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Comment by hawkice | Hacker News Reader

They aren't buying their way out of all criticism -- about 6 months ago I saw, on Michigan television, what I can only describe as an attack ad against them. They aren't politicians, they donate their money to charity and other causes they like. I disagree with some of the policies they advocate, but that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

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    They aren't politicians, they donate their
    money to charity and other causes they like.

This is the most generous description of the Kochs I have ever read. They are planning on spending upwards of a billion dollars in the next twelve months to elect public officials who support their policy objectives[1].

[1] http://www.salon.com/2015/01/27/this_is_the_legacy_of_citize...

Donating to Bernie Sanders because you believe universal healthcare is important is also spending money to elect public officials who support your policy objectives. Like I said, I disagree with some of the policies they advocate, but unless someone is donating to a politician because they like their rock-hard abs (I literally cannot think of one likable thing about any politician except their policies), they fit that description as well.

You (and I) may disagree with the causes they find important, but that's a somewhat different topic. The article points out many, many instances (or rather intimates they exist) where _policies_ are immune from criticism -- my concern is when _people_ are criticized. There's no public policy value in humiliating someone, and it's happening anyway.

> you believe universal healthcare

The difference is it's something that benefits the many, as opposed to the few

Why does that make it right?

Because in "a democracy" the majority provide what's called a "political mandate". This kind of clandestine lobbying outside the democratic process usurps the democratic process.

There's a big difference between publicly supporting Bernie Sanders because you believe he'll be a good president and skulking around in the corridors of power buying off officials so that you can line your own pockets.

No, the fact that the US is a democracy just makes it legal. That still doesn't make it right.

Right now in the US almost all the income taxes are paid by 20% or so of the population. People who advocate a bigger, more expensive government are almost always planning to do it with someone else's money.

Strawman

It's in no way a straw man. That doens't even make sense in this context.

It does yeah - you've taken what I was saying, made a replica stuffed with straw and then defeated that. Your response doesn't really tie into what I was saying it seems like something you had rehearsed. So you reinterpreted to suit your response rather than discuss the topic at hand.

Still... no logical connection there. Are you cutting and pasting this from somewhere else?

Ha was thinking the same thing about you!

From the outlook of the human species, the health the needs of millions hold a higher value than the desire of the absurdly wealthy to become even more wealthy.

Hmmm while I broadly agree with your sentiment I could argue your point on Darwinian principles (-:

Sounding the Utilitarian alarm! Someone here hasn't done Philosophy 101. Here's the gist of it: utilitarianism is self-contradictory and by consequence self-defeating.

Many people have not had "the luxury" of doing "psych 101" as you call it. I have not but yet I get the gist of what your saying and to me it sounds like you're making an appeal to authority. I'd imagine the authority you're appealing to is a fairly culturally biased one too (101 doesn't sound particularly rigorous). Try to make a reasoned argument for what you want to say rather than regurgitating what was pumped into you as a brat freshman.

>>Donating to Bernie Sanders because you believe universal healthcare is important is also spending money to elect public officials who support your policy objectives.

Did you read the article? It talks about how Koch donated to an economics department at a public university in return for having a say in who gets selected as a professor every year. That's a different form of donation than the common citizen's congributions to political campaigns.

So you're OK with very rich people having more say in your democracy? I find that somewhat disturbing.

Surely the world doesn't deal in black and white. Rather issues are generally presented to us in shades of gray. With that said it's always a good exercise to imagine what an issue would look like if taken to its logical extreme.

Suppose 1 person had all available money to "invest" toward their politician of choice. All other citizens on earth are busy scraping by on minimum wage, in debt up to their ears, working for this one man who essentially gets to choose who gets elected because no one can put a single penny toward another candidate or his/her legal team to get through all the loop holes necessary to get onto the ballot, etc.

How is this a "fair" representative democracy?

Sure it's not at the point today, but one could imagine that without limits a political system's integrity can be upended through manipulation of its own structure.

The difference is in the size of the donation. Sanders rightly prides himself on the fairly small donations he receives; his donations come from a large number of not-very-rich people. Many other candidates rely on a handful of billionaires and big corporations to fund them.

Better would be to get all money out of politics, but until we get there, surely Sanders' donations are a lot more democratic than those of the billionaires' favourites.

The question is the size and number of the donations. A private citizen can donate very little compared to someone with the resources of oil tycoons (I'm using the Koch brothers, since they're the topic of the parent article). If total political donations were limited, or if an individual was only allowed to donate a limited amount to each candidate, the situation would be very different. But when a candidate has a handful of people donating two-thirds of their campaign funds, those voices will be heard above the rest.

I'm not sure it makes a difference either way when it comes to the influence of money on institutions (influence from non-politicians is not necessarily any less corrupting), but: I think it would be hard to consider the Kochs to not be politicians, anyway. They're heavily involved in party politics and electioneering, both in internal party politics and in general elections. And David Koch has even run as a candidate for national office himself (he was the vice-presidential nominee on the 1980 Libertarian Party ticket, before leaving them for the GOP).

Yeah, they're politicians for sure, they're just in it to actually affect policy in their favor rather than as an ego trip or whatever other petty reasons people usually get into politics. And, they've figured out that directly running for office is sort of a waste of time in that regard, in America.

I rather think they figured that they can't run for every office they can buy.

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