What Money Can't Buy

I should probably read "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" by Michael J. Sandel before writing this but I have a backlog of books and this thought came to me when he was being interviewed on The PBS Newshour this evening.
 

Watch 'What Money Can't Buy' and What it Shouldn't Buy on PBS.

Sandel was talking about "line standers" people who lobbyists pay to stand in line to get in front of members of congress, so that the lobbyists don't have to waste their valuable (literally - the opportunity costs is huge) time waiting in line.

So if lobbyists buy all the people in the line, then potentially regular citizens are crowded out. Extend this further (and it's not beyond the realms of the possible) and they might pay ordinary folk with a beef wanting to talk to their congress person to given up their place in the line for a sum of money (to be negotiated).  After all, everything and everyone has their price, don't they?

Then I realized why the trends Sandel talks about have been troubling me. When groups and individual with great wealth have a disproportionate voice (some would say the only voice) in a system of  representative democracy, we have a system reminiscent of Britain in the 1700s; if I have remembered correctly what little history I learned, only those with land (i.e., wealth) could vote.

Moreover, there were some electoral districts (or boroughs) which had so few (land owning) residents, that these voters could be readily bribed by candidates. [As it happens, I was born only a few miles from one such "rotten borough", Bramber in West Sussex]. When the outcome of an election depends on the size (in dollars) of the coffers and war chests, government is no longer truly representative, a point being made much more forcefully and eloquently by Lawrence Lessig.

A quarter of a millennium of struggle for universal suffrage seems to have been de facto reversed, or at least some significant ground lost, in the last 30 odd years.