Richard Posner: “The Real Corruption Is the Ownership of Congress by the Rich”
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It was designed to have a bicameral legislature. The lower house was supposed to be full of your neighbors, folks that lived down the street. They were supposed to only serve for a couple of years at a time. It wasn't a lifetime job. One of their main responsibilities was handling money.
The upper house was specifically designed to be a bunch of old, privileged, party hacks from the states. They work six years at a time, and might stay in for a long haul. They are the architects. They are responsible for monitoring and maintaining the structure of the system and keeping an eye on the other two branches.
This is not where we are. Somehow we thought that the more democratic the legislature, the better. That is not the case. The structure of the system suffers. Somehow we have Representatives that have jobs for life. The system suffers.
Now I can't tell the difference between my senators and my representatives. They're all camera hungry partisan hacks voting solidly as a block. Voting for them is pointless.
It's not rich people. It's not privileged people. It dumbasses over the years that have hacked the system into something it was never supposed to be. Democracy is not some special thing where the more you get of it the better you are. It doesn't work like that. It never worked like that. You take apart the body of legislators that were specifically responsible to monitor and fix the system and turn them into run-of-the-mill politicians? Then the rest of it is going to fall apart. What else would you expect?
The real problems here are the assortment of the general population into self-selected "red America" and "blue America", who have different economic priorities, live in different sorts of municipalities, and fundamentally different analyses of the world.
(I'm actually partial to both for some reason: I like the "plainness" of the Reds, but think Blue usually has a somewhat half-decent analysis of reality while Red is usually wildly delusional. My actual preferred analysis might be called "the Other Red", the one with the gold stars and roses and such.)
Complain about "partisanship" all you like, but it won't sort out the difference between someone who thinks the economy runs on consumer demand, thus requiring a level of wages that lets most people consume without much debt, and someone who thinks it runs on manliness and resource extraction, thus requiring wage suppression until all those namby-pambies buck up and do a day's work. Those are just different causal models.
What we could really use is proportional representation, so that "partisanship" could at least sort itself out into multiple competing parties within each of the two broad coalitions, and every well-supported analysis of the world could find some official expression.
US Senators were elected by the state legislatures for 125 years prior to the 17th Amendment. They were supposed to represent the states and not national special interests.
Think how much easier it is to contact your state representatives than it is a US Senator which is basically impossible.
It is the loss of classical liberalism that is causing all the problems.
And I disagree that people are all that different or if economic philosophies are even relevant to most of the population.
If there were 6000 representivies rather than the 300odd there are now, political parties would dominate things even more than they already do.
Indeed. The order of priorities for law makers in Washington seems to be:
1) In keeping their job as long as possible. In order to accomplish this it takes vast sums of money. However this money flows freely from the lobbyists on K Street so is generally not a problem.
2) The concerns of special interests. See number 1.
3) The third concern of lawmakers in Washington is to blind allegiance to their party. They generally vote along party lines regardless of whether those votes reflect the will of the folks they are supposed to be representing.
4) Dead last - the wishes and concerns of the regular working folks back home.
Wall street knows this, the politicians themselves know it, its a democracy purely for display purposes. Its essentially been hacked.
http://time.com/373/congress-is-now-mostly-a-millionaires-cl...
All political systems tend to aristocracy/oligarchy. It's incredibly hard to design a stable system that doesn't.
I suspect the only systems that work are ones where making smart policy is a considered a form of rather dull social service, not a surefire tool for self-advancement.
But humans don't work like that. We're too short-sighted and competitive, and the only way to fix that is to change the reward profile so actions that benefit long-term collective intelligence get better outcomes than actions designed for short term personal gain.
It is never 'we'.
Organizations reward those who maximize their power. They're evolutionary environments.
Actions proceed when there is sufficient net clout from those who expect a power increase from it. Acting any other way is suboptimal. When's the last time the POTUS reduced their power?
Don't presume to call the people who made these changes dumb-asses. By effectively disenfranchising the public they consolidated their power base and reduced the amount of supporters they have to appease.
These are the politics of power.
Stupidity is an easy scapegoat that obviates the need for further analysis. Some politicians have been very effective at using it, like Bush. You may want to reconsider who exactly is the dumb-ass.
My Congressman is a dumbass. I'm sort of okay with this because, in general, he's pretty representative of his constituency. He's also good about interacting with his constituency, which I applaud.
But my senators are also dumbasses. Not well educated in the law. Not able to think in a nuanced way about any remotely complex issue. Perdue said he wanted to get rid of the EPA, just, just get rid of it. This is not architect-level thinking. This is singleminded businessman thinking, which at the end of the day does tend to equate itself with a "rich people problem."
