“Because in a democracy politicians are answerable to the entire populace, while share traders and banks answer only a handful to shareholders, most of whom are other corporations.”

Politicians are only answerable to the entire populace in the very broad and imperfect sense that, once very three years, you get one-twenty-millionth of a say in whether to sack them.

Shareholders and capitalists answer to shareholders only in the limited sense that they are *all*unconditionally subject to the decisions of the masses as consumers.

Every dollar is a vote in the market. The individual is free to chose whether to enter into a transaction or not. If he decides not to, he cannot be compelled to. And if he decides to, he has an ownership interest in the product as a result. A supplier cannot raid his bank account without his consent. Nor can it force him to pay for someone else.

Capitalists and entrepreneurs who disobey the people, and fail to serve them with they consider most urgent, suffer serious losses or bankruptcy. Their property is transferred to people who will serve the consumers with what they demand.

Profit is the direct result of the behaviour of the mass of consumers in voluntarily preferring the goods of a particular supplier.

Most profit is ploughed back into the business. This process of capital accumulation raises the marginal productivity of labour, which in turn raises the level of real wages for all, at the same time it reduces the level of prices. And while the return to labour remains, or rises, the return to capital always tends toward zero. The capitalists get only the smallest fraction of the total benefit to society initiated at their own risk by their entrepreneurial activities.

The risk of dishonest businesses being sacked is far greater than for dishonest politicians because *every single transaction* in business requires the consent of the payer, and none in government do.

By contrast with government, all revenue is obtained through government’s monopoly of coercion. Your only vote is once every three years.

Voting is compulsory, so you can’t build any theory of consent on that.

You have a remedy against a business’s deception under common law, trade practices law, fair trading law, corporations law, criminal law and equity. You have no remedy whatsoever against politicians lying to get votes, or failing to perform what they promised. (For example John Howard orchestrated the confiscation of ten percent of the entire product of the nation on promises he then failed to perform – a deception worth literally hundreds of billions of dollars. But no prison for him.)
All policies are presented to the voter as a package deal. The major parties have very similar packages. There is no way a voter can select the policy he wants, and not the policy he doesn’t want. After the election, there is no way of knowing which policies the majority wanted, and which they didn’t.

In the market you can have what you want, and I can have what I want. But under government, it’s enforced conformity. But worse - there is no way of knowing whether it is in fact a majority who are forced to pay for the choices of a minority; and not the majority paying for a minority.

There is no way to withhold payment. The opportunity and motivation to force someone else to pay is rife, if not dominant.

As tax is compulsory, politicians have an endless interest in hiding taxes. Government’s favourite sneak tax is inflation, which it causes by manipulating the money supply. The resulting ‘economic management’ is what causes the greedy economic booms, and the following unjust *and unavoidable* depressions, which government then blames on the market, ie society.

Those who engineered the GFC are precisely the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Treasury, and while innocent people suffer hardship, they continue the same legalised counterfeiting and fraud on a grand scale, worshipped by interventionists calling for more, such as Obama and Rudd are now serving up.

The common belief that government is more representative of society, than society is of itself, is simply false.