A relatively smaller amount of money will influence state elections, and state-level politicians determine things like district boundaries (i.e. gerrymandering), vote roll purges, polling stations, etc. All of those have a very large impact on elections too.
1. More people voted for Clinton than Trump in 2016. If you look at the notion "More campaign funding = more votes", then this instance does not prove that wrong. It says a lot about Clinton's campaign strategy and America's election system, however, that she still lost the election despite more votes.
2. Trump still raised about a billion dollars. That is an insanely large amount of money.
Here's an excerpt that starts to answer your question:
> The 1970s was a turning point in the other direction. In the decades leading up to the '70s, the government had grown increasingly aggressive—intervening in the free market to defend competition in more and more ways over time. Then a lawyer named Robert Bork completely transformed the way courts would interpret antitrust law. The approach to enforcement reversed direction away from protecting firms and toward a consumer focus, paving the way for today's tech giants.
I read recently in the book "A Generation of Sociopaths" an interesting perspective I hadn't before considered. The book's claim was that as the Baby Boomer generation aged into a capital owning class, they used their democratic voting influence to impact companies they increasingly owned via stocks.
I don't know if I buy it, but it was an interesting take on the political and tax changes that began in the late 70s and early 80s.
I don't personally, it conflates boomers with capitalists, and there are plenty of boomers who aren't a part of the capitalist class by any stretch of the imagination. Just because some of them benefited from it, doesn't mean they had any part in its construction, execution, or intention.
This story just obfuscates the fact that this tension between capital and labor existed long before this generation and pretends like the entire generation was in on it, when it was really just the boomer capitalist class, not all boomers.
It does group (majority white) boomers together but I don’t think the auther conflates them with capitalists exactly. It was more so making the point that as a collective voting block, they tended to vote to their own selfish interests and had the numbers to sway policy. For example, reducing capital gains taxes which wasn’t necessary until they, as a collective, had enough vested interest in the stock of companies later in their life.
The book by Matt Stoller, Goliath, is a deep exploration of this.
The blame is scattered all over the place, but the main idea is that government has become increasingly technocratic; trusting industry leaders to tell us that their industries are too complicated for politicians to interfere in. This is not just a question of "regulation" -- the problem is bigger than regulation since anti-trust is generally not a regulatory issue so much as a law enforcement issue. Regulation is actually part of the problem to a degree, as regulating fewer larger entities is "easier" than regulating a diverse healthy industry.
In the 1970s, a combination of things -- Bork and the Chicago school's notion that "consumer protection" was the main objective of anti-trust action, Ralph Nader and the burgeoning consumer rights movement that joined forces with this (because of the regulatory pressure above), and the switch of the Democratic party from a populist party to principally a social justice party. All three of these had positive effects as well (prosecuting abusive monopolies, increasing customer safety and dropping consumer prices for goods, and advancing the civil rights movement), but between them they ended up dismantling the New Deal era protections against big businesses that led to the massive consolidations of the 80s and 90s across almost every sector.
There are many things that Stoller points to as positive things that I was dubious about but he makes a compelling case -- specifically pricing controls (where the manufacturer can set retail price ceilings and prevent discounting). Some of it has been things that I have had trouble specifically elucidating -- why it's bad that Disney controls both content production and distribution, and how Congress can wield (and has wielded, in the past) power directly.
I’ve heard someone claim that the US Government was responsible for this merger in the first place. I wasn’t clear on whether they actively pushed it or it was a result of policy change around defense contracting. The implication was that it was the former.
When you read the press there is this constant celebration of companies hitting ever higher market values or billionaires weighing on on issues. It seems the bigger and richer the more respect companies and people get.
Regulatory capture. Corporations entice regulators with cushy jobs when they leave public service, with the implied understanding that they won't act against their interests while they work in government.
That’s another effect of income inequality. Some players can pay so much money that people are willing to compromise some values. I am pretty sure I could overlook some things if I suddenly got paid ten times as money as before.
That's only one theory. The other is that it is natural to expect people who exit high-level positions in public service to enter high-level positions in private industry, particularly in the same field.
In the progressive era we had pretty good anti-trust enforcement. But during the early 20th century the fashionable view was that dog-eat-dog competition was inefficient and it would be better if the economy was made up of a series of well regulated monopolies like Ma Bell or at least cartels like the airlines used to be. Back when the USSR was reporting huge economic growth this theory was something people pointed to to explain how communism could be so much more efficient than capitalism.
Thankfully the pendulum has been swinging back in the other direction for various reasons like the fall of the USSR, realization of the dangers of regulatory capture, etc. But then we've been allowing all these horizontal mergers recently which just doesn't make any sense to me.