I don't think higher turnover in the House is really going to solve that problem. I know that there are hundreds of people better qualified to serve in that architect role. The question for me is, "Why aren't they incentivized to run?"
In other words, if you live in the US, your congressman/woman is spending FIVE HOURS A DAY (!) on the phone raising money from people at the top of the wealth/power distribution.
Yikes!
Instead of cheering how "democratic" we are.
That's good because if you read the Federalist Papers, you will see the founders explicitly set out to design a Republic at the federal level. Each state, however is a democracy, but people seem to ignore state-level politics for some reason.
If you prefer the more academic version: http://mysite.du.edu/~smasket/Masket_Miller_SPPQ.pdf
What's more, it doesn't appear to favor one side of politics (which challenges some partisan rhetoric around the influence of Soros/Koch on outcomes. Note that this is different to corporate influence, which may well be a worse problem)
It helps. Definitely a good idea. But it doesn't eliminate corruption. It just makes it easier for principled politicians to keep up with the less principled ones.
But what happens is that a party will start out being principled and prove itself and then people will keep electing them expecting more of the same, (literally "more of the same" is the motto of most centre-right, financially conservative, parties in the EPP) but then over time the party becomes increasingly more corrupt and the people let it happen because they aren't comfortable with the idea of switching parties after so long. They value the stability. So the corruption grows until the people have no choice.
But overall it does improve things.
I haven't heard any allegations of corruption or scandal around him either.
What am I missing here?
But I don't get his devil-may-care attitude toward Google etc. He seems to acknowledge that they're a monopoly, but argues that it's not hurting anyone. Loves to Google stuff.
So what am I missing? Is it just that he's a cynical libertarian?
Android, search, email, and web video have multiple competitors, little user lock-in (effective advertiser lock-in yes, but the advertisees can easily go elsewhere). Google Social Network essentially failed, Google AWS is nowhere near as preferred as Amazon AWS, etc.
this is a big reason why using an open app store like f-droid isn't a lot more popular.
on a funnier (and more cynical) level, when posner says "anti-trust is dead" he may very well be giving himself a pat on the back, since he's a leading thinker of the "law and economics" school (usually attributed to u chicago, where posner has long been a professor - his seminal paper on the subject here is pretty amazing: http://m.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/53.Posner.Values_0.pdf) that many give credit / blame for shifting anti-trust's focus away from reigning in corporate power (the traditional "trust-busting" rationale, which was really as much about trying to avoid total capture of government by the big trusts), and instead focus on consumer harm and market inefficiency, which is generally indifferent to the expansion of corporate power so long as they don't gauge prices or do anything blatantly harmful to the market. this shift in focus greatly reduced the scope and practice of antitrust prosecution, and I think posner in general thinks that's a good thing since he's prefer less gov intervention. what's odd to me is that he seems concerned (or honestly, he just seems annoyed ha) about corporate influence on government, but doesn't seem to care that the fact that these companies are able to become so massive is in large part why they are able to influence the government so much...
this is the backdrop to a lot of the interview, good example is when the interviewer asks "Are we only concerned about seeing low prices, and not about other things like capture or having members of the House of Representatives owned by one large company?"
this is just rambling at this point (sorry!), but posner's response here is totally amazing / weird - he seems to basically say the problem is that the court system has been making bad decisions because it has been politicized because appointments are made by politicians, and (at least in part) because money influences politics, the politicians are picking judges for their stances on token political issues, not their abilities. that all makes sense, but his solution is not to attempt make the entire political system less full of shit...but just have other smart judges/lawyers appoint new judges (presumably producing more judges like...him).
he seems to want to simultaenously NOT reign in corporate power at all (or maybe he just doesn't believe it's possible, which is a fair assumption), but still not have corporations influence (at least one branch of) government - feels pretty "cake-and-eat-it-too" to me. not the worst idea, but exposes posner's high view of himself to be both smart and nonpartisan (not surprising and honestly pretty well-deserved) and his arguably naive belief in the ability of judges to be "above the fray" - very few people in general are as intelligent, idiosyncratic and nonconformist as he is - pro market, pro choice, pro drug legalization, pro human organ markets, and frankly he's widely considered a genius (an eccentric one for sure, but that's not an unusual pairing)!
Change is the best antidote to vested interests. So, term limits and always voting against an incumbent unless they are doing a demonstrably superior job are going to be far more effective than other approaches.
this piece by RP appears to echo Larry Lessig's. Interestingly, LL was a law clerk for RP, after graduating from the law school where RP taught.
