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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

> We don't want wealthy people to have an outsized influence on politicians. And we want donations to be transparent so we can see how politicians might be influenced by certain donors.

As a pure thought experiment, let's just admit that the rich own our political process, and make it explicit:

- You ballot gets multipied by the amount of tax you choose to pay.

- All contributions have to go through the Treasury, and are public.

- If caught violating the "all your cash in the open" rule, the offender is disbarred from public service.

Again, this is not a complete thought, but the intent is to drive politics away from the current poker match, toward chess.

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>- You ballot gets multipied by the amount of tax you choose to pay.

I heard of a variation of this where the multiplier is ln(x) or sqrt(x), so there's diminishing returns from additional donations. That way the rich don't have as much outsized impact on politics.

I'm OK with that.

> If caught violating the "all your cash in the open" rule, the offender is disbarred from public service.

Not sure how this would be much of a penalty; how many rich folks who donate to politicians are themselves wanting to run for office?

Disenfranchisement for N years (where N could be "for life") would seem to make more sense. But it would probably have a side effect of pushing that person to find backchannels of influence.

Also I wonder if additional transparency could work as an opposing force to moneyed interests. We could petition the government to create a realtime spreadsheet of all donations and lobbying so we could query it and see the entire money chain at any time. That way even gaps in the chain would be suspicious and fraud would be more easily revealed by crowdsourcing.

Taken to the limit, we could even get an immediate summary of what percentage of our retail purchases go to which political issues and buy according to our ethical values. It would be a way to put democracy back in the hands of the middle class since our combined buying power is larger than the wealthy class (I assume, I actually don't know if this is true anymore).

That might be a stable state. Don't know how to get there though, also not sure if it would be better.

Overall, probably break-even.

Money in political campaigns is just a grift that enriches political fundraisers and does very little to move electoral needles. You may be confusing it with lobbying, which has very different economics.

A problem I see with this is that government has control over the economy. A winning actor can tip the balance of wealth further in their favour.

Then again, this is just analogous to tyranny of the majority in conventional democracy. Elected governments can (and do) fortify their majority through voter disenfranchisement, or even genocide.

Are you saying they'd be more open about the graft?

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