But then there are two main vehicles - these days - to power: government and money. In the olden days, there used to be physical strength, but what can compare with e.g. the powers of nukes & greed? Democratic governments, when implemented correctly, provide an internal system of checks & balances, and forces people (like HRC) to still try to, or at least make a minimally-convincing outward appearance of, competing against their "opponents". Corporations, on the other hand, just have to keep raking in the dough, and quite frankly as we saw with Reddit not even that really.

Also, for all the mouth-noises that people make about "voting with your wallets" - how can a normal, non-Giant human being "vote" when it comes to going toe-to-toe with the big Giants? Even Elon Musk strongly leveraged Tesla in order to purchase ~~Twitter~~ X. Like if we e.g. wanted to see more space exploration, I suppose "all we have to do" is pull ourselves up by our boostraps and go there, beating out the likes of Bezos & Musk etc. along the way, i.e. somehow do MOAR than them, b/c when they went they had the actual help of the USA government, but now we are supposed to do it against the gradient of their anti-competitive business practices? Those quoted phrases are ~~"alternative facts"~~ lies.

Government at least can exist without the might of corporate greed digging into it. And even if not quite yet, soon corporations will be able to exist independently of governments as well - e.g. when AI comes more to fruition and workforces are no longer needed. Though personal ~~slaves~~ workers may still hold some appeal, for awhile, until they too can be replaced. By virtue of tying a democratic government to the welfare of its constituents, however loosely, I still think democracy aka oligarchy wins out over corporations that exist solely to feed their capitalistic greed, in terms of morality. If only just barely. Therefore I like your analogies e.g. about explosives:-) - some people do not want to have any restrictions placed upon them whatsoever, but those tend to be the absolute worst people of all, in any system (government or business):-(.

bUt ThE eCoNoMy ThOuGh! :-|