Since outside Switzerland direct democracy does not exist, we get the representative version. Sure enough, companies can't vote, but technically neither can citizens. Not on individual matters.
What happens is that companies pay their congress-critters to vote for them. This has the added benefit that representatives can (and do!) propose legislation that not-quite-coincidentally would benefit the companies who already pay them in various forms.
I've said it before - we are currently pretty close to the original meaning of democracy. Democracy, as practiced by the city state of Athena, gave vote to free men, who made up 10-15% of their population[0]. In order to qualify a free man, you had to be an adult non-slave male who owned land. Or to put it another way: you had to have a vested interest in keeping the system suitably exclusive.
After all, if you are going to have a say in how the state is run and you have established business interests, you certainly wouldn't let any riff-raff in the decision-making process. Their interests would interfere with yours. And if given the vote, they could outnumber your faction.
Since outside Switzerland direct democracy does not exist, we get the representative version. Sure enough, companies can't vote, but technically neither can citizens. Not on individual matters.
What happens is that companies pay their congress-critters to vote for them. This has the added benefit that representatives can (and do!) propose legislation that not-quite-coincidentally would benefit the companies who already pay them in various forms.
I've said it before - we are currently pretty close to the original meaning of democracy. Democracy, as practiced by the city state of Athena, gave vote to free men, who made up 10-15% of their population[0]. In order to qualify a free man, you had to be an adult non-slave male who owned land. Or to put it another way: you had to have a vested interest in keeping the system suitably exclusive.
After all, if you are going to have a say in how the state is run and you have established business interests, you certainly wouldn't let any riff-raff in the decision-making process. Their interests would interfere with yours. And if given the vote, they could outnumber your faction.
That would be disastrous.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy