One naive quick response: it’s a coordination problem. Sticking your head above the parapet alone gets you shot. And you only collect a very small fraction of the public good. (Also, publicly genuflecting instead may get you favours.)
Meanwhile, quite rightly, coordination between firms and representatives of firms is seen as a big no-no in most sectors in a good liberal democracy, and this is enforced somewhat. It’d be market-distorting!
One of the main reasons to have a government at all is to do the coordinating in such cases, because markets can’t (be trusted to). Difficult when the government itself is the (ex hypothesi) problem.
That’s where checks and balances, and ideally ‘the wisdom of the people’ is meant to step in. (How is that going?)
One naive quick response: it’s a coordination problem. Sticking your head above the parapet alone gets you shot. And you only collect a very small fraction of the public good. (Also, publicly genuflecting instead may get you favours.)
Meanwhile, quite rightly, coordination between firms and representatives of firms is seen as a big no-no in most sectors in a good liberal democracy, and this is enforced somewhat. It’d be market-distorting!
One of the main reasons to have a government at all is to do the coordinating in such cases, because markets can’t (be trusted to). Difficult when the government itself is the (ex hypothesi) problem.
That’s where checks and balances, and ideally ‘the wisdom of the people’ is meant to step in. (How is that going?)