Your chance of deciding a presidential election: 1 in 60 million. You're more likely to die in a car crash driving to the polls. The expected value of your vote is zero point zero zero zero one seven dollars. The cost of casting it (time, gas, parking) is about fifty dollars.

Democracy was designed so that your individual participation is mathematically meaningless. What isn't meaningless: the four point one billion dollars corporations spend annually on lobbying. That math works out just fine.

The Founding Fathers were brilliant men. They anticipated tyranny, corruption, foreign invasion, and mob rule. They did not anticipate Florida.

What Democracy Should Look Like vs Reality.

Princeton University analyzed one thousand seven hundred seventy-nine policy decisions over twenty years. The correlation between what ordinary voters want and what actually happens? Zero. Percent.

When economic elites want something? Seventy-eight percent of the time.

You have the same political influence as your houseplant. Slightly less, actually. Your houseplant produces oxygen, which at least one congressman needs.

Your institutions tell the whole story in their names. You have a "Department of Defense" that mainly attacks people. A "Department of Health" that has not yet produced any observable health. And a "Department of Justice" that (you can see where this is going).

Whether zero percent or one hundred percent of voters support a bill, it has the same roughly thirty percent chance of passing. Democracy is a slot machine where every pull gives the same result but you keep playing because the machine has an American flag on it.

The Mathematics of Political Failure.

Concentrated Benefits vs. Diffuse Costs.

Sugar subsidies cost Americans three point five billion dollars per year. That's ten dollars per person.

Will you spend weeks fighting to save ten dollars? No.
Will sugar companies spend millions to keep their three point five billion dollars? Yes.

Guess who wins?

This pattern repeats everywhere:

Pharma companies earn five hundred billion dollars in concentrated profits.

Patients pay one thousand five hundred dollars each in diffuse suffering.

The winner is not you.

Banks in two thousand eight received a seven hundred billion dollar bailout (concentrated).

You paid two thousand one hundred dollars in taxes (diffuse).

The winner is the ones with yachts.

How Money Buys Power.

Campaign contributions don't directly buy how politicians vote. Only one in four studies support that. The system is much more elegant than bribery. Bribery is what poor countries do. Rich countries have "campaign finance.".

But they do something far more effective: they buy which politicians exist in the first place.

Ninety-five percent of House races since two thousand four were won by the highest spender.

The average winning House campaign costs two point seven nine million dollars.

The average winning Senate campaign costs twenty-six point five three million dollars.

Why bribe a politician when you can just manufacture one who already agrees with you? It's like complaining about the menu when you own the restaurant.

For the ones already in office, contributions buy something more subtle than votes:

Access: Your call gets returned, theirs goes to voicemail.

Agenda control: Your issue gets a hearing, theirs gets buried.

Legislative language: The exact wording that creates loopholes.

Committee positions: four hundred fifty thousand dollars to party committees buys a seat where bills live or die.

You don't buy the vote. You buy the voter, the agenda, and the room where the vote happens.

The Lobbying return on investment, or R.O.I.: eighteen to one Returns.

The most profitable investment in America isn't stocks, real estate, or crypto. It's congressmen:

Disease advocacy groups spend one hundred million dollars on lobbying.

They get one point eight billion dollars in increased funding.

The R.O.I. is eighteen to one (eighteen hundred percent return).

Meanwhile:

Breast cancer: Great lobbyists result in massive funding.

Heart disease: Kills more people, but worse lobbyists result in less funding.

Rare pediatric diseases: No lobbyists means no funding.

Democracy doesn't allocate resources by who's dying. It allocates by who can afford the best lobbyist. If your disease can't hire a P.R. firm, it's not a real disease. It's just dying.

Your Congressman: A Fundraiser Who Occasionally Legislates.

Fundraising: four hours a day.

Reading bills: zero hours a day.

Actual governing: Whatever's left.

They don't read what they vote on. The PATRIOT Act: 342 pages, voted on 45 minutes after release. That's 7.6 pages per minute. Olympic speed-readers can't do that. The Affordable Care Act: 2,700 pages, "we have to pass it to see what's in it".

These people control nuclear weapons. Sleep tight.

Congressional Committees: The Menu.

Committees control which bills live or die. Both parties assign fundraising quotas for each seat: raise this much for the party, or lose your assignment. Don't hit your number? Your bills die, your amendments vanish, and your name goes on a literal "wall of shame".
It's like a restaurant where the waiters have to pay for their own sections.

Here's the menu. Want to be House Speaker? Raise twenty to thirty-one million dollars for your party. Want to chair a powerful committee like Ways and Means or Appropriations? That'll cost you about one point two to one point eight million dollars in party fundraising.
Even a basic freshman member owes a six-figure fundraising quota just to keep their seat at the table.

The House Speaker position costs thirty-one million dollars for Democrats in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or D.C.C.C., and twenty million dollars for Republicans in the National Republican Congressional Committee, or N.R.C.C., because it controls the entire agenda.

