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Comment by BoiledCabbage | Hacker News Reader

Pure free market Capitalism is playing a game of Monopoly where after each time anyone passes go, the player with the most money gets to create a new rule. Guess what? The game is gonna get pretty skewed, pretty darn fast.

Consolidated money is power. The only way that capitalism can work long term is if there are rules actively countering/fighting using that power to change the rules.

Money is power and capitalism consolidates money. So capitalism consolidates power. Consolidated power can change the rules in its favor to consolidate more.

The only options are prevent entities from consolidating money (which means you're risking losing capitalism), Or prevent entities from using money and power to change the rules (which, if you think of all the ways gratuitous money could be used to influence, is the social equivalent of solving the halting problem).

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> Pure free market Capitalism is playing a game of Monopoly where after each time anyone passes go, the player with the most money gets to create a new rule. Guess what? The game is gonna get pretty skewed, pretty darn fast.

I think you've misunderstood the free in free market. If anyone is allowed to make rules like that, it is not a free market, not superlatively, not normally, not even slightly.

The problem here is that you have a government apparatus which has outgrown its mandate in ways that were not adequately accounted for, which makes it ripe for the picking.

I think their point is that in a free market, the vacuum of power leads to organizations (with the means to) filling that vacuum and establishing rules that rationally favor themselves.

Which is why you have to constitute a power structure which is actively prohibited from the unwanted behaviours, while filling the void of an organization with said behaviours. This is partially accomplished by the U.S. constitution, but there are some holes either in the formulation or in the interpretation.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you actually make a great point. If there exists a Govt. which has the power to impose certain rules which change the markets, its by definition not "free". If there was no Govt. to create and enforce these rules, corporations could not influence said Govt. to create unfair rules (since it does not exist).

But I don't agree with your conclusion. If there were truly no Govt. creating and enforcing rules, there would be Guilds/Cartels that would (e.g. see how criminal gangs behave and operate). Which is why we do need an overarching authority that has the power to create, change and enforce rules that make the market less free, but potentially more beneficial to more rather than a few.

The problem isn't that the government apparatus has outgrown its mandate. Its that its become more easily influenced by money. Reduce that influence and you will have a Govt. that works for the general interests of its people.

> The problem isn't that the government apparatus has outgrown its mandate. Its that its become more easily influenced by money. Reduce that influence and you will have a Govt. that works for the general interests of its people.

I think it's simpler than that: you need to have one entity which could ever possibly have the mandate, and then bind them eternally never to use it. The supreme court is supreme, but it also has rules. When the supreme court plays by its rules, it does not create a power vacuum for violations, it creates an assurance against them.

> Reduce that influence and you will have a Govt. that works for the general interests of its people.

I recently found out about an old solution that would achieve that goal: Sortition. Instead of having elections every few years, we could randomly pick a hundred people from the population and task them with creating a law. After an initial preparation, they would deliberate like a jury and their decisions would be written as law. After a single task, they should disband and new groups should be selected for new tasks. With a country of hundreds of millions of people, it would be a light burden on the population to serve from time to time.

The benefits are: 1. by random selection, every social category is represented equally, 2. there is no need to have elections, so no lobbying and money in politics, and 3. because the legislative group only works on a single task, once, they can't grasp power, like politicians do.

I believe a group of 100 random people would make more heartfelt and wise decisions than a parliament full of professional liars. Regular population is more in touch with reality. Regular population needs to be heard directly because politics sucks, and this is a way to do it.

>1. by random selection, every social category is represented equally

No, every social category would be represented similar to their ratio in the rest of society. This wouldn't line up well with many groups that want much stronger support for minorities.

Take Native American concerns for example. With just over 1% of the population being Native American they will probably only end up with a few representatives out of the 100. The remaining ~98 people are going to be spending a bunch of time concerned about their own problems and won't put effort into making sure Native Americans get equitable treatment due to past issues.

In other words, by cutting out the ability to lobby for rich people to help themselves, you also cut out the ability to lobby for legitimate issues as well. Lobbying has (rightfully) been seen as a terrible thing, but it does have the legitimate purpose of bringing issues to a representative's attention that he/she would never even think about otherwise.

There's also the point that 100 random people won't have any background on the topic in question. Who's going to help them understand it? Most likely the same vested interests that today lobby the government.

It's a fun solution to consider, but I'm also concerned in that lobbying for this solution already exists - mass marketing, which has already been mastered.

My parents had me at 17 and had no idea how to raise kids. They see a commercial of kids eating cereal and poptarts, so they feed me cereal and poptarts under the false assumption that that is a healthy meal, and that plus other factors led to me growing up fat and unhealthy.

Basically, if lobbying is a problem, disinformation through mass marketing is a MAJOR problem.

> each time anyone passes go, the player with the most money gets to create a new rule. Guess what? The game is gonna get pretty skewed, pretty darn fast.

We call that crony capitalism and it is very much the opposite of a free market. I do agree with you however that we don't have effective barriers between money and government (or other forms of) power and therefore the stable state for liberal democracies with capitalist markets is crony capitalism and regulatory capture.

>>Consolidated money is power. The only way that capitalism can work long term is if there are rules actively countering/fighting using that power to change the rules.

Yes. This is why I'm in favor of term limits, as well as a rule that outlaws "revolving doors"[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

This is why I favor making our representatives an actual representative population using random selection.

Our current selection process overwhelmingly favors white male lawyers who are good at talking corporations into giving them money for their election campaigns.

That sounds nice, but why don't proponents of term limits ever offer evidence for their claim? We already have term limits in California. The result? Politicians spend a lot of their time in office figuring out how to leapfrog up the political ladder - usually city/county school board, to supervisor, to state assembly, to state senate, to Congress. They are never in one place long enough to build stable networks of influence (superficially a good thing) but that just means they're easier for lobbyists to manipulate (definitely a bad thing).

I have an open mind on term limits, but since they exist in multiple jurisdictions why don't you show, with data, that they are leading to qualitatively different outcomes where they have been implemented?

Sad but true. In California the legislature is just a tool for the bureaucratic state to pander To itself. Legislators who fulfill the wishes of the state bureaucracy get favorable treatment on the career ladder. I often suggest we should have term limits on laws, not politicians. An absolute sunset on every law and regulation with up/down votes only, no debate, will do a lot to show whether elected public servants are on the job and who they are working for.

>easier for lobbyists

Elsewhere in this thread, the concept of lobbying is being questioned as well. Find a way to prevent this and that removes a huge chunk of the problem, in my mind. Not that I can figure out how to prevent it.

Stopping corporate donations to political campaigns would be another thing.

@shhkmo, are you proposing choosing random people off the street to be our elected officials for short terms? That is such an interesting idea!

Right? It would be like jury duty, but with a salary and amazing benefits! Brilliant!

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