It doesn't discuss the role of the judicial system. It's all about the legislative aspects of US government. It's pretty compelling and well made. Hopefully a bipartisan movement can have some impact.
The video was made by https://represent.us/
I'm curious however, how does the data look for other democracies, e.g. in Europe. The question is, whether this is a problem of US and its "money in politics" issue, or whether other democracies suffer from that problem too. I have a suspicion that this is inherent to politics in general, regardless of form - that money and power will always find themselves in bed together.
Anyone who didn't see it should go watch it, it's still worth it.
Anyway, the solution to the particular problem of the rich owning Congress isn't breaking multinationals but rather limits on campaign donations - this whole "money is speech" argument is just bullshit.
Maybe you should try to meet some socialists. But the authoritarian ones (like Marx) and the anti-authoritarian ones (like Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin) have written many books on the topic of class-struggle.
I'd venture to say between corporations and governments 99% of 'bad things' that have happened in the last century were at the hands of governments. A few world wars is a good starting place.
The idea that governments are benevolent overseers of the common good is what is bullshit. Those in government are as self-interested (if not more) as any other group (lawyers, plumbers, etc).
The last thing the rich want to do is kow-tow to a bunch of politicians, but the reality is they have to because one poorly conceived law or regulation can do real harm to a business. You have to pay to be at the table to do the best you can to prevent this. Politicians demand $$$$ to be at that table. I've seen this first hand.
That's so cute. If only this super-powerful threat to humanity could be directed toward the good rather than the banal, all would be well! Bullshit. The threat itself is the problem, not who is temporarily at the reins. In fact this whole myth of "if we vote hard enough it will work this time!" was created by those who want to perpetuate the monster, so that they may profit by it.
Thankfully we have enlightened people among us to guide the sheep, right?
>that it's not EU versus US versus China but rather corporations versus the people
Corporations have zero ability to act by themselves. So where do you propose to draw the between the "corporation team" and the "people team"?
Please don't. If another comment takes a wrong turn, going further that way doesn't help. Instead, please help the thread self-correct by posting more substantively.
Especially given the current trend in automation, the risk that a relatively small group of capitalists will slowly take full control of almost all the means of production is real.
Another huge problem of having a world run by corporations is the environmental situation. Personally I cannot accept a world where profit is considered more important than the environment to such an extent.
I don't know what the solution to this problem may be. Alternatives to capitalism have been proposed in the past, and are continuously studied now, but shifting to another economical system would not be easy, if possible at all at this point.
Are you sure that government operations produce less pollution?
Anyhow, the way to deal with pollution in a market based economy is to tax it.
No, I'm not sure. But we're talking about private companies now, not governments. Governments and companies in the end are two faces of the same coin: the first aim at power, the latter aim at profit (with some exceptions of course).
Moreover, many proposed alternatives to capitalism consider the governments (as we know them today) harmful and unnecessary. I'm not saying I agree, just wanted to point out that removing capitalism does not automatically mean to give more power to governments.
> Anyhow, the way to deal with pollution in a market based economy is to tax it.
Sure, but that doesn't solve the problem, it just reduces its impact. And in a world that runs on profit, limiting your local companies may in the end give an advantage to the foreign ones, so this solution may not always be practicable, unless a truly global coordinated action gets taken.
Capitalism drives the conversion of everything into money, so it's no surprise to me when anything from votes to the air we breathe are turned into money.
We generate a lot of carbon dioxide but the consequences of that are more long term, not experienced as contamination of things we interact with day to day.
Even members of US Congress are extremely responsive to issues they think will get them kicked out of office.
There's no reason it cannot reduce pollution to tolerable levels.
> removing capitalism does not automatically mean to give more power to governments
Yes, it does. Who/what else is going to prevent people from trading for a profit?
There are several social and economical theories that consider a central government, and thus the state, unnecessary. Historically the anarchism movement is maybe the most known, but recently other schools of thoughts are getting relatively important, such as communalism and democratic confederalism (mostly relevant in the context of the revolution in northern Syria).
Even communism in its final form (i.e. past the dictatorship of proletariat transitioning phase) should be a stateless and classless society, however historically "communist" states failed to get past this transitioning phase (due to a refusal to give up power by the State, I guess) and ended up in a State Capitalism system, as in the USSR and in China.
However, to be honest I don't know this topic in detail enough to teach anyone, so I can only suggest you to look for more info in case you're interested.
Regarding anarchism, it's known that the reason it didn't work out in the attempts so far has not been an inherent flaw in the system, but external ingerence.