The Ways and Means Chair costs one point eight million dollars for Democrats and one point two million dollars for Republicans because all tax laws start here.

The Appropriations Chair costs one point eight million dollars for Democrats and one point two million dollars for Republicans because it controls the one point seven trillion dollar budget.

The Energy and Commerce chair costs one point eight million dollars for Democrats and one point two million dollars for Republicans because it handles healthcare and Wall Street.

A Regular Committee seat costs between five hundred thousand and one million dollars for Democrats and eight hundred seventy-five thousand dollars for Republicans, which still beats irrelevance.

A Basic Member owes at least one hundred fifty thousand dollars as an entry fee to play.

This is why congressmen spend four hours a day fundraising. They're not campaigning. They're paying rent. The people writing your healthcare laws literally bought their positions from the industries those laws regulate. On your planet, this is called "the system working."

Public Choice Theory: The Nobel Prize for Cynicism.

In 1986, James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics for formally proving what anyone who has ever been to the D.M.V. already knew:

People don't become angels when you give them a government I.D. badge.

This is Public Choice Theory: bureaucrats, politicians, and regulators are JUST AS SELFISH as everyone else. The only difference is that when a corporation is greedy, you can stop buying their product. When a bureaucracy is greedy, they can arrest you for not buying their product.

What They Actually Maximize.

The N.I.H. should maximize cures, but actually maximizes grants awarded, resulting in no cures.

The F.D.A. should maximize lives saved, but actually maximizes avoiding lawsuits, resulting in deadly delays.

Congress should maximize voter welfare, but actually maximizes campaign donations, resulting in corporate welfare.

Pharma should maximize health outcomes, but actually maximizes recurring revenue, meaning chronic disease is preferred.

Defense contractors should maximize national security, but actually maximize government contracts, resulting in endless wars.

NOBODY in the system is incentivized to cure disease. Or end war. You could elect five hundred thirty-five clones of Gandhi and within two years they'd be taking pharma money. The system digests idealists like a stomach digests food. It doesn't matter what you put in. You get the same output.

The Libertarian Paradox.

Libertarians say: Government fails because government is government.

Socialists say: Government fails because it needs more government.

Public Choice Theory says: Government fails because the people running it are people, and people are terrible.

The solution: Stop expecting people to be good. Design systems where being selfish accidentally produces good outcomes. Like capitalism, but for not dying.

Regulatory Capture: How Industries Write Their Own Rules.

There are thirteen thousand seven hundred registered lobbyists in Washington. Half of them used to work in the government they're now bribing, which on your planet is called "a career path" rather than "corruption." In 2023, corporations spent four point one billion dollars on lobbying.

Divide that by five hundred thirty-five members of Congress and you get seven point seven million dollars in professional persuasion surrounding each congressman who earns less than a mid-level dentist. The mystery is not that they're corrupt. The mystery is that any of them aren't.

Citizens United made corporations people who can donate unlimited money through Super PACs. Corporations are people now, which is odd because you can't imprison a corporation, give it chemotherapy, or make it feel shame. Pharmaceutical companies write their own regulations.
The Medicare Modernization Act banned the government from negotiating drug prices. That's why insulin that costs six dollars to make costs you three hundred dollars. A five thousand percent markup. Your street-corner drug dealers find this excessive, and they don't even have shareholders.

The military-industrial complex distributes operations across 42 states so that cutting any program threatens local jobs in enough congressional districts to make it impossible. It's a tumor that grew its own blood supply.
The Pentagon has never passed an audit but somehow knows it needs more money (they can't tell you where the last trillion went, but they're very confident about needing the next one). Pharma employs 3 lobbyists for every member of Congress.
The F.D.A. gets seventy-five percent of its drug review budget from the companies it regulates. For details, see F.D.A.: Unsafe and Ineffective.

The system maintains itself with the elegant efficiency of a parasite that keeps its host alive just enough to keep feeding. Cures are a one-time payment; treatments are recurring revenue.
Approving a bad drug ends careers; delaying a good one ends lives (but not careers, and careers are what matter to people with careers). Everyone who matters wins. Everyone who's dying loses. The system works perfectly. It's just optimized for the wrong thing.

The Solution They Don't Want.

The whole system runs on one trick: each American loses one hundred dollars to corruption (not worth a phone call). Each corporation gains one hundred million dollars (worth a thousand phone calls, a lobbyist army, and a senator's vacation home).

But what if curing disease was more profitable than treating it? What if peace paid better than war? That's what a one percent treaty does. It doesn't fight the corruption machine. It feeds it different inputs. You're going to out-bribe the bribers with math.

*P.S. - If this chapter depressed you, good. Depression is the correct response to your political system. But remember: the same corruption that lets corporations buy politicians also lets you buy them back. Politicians don't have principles. They have prices.
And prices, unlike principles, can be negotiated.*