Thitirat Pongprajuc (Nuch)

Professor Kjartan T. Magnusson

ECON 1010-400
30 April 2016
Economics Reflection
The article The Erosion of Democracy by Eric Gomez shows how economics involved
with politics nowadays, and it demonstrates how money is used in the government system. The
article reveals that since the great recession in 2008, America has been vigilant on democracy
system. Gomez explains the meaning of democracy is a government by the people, a
government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly
or through a system. The equality of all citizen of a minimum age can elect their
representatives to be in the government; then, the representative will manage the welfare of the
people. After explaining the term of democracy, the author describes capitalism is an economic
system based on private ownership of the means of production employed in the generation of
profit. The main goal of capitalism is to get the highest profit as much as possible, and it needs
to have the free market where consumers can decide what they want to consume.
The author conveys the contradiction between democracy and the capitalism, which is
disagree on the surface of both concepts. The idea that Americans have freedom to elect
representatives is similar to the idea that consumer can freely choose what products they like and
fulfill their demand. However, if I go in-depth to how these two concepts function in society,
they have many differences. For example, in capitalism system, the power is given to few rich
people. In contrast, democracy gives the power to the people even though the power is used by
the representatives.

As noted by Gomez, a major concern of the American people is the democratic erosion
due to the large amount of lobbying. The lobbyists interfere democracy by informing an issue to
the attention of politicians. This has become a concern because how much money the lobbyists
spends equal to the benefits they expect to get from the government. As an international student,
I do not have enough information to critic this point in American democratic system, but in my
country, this problem has involved in Thai politics system for decades. There are few extremely
rich people, who publicly or secretly sponsor political parties, receive certain benefits that
advantage their businesses.
Another concern is the amount of money that the private contributors spend on the
election campaigns. The contributors mostly would be businessmen, and they might think that
supporting a politician financially is one type of an investment that they need to get profit more
than the total cost they spend. Therefore, when the politician is elected to be a representative,
they need to consider what those private contributors tell them. This does not fair to the people
because they vote for the representatives, and then the people is to be ruled by the president who
has the contributors on their shoulders. Sometimes, when the government has to make decision
on something that benefits people, but it might negatively affect to the contributors, the
government might postpone or change some details of it to have least negative effects on
contributors businesses. This makes the people taken away from influence their government and
also the collective nature of democracy that exists in America.
Moreover, the author suggests a possible solution to this misleading political election
process that America should implement Voter-Owned Clean Elections, which are known as
fair elections. This would require that all candidates have to be qualified, and they would get
amount of funding equally. It would exterminate the lobbying system out of the election process,

and the interests could stay with the people. In my opinion, I would say that I partially agree with
the author because it is true that fair elections would solve this problem somehow, but nobody
can guarantee that the lobbyists would make any deal with the candidates secretly. I think
morality would be the solution for this issue because if the politicians are moral, they would
refuse any offers from the contributors. If the politicians receive any financial support from
businessmen, they would make sure that they do not have to do anything in return to the
contributors, but the public interest.
Overall, the article was very interesting to read. I feel that I can understand the concepts
in this article much better because if have some knowledge from taking the economics course.
Moreover, I am glad I was introduced to this article, as it has given me a new perspective on
American government and society. Even though it was difficult to me to understand the idea of
American democratic system, I can link this article to political problems in term of economics in
my country. We have been struggling on corruption problems due to lobbying system for
decades, so this article illustrated me how economics applies to all parts of a country, especially
in a government where laws and policies are enacted, and this will determine the direction of the
country specially economic direction that may or may not benefits the lobbyists.
Even if the economy is constantly changing, I feel like this class has prepared me to
comprehend the basic concepts of the economy that I will later face and experience it in my life.
Actually, I have never experience any economic regression. It is not because there is no
regression, but it is because I was too young to know how unfavorable of Thai economic crisis in
1997 was. Although we can roughly predict when the crisis would occurs, we never know
exactly when and how bad it is going to be. Therefore, I have to be ready for the any economic
crisis that would happened in the future.