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Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

The vast vast majority of citizens in either country do not play a part in legislation.

The USA has lobbying, which is seen by the rest of the OECD countries as a legalized form of bribery. This allows regulated industries to corrupt and otherwise influence the regulation of their own industry. The USA might very well have similar restrictions to China on say prize boxes in video games if not for the outsized effect of industries on legislators.

The US also has a history of actual disenfranchisement and state legislators gerrymandering away the influence of a large minority of votes for Congress.

The effect is that the US actually has a complicated system of perverting the democratic system, whereas the Chinese system doesn’t even try to appear democratic, thereby appearing at least more honest about what it is.

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Lobbying is a beautiful mechanism of democracy. Anyone can register to be a lobbyist. Any organization's members can pool money together to form an association which represents its interests to legislators. I worked as a Congressional staffer on Capitol Hill and saw firsthand how it works. We met with lobbyists on both sides of every niche issue you could possibly imagine.

There's no perversion of government caused by lobbyists. On net balance lobbyists are beneficial - and sometimes they're all that stops a 20-something Legislative Aide from drafting a terrible piece of legislation which the Member only faintly understands.

What is the money for?

Lots of things. To name a few - printing literature, building a website, salary for a coordinator to schedule the hundreds of meetings that will come up, and salary for a communications expert who can strategically articulate your position to legislators and their aides.

I know all of that sounds distasteful to some people, but the alternative is not the utopia they imagine - it's Chinese authoritarianism.

> Lobbying is a beautiful mechanism of democracy.

I don't think so. Poor people have no lobby. Families have no lobby.

Regardless of how you feel about lobbyists, this is just untrue. The CBPP and WCLP are a couple examples of lobbyists for the poor.

But they won't have as much money as rich organisations and not as much influence.

I would certainly think so. But it turns out to be surprisingly hard to quantify.

(I'll just talk about lobbying, not political donations, which is a related but separate issue.)

The organizations with the most lobbying spending are the US Chamber of Commerce (politically right, but not necessarily representing the very wealthy) followed by the Open Society Policy Center (politically left, but not necessarily representing the poor).

Most lobbying comes from industries of some sort (e.g. realtors, hospitals, farmers, coal, manufacturing, unions, education, etc). The legislation these groups favor will often disproportionately benefit the rich, but they tend to benefit rich and poor alike within that industry. For example, the farming industry may favor subsidies that benefit both poor and rich farmers.

As an example of industry working against the wealthy, the life insurance industry is the main group lobbying in favor of estate taxes (a tax which only affects the wealthy).

I'm not aware of any lobby groups that are specifically for the interests of the wealthy. However, politically right groups largely fill this role (the distinction being that right-wing fiscal policies are broader than just cutting taxes for the rich).

Without commenting on the specific issue at hand, if playing "a part in legislation" is a literal criterion for democracy, I think the direct democracy in a place like California (or Switzerland, and possibly 1-2 other places) which allow for public votes on essentially everything including constitutional amendments place a decent number of US voters ahead of most OECD counterparts.

Anecdotally, I think there are far more significant issues with US democracy than lobbying given that legislators still largely seem to do what they campaign on, lobbying-influenced or otherwise, and voters elect them in almost universally accepted elections. If the disconnect were between the expectations of voters (from campaigns, etc.) and actual legislation, I would be more inclined to place further blame on lobbying, but I'm not sure that's the case. I wouldn't say lobbying isn't a problem, obviously.

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