In the two cases that are most known to the public, i.e. anarchist Catalogna and Free territories of Ukraine, the reason why the revolution finally failed has been in both cases the intervention of Soviet Russia, that in the first case supported an antagonist faction (i.e. communists front in the Spanish Civil War) and in the second case it invaded the free territories.
I think in general it's not possible to disregard some ideologies on the basis that they never managed to be implemented, without looking at the context. In today's world, which is dominated by capital, it would be even harder to establish a non-capitalist society, but that doesn't mean that such a society would be less fair, free or just than capitalism.
Two reasons why hierarchical structures show up:
1. If you want to even have someone looking at the "big picture", due to limits of human cognition, you have to build a hierarchy.
2. Hierarchy shows up as a natural solution to coordination problems. Consider e.g. various forms of the tragedy of commons. The solution to that[0] is that all actors involved agree to be governed by an independent one. This is something that humans end up rediscovering all the time.
Basically, hierarchical governance is what lets humanity build societies larger than couple dozen people.
--
[0] - in larger systems, i.e. beyond few people who know each other personally and can mutually agree not to be assholes to one another; we have a strongly developed social skills to handle such issues in small groups.
(A part of) the world already did some good progress on this front with the gradual switch from absolute monarchies to democracies, and I hope it will eventually be able to continue on the path towards a more just world.
Thats easy, with a bit of surgery ...
Where to begin ... Well first of, capitalism and global markets are made by people.
Then there are very tiny individual nations, like Lichtenstein.
Why should they have more power than a voluntarily group(corporation) of much more people than that small state?!?
Or do you prefer statecorporations like in socialism?
Afaik, they polluted much more, produced less and with shitty work conditions.
Rather, they are made by the capitalist class.
> Then there are very tiny individual nations, like Lichtenstein. > Why should they have more power than a voluntarily group(corporation) of much more people than that small state?!?
Because a corporation is not a voluntarily group of people, it is, well, a corporation! The workers have no control on it and its aim is to make the maximum profit, even when this means polluting oceans, exploiting people and doing any kind of unethical action.
> Or do you prefer statecorporations like in socialism?
Just because I recognize flaws in the capitalist system does not mean that I support other flawed systems.
I even clearly stated in my comment:
> I don't know what the solution to this problem may be. Alternatives to capitalism have been proposed in the past, and are continuously studied now, but shifting to another economical system would not be easy, if possible at all at this point.
And you do realise, that there are many different kinds of corporations? And even in the most shitty ones, people choose freely to be part of it (even if pushed by money pressure).
And again, you are totally free to gather fellow "workers" and start together a corporation of the type you like and produce what you want. And people are doing that btw. Just like <people> choose to put waste in the rivers, or not.
It is allways people doing things, good or bad, bound to a corporation or government or whatever other group. Just picking one type of organisation and blaming everything bad on it is extremely oversimplifying and I can't imagine how that could improve anything
That's the whole point. People do not voluntarily work for shitty wages at shitty jobs, they are forced by the need of money.
Workers in western countries are extremely lucky, since they live in very wealthy countries where even the shittiest job usually gives the possibility to live a decent life.
However, I'm not sure (to make an example which is extreme in the opposite way) congolese children do voluntarily work in cobalt mines, getting intoxicated and often dying just to be able not to starve in the short term.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I just have to say that:
1. yes, people can start their own ethical corporation, and some people actually did that. But they are pretty much irrilevant in the global market. Actually, I would argue that following ethics often puts a corporation in a less competitive position.
2. just because I could do that myself doesn't mean that's a good thing. I'm not saying that the capitalist class is evil and trying to destroy the world, I'm just saying that the system is flawed in allowing such a restricted pool of people to accumulate so much wealth, and to actually encourage the exploitation of people and resources in order to stay competitive.
True, because most PEOPLE don't care about exploitation. Or can't afford to care if they want to keep their living standard. Thats the problem. That's my whole point, corporations just produce what people want. And most want it cheap.
And yes, the system is flawed, because people are flawed. Change one, and you change the other. Hard? Now thats news ...
But I think many things are changing for the better. So we are on a good way.
So who is part of that class? Everybody who has money on the stock market?
That would be anybody who has a bank account.
However, the usual definition of the capitalist class is about owners of capital, or people who earn wealth from the work of others. This includes industrial capitalists, who own the means of production, the land owners and the financial capitalists.
The average Joe may have some little money on the stock market, but he doesn't have any influence in corporations or the global market, contrarily to what your previous comment hinted.
