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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

For a non-American, it is amusing to see Americans believing that their Congress are the people's servants.

Unlike other developed democracies, the U.S. is a country where bribing the Congress is actually legalized, in the form of campaign donations. In fact, the main work of most congresspeople is to run after money to finance their next campaign. Therefore they will serve primarily the ones that pay them, not the ones that elect them.

When open source bribes politicians then they'll pay attention.

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As a european, to me it’s amazing the amount of disinformation we’ve been fed about how the US works.

Spend enough time in both continents and you’ll see that the proposition that the US is somehow more corrupt is not only disingenuous, it’s also probably dead wrong.

There are some people who try to assess this.

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi#

This is only perception, but it's still pretty interesting and useful.

FWIW according to that the US is more corrupt than some European countries, less corrupt than others. You can probably even guess the countries that are less corrupt and more corrupt in Europe.

> Unlike other developed democracies, the U.S. is a country where bribing the Congress is actually legalized, in the form of campaign donations.

That's not remotely true. It is illegal to actually give any gifts to any government official (including elected officials). This extends in practical effect to "we have to charge the DoE for coffee when they're doing a site visit."

You can donate to political campaigns--just as you can in every democratic country I'm aware of. Candidates can solicit donations--just as they can in every democratic country I'm aware of. What's atypical in the US is that the party structure is incredibly weak (which means you get less relative funding from party sources, and therefore candidates have to get more funding from fundraising), and elections are so eye-wateringly expensive that you need to spend more time fundraising to be competitive.

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders?cy...

If you get caught up in details, you won't be able to understand.

Those numbers are incredulous!

You should ask yourself: how can a for-profit company like AT&T justify spending $16million on something with $0 ROI?

For a company that made $180 billion in revenue, $16 million is only .009%. I'm not denying that lobbying is effective, but there's clearly a limit.

There are probably thousands of individual government regulations that each could cost AT&T more than $16 million per year. If lobbying was as powerful as some think, why don't they lobby even more?

0 ROI? Are you aware of the total monopoly they have in parts of the country?

Without lobbying, competition would have destroyed profitability of telecommunications.

Those numbers are just what they're spending on staff doing lobbying around the country, right? Most of those don't seem too crazy. Like the AARP is spending $3 million, but how many lobbyists is that actually employing? 10?

As someone who doesn't live in the US, I should tell people here that legalizing "bad" actions can be a net good. The lobbying market is big, and you can't extinguish it; You can only make it a black market. This makes the laws more suited to the interests of "shady elites." Consider that Google serves the whole world a very valuable service; What do the corrupt beneficiaries of most other countries do? They have near zero output.

Yes and that doesn't mean that legalizing it carte blanche is a net good either. There are important pieces of legislation missing around controlling how and when politician's can fundraise. Most normal countries legalize lobbying & restrict electioneering to a ~3 month window prior to an election. Additionally, they usually line up election cycles so that you're only having an election every 4 years on all parts of government.

America has no such restrictions. Members of Congress & the President start running & fundraising now ~2 years before an election (& unofficially before that). For the House of Representatives, that means members are in an electioneering & fundraising mode non-stop. The staggered election cycle in the Senate means that a large portion of the Senate is constantly campaigning further making focusing on the act of governing difficult. Fixing these issues doesn't solve all problems obviously but making no reforms isn't going to improve things either.

I agree.

Lobbying as “too big to fail” is an interesting argument, although your “black market” argument could be made for pretty much any law. On the other hand, we know that legislation and court decisions have a large impact because we’ve witnessed the results of McCain/Feingold and Citizens United. At the same time, we can observe how other democracies manage the same issue.

“black market” argument could be made for pretty much any law

Not the OP, but ... murder or genocide is very clearly a crime, while lobbying starts with "talking to an elected official about laws that concern you", which is sorta normal in democracy, the elected officials should be available to talk. It only becomes problematic if it is overdone or done too secretively.

I think that a good and transparent lobby register is probably more useful than outright ban; at least an external observer can glean some information from it.

We have made murder illegal and there is a “murder for hire” black market. How does that refute my point?

> while lobbying starts with "talking to an elected official about laws that concern you"

For the purposes of discussing government corruption, "lobbying" mean "talking to an elected official about laws that concern you, with the implication that their response will affect how much and in what direction you use money to pervert the electoral process". (Obviously, corporations generally don't actually explicitly say that part, because plausible deniablity.)

What you describe is more the contrapositive of 'legalizing "bad" actions can be a net good.', in that it's "illegalizing 'bad' actions can be a net bad".

Lobbying is already legal, and is mostly a bad action; but if we make it illegal, it will create a black market that isn't regulated. It's the same problem (one of many) that the "War on Drugs" had, in that any activity that's illegal tends to be unregulatable. It also attracts to the market for people who are already doing illegal things.

I think the root of the problem is that politics in the US (and in most other places) is a popularity contest; it attracts people who are charming, lie effectively, and who's goal is to be popular. They, of course, have other goals too, but having the accolades of the represented is a requirement, and people that seek that status end up drawn towards politics.

Just to be clear about the law, there is a limit of a couple thousand bucks on campaign donations under the federal election campaign act.

The issue is under the first amendment, the government is not allowed to curb speech by people or organizations advocating for a candidate as a third party (which people can contribute to instead).

Campaign finance transparency is a complex problem.

Of course, having a president who equates civil fines for late paperwork with criminal prosecution for dispensing hush money as equally benign "process crimes" is a major problem as well.

If I could donate all my karma points to you for this single comment, I would.

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