That's a libertarian point of view, from a socialist point of view the problem lies with the corporate lobbyists.
I have sympathy for the representatives as they are elected on a first past the post basis. They need corporate sponsors to fund their expensive campaigns. If they were to attempt to change the way the electoral system works they'd be gone by lunchtime.
Organizations who fund campaigns aren't acting in the interest of the people. By having representatives dependent on these organizations they'll never act for the good of the people. This is the primary reason why the system in America is flawed and will only get worse as time goes on. By slowing grassroots movements it erodes the power of the voters away.
That's why it doesn't matter if SOPA is killed. There will be another one soon. If they can't push a bill through they might amend a similar one or find another backdoor.
It's not and incompetent government at fault. It's a culture of corporate dependency.
As with everything, there's not just one cause. Yes, corporate dependency is undoubtedly part of it. Public-only funding of campaigns is something I think needs to have come about a long time ago. But another problem is that these people have always been lawmakers, and their form of productivity is adding stuff to the corpus of laws. They're like the framework designers making a framework that's completely out of touch with the real needs of coders using their stuff, because they've only ever been framework designers. They are functionally not very competent, and that is a problem.
There's no single silver bullet here - there need to be reforms in more than a few directions.
Fyi, I don't know any libertarians who wouldn't also agree that the problem lies with the unfettered ability of corporations to use money as a way of buying favourable governance.
And that if we just took government off the market (in the discontinued product sense, so to speak), there would no means by which corporations could buy undue or coercive influence, because of course no one else would step up to sell force or influence.
I have sympathy for the representatives as they are elected on a first past the post basis. They need corporate sponsors to fund their expensive campaigns. If they were to attempt to change the way the electoral system works they'd be gone by lunchtime.
Organizations who fund campaigns aren't acting in the interest of the people. By having representatives dependent on these organizations they'll never act for the good of the people. This is the primary reason why the system in America is flawed and will only get worse as time goes on. By slowing grassroots movements it erodes the power of the voters away.
That's why it doesn't matter if SOPA is killed. There will be another one soon. If they can't push a bill through they might amend a similar one or find another backdoor.
It's not and incompetent government at fault. It's a culture of corporate dependency.