Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

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There's a difference between "bribes" and "bribes".

A bribe is usually understood to be of benefit to the politician personally. This sort of corruption is actually incredibly rare in the US.

What is, unfortunately, very common are payments to their campaigns. These are legal and, since Citizen United, basically unlimited. There are, however, rather strict rules as to how they can be used. And as that Republican idiot from California is currently experiencing, these rules are enforced.

I'm not making apologies for the undeniable harms of the latter practice. But it is different, and marginally less evil . As to the relative evilness: the "traditional" bribe is strictly more useful to a politicians, because they always had the option to convert it to campaign money. That option does not exist in the other direction.

I think it's important to appreciate such nuances. First, because it stops the corroding effect of cynicism on your soul. And, second, if we condemn everything at the same level of maximum evilness, any change that is not instant paradise is indistinguishable to the status quo. Because Paradise no longer exists (or is now a strip club), nothing will ever happen.

Bribes buy influence. “Payments to campaign” buy influence. Unlimited “payments to campaign” buy unlimited influence. With a given amount of resources at the congressman’s office, unlimited “payments to the campaign” buy up influence at the expense of other constituents. Which is what bribes do. Before Citizens United, I may have agreed with you. Not anymore.

I believe it's almost tautological that a politician would prefer personal cash instead of campaign donations. Among other things, campaign donations cannot be used to buy themselves a boat or ensure luxury in retirement.

It's a pretty good example of the point I'm trying to make that my post is being downvoted, presumably by people of the mindset of the other reply, i. e. "Nope. U STUPID. Burn all politicians". I completely agree that Citizen United is atrocious. But blanket hate and cynicism is the surefire way to populism, and the ensuing wide lurches across the political spectrum.

It just seems far too many people think everything is so bad it's time to get out the guillotines. That proposition strikes me as rather shortsighted, considering today still would seem to be the best time in history to be alive.

A revolution acts a lot like random shuffling. If you consider society as a puzzle, which is not done, but more complete than ever before, throwing it in the air and letting the pieces fall where they may seems unlikely to produce a more perfect arrangement, just by the principles of entropy.

That assumes that progress in civilization is a forward path and that there are no local minima that are both extremely difficult to get out of given the institutions that got them there and dangerously unstable. Entropy eats away at systems no matter the path we chose and there is no guarantee that the end result of our current path won't be worse than a traumatic reshuffle now.

I'm not advocating revolution, having seen the end result of one first hand, but to say that revolution is shortsighted entirely misses the forrest for the trees. All complex systems, be they biological organisms or deep learning neural networks, need randomness injected into them or they will fail to respond to the randomness of the environment around them. In the case of societies and organisms, that could very well mean extinction.

It's a risk-reward calculation like any action.

I'd want a revolution like I'd want to have my molecules scrambled by standing in the LHC beam - sure, maybe I'll end up in a superior configuration, but the odds are that if I am at all happy today in even the slightest way, a randomly chosen state will regress me to the mean of complete, brutal dysfunction.

Violence tends to be the dynamic in which power is doled out in the anarchy of post-revolutionary states. Whether it's direct violence against political groups or against honest hardworking citizens so their property can be handed to another group. Usually it's a little of both.

Did you experience a revolution firsthand? Learned something from it?

Elections are supposed to be bloodless revolutions. If you can't effect change through the electoral system, then the non violent solution is to revolutionize how we vote.

Relevant videos (IMO)

First Past The Post Voting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Range Voting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig

Single Transferable Vote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI

Alternative Vote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

Mixed-Member Proportional Representation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU

Bonus video

This video will make you angry - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

I hate to be a downer, but that would require an amendment that drastically hurts both parties. Just try and imagine it passing, remembering that you would be asking your elected representative to give up some of their power.

No it wouldn't. Voting methods and how presidential electors are chosen are entirely up to the states.

While you're not wrong that campaign donations aren't a direct benefit to the politicians, you're arguing on a too limited scope.

Donating to a campaign buys influence. That politician is keen to keep a good relationship to the donators do keep the money flowing, and get good deals outside the campaign, get positions that pays him/her directly ect. In really bad cases a donor can blatantly say "I have this new boat, since I've used it once it's only worth half of the original sales price - want to buy it? And completely omit that it was actually build for the donatee". That is just some of the examples of indirect payment involved in blatant corruption.

