^o'rourke is right, the legislators are being bought and sold, but we must never forget who is doing the buying and selling.^

Both, actually. The corporatists ("private profits, public losses") are buying favors (tax deals, competition-killing tariffs and regulations) that are being sold by the legislators. The legislators get the campaign and other donations that the private interests are selling. Loot and power. It's an even trade, and anybody who thinks the politicians are starry-eyed naifs who are corrupted by the evil capitalists is...well...a starry-eyed naif.

How do you keep a government from accumulating too much power? I don't know. There's a school of thought that this decay is inevitable in a society, and that you have to start fresh somewhere every few generations, either somewhere else, or in the same place after the collapse.

The main problem is probably cultural. We used to have an individualist culture, and now it's moving toward collectivism. People see a powerful centralized government in every aspect of our lives as the norm, not an aberration. The first knee-jerk response to any issue seems to be "more government power."

"See your point of view?" I'm not sure you really have one. If you read your explanation of the problem, it devours its own tail. There is no way to eliminate concentrations of economic or political power by creating greater power concentrations to "control" things. I've noticed that every progressive dream society requires some overwhelming power to make sure everything comes out "fairly." "Do your own thing" is long dead. Apparently over the years since the 60s, the hippies got edged out by the leftist radicals.

This shouldn't be that hard. I don't know why the paradigm is so difficult to shift. By simple observation across history, economies that are free work better than economies that are not. In short, the free market works. This is not theory, this is history.

Even now there are countless examples of free markets regulating themselves successfully. You don't easily see the market system operating all around you every day, producing better ideas and products all the time, just the exceptions.

I don't need to work from abstract political theory to know freedom works better than coercion and control. All it takes is observation. In the days of the Cold War, it was a lot more obvious.

Libertarian ideas are not an endpoint. They're a direction. In any given issue, we should try to choose a course that leads to fewer chains on individual freedom, not more.