Everbody who has money on the stock market, directly or indirectly, earns wealth from the work of others. But this is not a bad thing, as "the others" also benefit from the capital invested as they otherwise could not produce or earn.
And for sure you have influence even with little stock, by choosing where to invest and where not. And surely there are people with much more influence (money), thats the way it is, if not everbody is forced to have the same, no matter what they do (or their ancestors did)
I think that everyone can understand the difference here, even though the line between proletariat and capitalist class may be a little more blurry than it was 50 years ago.
You might as well say "rich" and "poor". Which is more fitting and more to the root problem.
The division of the society in capitalist and working class is a well studied topic, it's not like I invented it at the moment.
But your argument about holding penny stocks making people comparable to capitalists makes me think that you're just attempting to mislead instead of keeping a meaningful discussion.
And by the way, rich and poor is a consequence and not the cause.
Yes, studied and defined by those who later created a big slavesystem. And I read them, but don't like or agree to their definitions, nor alternatives.
And by the way, " rich and poor is a consequence and not the cause." I think not. So ?
And I also think that creating arbitary classes is not helping the (old) discussion or society at all and rather increases tensions, than solving them. I think history proves me right.
This is just plain misleading. Marxism/Leninism is not the only school of thought against capitalism, or that distinguishes between proletariat and capitalist class in the capitalist systems.
And I would argue that
1. the "slavesystems" you're talking about (I guess you refer to soviet russia, china and other similar dictatorships) never applyed the Marx theory, but they rather implemented a state capitalism system (IMHO because the idea of dictatorship of proletariat as a means to reach communism is plain stupid).
2. even considering those cases, which I agree were fundamentally flawed and unjust, there's still debate about whether they caused more or less death and suffering than capitalism. I think this answer [0] on Quora gives a good summary of the main points in that regard.
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-has-killed-more-people-communism-...
"emt02 17 minutes ago [-]
1. Have you actually read my comment? I explicitly said that I think that Marxist's view of dictatorship of proletariat as a means to reach communism is fundamentally flawed and wrong"
Have you read yours?
"1. the "slavesystems" you're talking about (I guess you refer to soviet russia, china and other similar dictatorships) never applyed the Marx theory, but they rather implemented a state capitalism system "
You were refering to Marxism i answered to that.
And I did not.
"Claiming anarchism (for instance, but the same can be said on communalism and many others) is the same of communism in regard of authoritarianism"
By saying "same direction".
But staying on topic, yes in theory anarchy is about anti-authorian. But applied that never happened. I read some history(spain, hungary, etc.) and have quite some first hand experience, with so so called anarchist who act pretty much despotically if things get serious.
And I also can't imagine how you take things away from others (the capitalist) and not act authorian while doing so.
2. I disagree, but this goes too far.
And about those other schools, yes there are nicer formulated ones. But in my opinion, they all go in the same direction. "Rich are evil" "poor are good" "poor must take from the evilrich and then is all good"
2. Well you're free to disagree, but the point remains that capitalism is comparable, if not worse, to other systems (namely state capitalism / "communism") in regard to responsibility for deaths and suffering.
About your final sentence, first of all you apparently have no clue of the ideologies you're talking about. Claiming anarchism (for instance, but the same can be said on communalism and many others) is the same of communism in regard of authoritarianism and human rights is plain misleading, as being anti-authoritarian is like the main point of anarchism.
And the point in anti-capitalism is not about being against people who are rich, but being against the fact that they are rich while other people are extremely poor. Nothing against people themselves (I think everyone would be happy to be rich), the problem is that the system is so fundamentally flawed that some few people can own more than billions of other people combined.
Easy! I know the answer to that one. All who do not have to work to come by. To me that means in most western nations the threshold is somewhere between 1 and 10 million USD in net worth.
When you have that much money your money makes money for you! You own some houses/land you rent out, or own (part of) some business that yield profits. Maybe you work, but it is by choice, not by necessity.
And even with 900000$ you can pretty much live like a king in a 3. world country for a long time.
While the exact threshold is up for debate, I think it is an otherwise easy to distinguish class difference.
And maybe don't allow foreign companies onto your market if they have a monopoly back home.
There are many individuals and their respected conglomerates who own sums that equal and exceed the wealth of many nations. Our systems and even our own nature allows for this. And its bad. Real bad.
Some are benevolent, most arent.
I mean this does sound conspiracy'ish, but it really isnt. We will feel the brunt of it all soon, and we'll need viable solutions, a new way of government, and a new way of sustaining ourselves that avoids such concentrations of power.