> I think it's important to appreciate such nuances.

I think this is complete nonsense. Where you see nuances I see direct conflict of interest. There are no pragmatic approaches to be made here, because they would simply not be beneficial in any case but for involved parties.

Strong condemnation and punishment of corruptions is very viable to drive up the price. For every little penny.

The more outgoing form of cynism is taking it up the... and fighting corruption isn't some inquisition to the next revolution. That is a strawman.

Just because they’d prefer one doesn’t necessarily mean that the other is all that much less effective.

This is what the bribes buy.

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

I can show you the increase in politicians turning into lobbyists over the years or you can research it. I know which documentary shows the number (Saving Capitalism) but don’t have time to look it up at this moment.

nonono, you're not hearing me -

if something is wrong and illegal, you just change the law to make it legal and then it's not wrong, see. so these 'bribes' you are talking about arent really bribes, because they are legal.

obvious. duh.

Citizens United does not allow unlimited (or any) payments to a campaign. Citizens United was about the rights of a corporation to spend money publishing its own speech. Political speech is expressly protected by the first amendment, and the court decided that restraint of it was unconstitutional: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

> Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence. Premised on mistrust of governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor certain subjects or viewpoints or to distinguish among different speakers, which may be a means to control content. (...) Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation. (...) All speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech, and the First Amendment protects the resulting speech.

What Citizens United wanted to do was distribute a documentary film critical of Hillary Clinton.

If someone feels that Citizens United was wrongly decided, then I would encourage that person to read through the case in detail to understand the issues evaluated by the court - specifically, the contradictions in reasoning, chilling effects, and violations of precedent that would result from deciding the case in the alternative. Difficult topics would need to be untangled such as: why should it be unlawful for Citizens United to distribute a political documentary when it's OK for media producers like Fox News or CNN or 60 Minutes or Netflix to do so? They engage in political speech whenever critiquing a policy position or candidate.

One must consider the sweeping consequences of what it would mean to restrain corporations, including the news media, from engaging in political speech. How does journalism and freedom of the press remain in this world, or what bright line distinguishes Citizens United from any other producer of documentaries like e.g. Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11)?

The entire sweeping consequence of citizens united was to vastly increase the amount of money in politics, now hidden behind the free speech rights of corps. Corps should not be considered people. all this did was provide a mechanism for very wealthy people to influence politics and hide it much better than before. can you possible claim this is a good thing?

There was a politician and activist from Montana on (US) NPR radio today who advocated getting congress to pass an act that /corporations aren't people/. If anyone's new to the issue, Google 'Thom Hartmann corporate personhood', you'll get the flimsy history of how it came to be. Making them not be people would solve a lot of the problems of money in politics. Too bad there's now so much precedence, I guess.

What was once cash in a brown envelope is now the high paid job once they leave office. Envelopes stuffed with cash have become rare, the latter have grown hugely. The net effect on a politician's personal wealth and the likely effects on ethics of public office are similar.

Some sort of politician's equivalent of a ten year non-compete clause seems in order.

Obama ran that as a campaign promise for his cabinet and then promptly ignored it.

I remember when he campaigned for whistleblower's rights and repealing 'bush era spying'...

... promised to be "the most open administration ever" - and ended up being more closed even than GWB. There's really something to the idea that paying lip service mentally gets you off the hook.

But remember how quickly he followed through on closing Guantanamo Bay?

Donating to a campaign is far from the only way to buy influence. I can donate to a politicians charity or invite them to an all expenses paid speaking engagement where I also pay a speaking fee.

Im both of these examples the politician will have MUCH more discretion in how to spend the money.

Politicians getting rich isn't the main problem I have with bribes, so I don't really see why this is a meaningful difference.

That's a counterproductive distinction to make because you lose the soundbite game.

If you have a paragraph to make the point it's reasonable, but pushing back on the rebranding of lesser bribery as "lobbying" is a very important first step.

No, actually, there's no difference.

There is a difference when it comes to politics. Politicians take a dimmer view of bribery and smear campaigns when they occur outside an election season context.

It's always election season

I know, I was making fun of the NYT's ridiculous apologetic attitude towards politicians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18466253

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