Meh…I don’t argue with your point that people will act indifferently/complacently when they can get away with it, but at least if politicians can’t spend 50 years living off of other’s people’s taxes while making themselves and their cronies rich, that’s a benefit in and of itself. Making aspiring officeholders actually have to go out and earn a living first, or expect to have to do so after holding elected office, will naturally benefit a democratic society, and closely comports with the original intent of our founders and their belief in the yeoman farmer. They would find the de facto establishment of an embedded, long term, political class in our country antithetical to some of the principles we were founded on.
If people still can only vote for party apparatchiks, at least under a term-limited paradigm the apparatchiks could not accumulate any more political influence and power that a term or two would allow, and the next apparatchik would have to start all over. And, occasionally, you’d get a decent candidate or two in there as well. But a lot of the perverse incentives would be reduced, undermined, or eliminated, IMO.
Only in a court of law when applied to a specific case or controversy. But with regard to society and from a political science perspective, laws (and regulations and etc.) are nothing more or less than expressions of a society’s values and principles and desired policies…they don’t exist just to give law book publishers something do or law students something to read and quibble over. Why the law says this and not that is very important in this overarching context. The whole point of antitrust law is to keep companies, and therefore the individuals that run or own them, from getting too powerful, whether it be through being rich or influential or market-dominant or whatever. Any numb-nutted numb-nut understands that money == influence == power == more money (not necessarily in that order!)…I know this because I just asked myself and that was how I responded.
That’s not quite true…some business behaviors such as price-fixing, geographic market division, and group boycott are deemed to be illegal per se, regardless of the market reasonableness or overall benefit to consumers of such actions.