 40-50% range and yet, in all that time, the incumbency rate has remained sky-high. I guess it's a case of "everyone else's Congressman sucks, but not mine" syndrome. I'm just left wondering how it is this has not come to the Supreme Court.
AT&T was denied a merger with T-Mobile because it was felt that such a merger would remove a "significant competitive force" from the market. And this was an instance of four major carriers being reduced to three...really two since Sprint NexTel is considerably smaller than Verizon and AT&T.
While yes, on paper, there are many political parties in the United States, there are really just two. It's been that way pretty much since the beginning. We don't really do the coalition thing here. But if having only three cellular services was deemed unacceptable by the Department of Justice, how is having only two choices of political parties good for competition on the ideological stage? Should they not be broken up? Maybe into at least three pieces each? I say that only because the Republicans seem to have three major factions: the fiscal conservatives, the religious conservatives, and the business faction. Democrats are what? The social liberals, the union/workers' faction, the non-Christian religious faction, etc.
And if the parties cannot be broken up, how about the districting? How about each district be carefully drawn so as to be as close to 50% Democrat and 50% Republican as possible (or one-third Democrat, Republican, and Independent if that is more feasible). At least that way, the election could always go either way. I might actually vote if that were the case because I would feel enfranchised or at least like my vote mattered. Enfranchisement alone would seem reason enough to break up the parties or the districting (or both) under anti-trust laws. I guess all that remains is, are the political parties corporations?
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