Surveillance state: A state government conducting surveillance and monitoring its citizens. Storing personal information on its citizens such as location, financial history, and social media. Limiting freedoms and oppressing public speech are just a few of them. However, others argue that surveillance can create an environment of suspicion and threat and that it can negatively impact human rights.
*Card network monopolies: Card network monopolies, like Visa, refer to dominant companies that control the infrastructure for processing credit and debit card transactions. These networks set the rules and fees that merchants must follow, giving them significant influence over global payment systems. Their market dominance often leads to limited competition and high fees for both businesses and consumers.
The Department of Justice is suing Visa, America’s largest payment network for creating an illegal monopoly in the space of payment processing. Accusing it created such a monopoly that it was charging absurdly high transaction fees to process payment which in turn merchants having to pay these fees are forced to either raise prices or reduce the quality of products to stay afloat. These fees are then passed on to us the consumers in the form of higher prices and reduced-quality of products
“Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market”
*Mandatory voting(i.e. Compulsory voting): In every democracy, the right to vote is an indisputable right granted to its citizens. This begs the question should the citizens have a choice of whether to exercise their right to vote or not? Having everyone to vote would make a democracy where the turn out would be 100% and everyone is fairly represented.
https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/voter-turnout-database/compulsory-voting
In many democratic countries voting is a right of the citizens free for them to exercise or not. With compulsory voting, citizens are required to vote in elections and express themselves through voting for their preferred candidate. This in turn helps create a higher turnout than in non-compulsory voting countries. Supporters of this argue that this helps certify and legitimize the elected government as a whole as the majority of the population is in favor of this government since they voted for it. On the other hand critics of this idea argue that in a compulsory voting country, you are required to vote or else the citizens will be punished for not fulfilling their civic duties. This leads to random votes when an election is happening checking off the 1st candidate on the ballot just to fulfil their duties.
“compulsory voting argues that decisions made by democratically elected governments are more legitimate when higher proportions of the population participate”