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Comment by roystonvassey | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about morality but yes it’s unethical and borderline illegal. If an elected body is planning legislations, actively blocking it means you’re suppressing the voice of the public and the voters.

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> If an elected body is planning legislations, actively blocking it means you’re suppressing the voice of the public and the voters

This is reductive. When the Congress was writing cryptocurrency reporting rules, the crypto industry asking for clarifying amendments (to avoid classifying miners as exchanges) wasn't suppressing anyone's voice. It was supplementing it with specialist knowledge.

When we write laws about speeding should we ask sports car owners to supplement the legislative record with their specialist knowledge?

If the legislation, as worded, applies to cars on race tracks -- probably? I think these metaphors are getting far afield.

Privacy is a fundamental thing that's more important (and harder!) to protect than most things.

It's probably also a good idea to get a breadth of stakeholder's opinions on an issue. Lobbyists definitely have a massively outsized portion of this breadth.

Even if it’s a decision that I don’t agree with, if we all agree democracy is the best form of representative government, the decision taken by the lawmakers has to be respected. It’s not optimal, it’s slow to effect changes but I still believe it’s the best form of government we have.

They're not "actively blocking it" any more than someone holding a protest outside of the Capitol building is. The difference is that they have lobbying money, which is allowed and generally encouraged by the congresspeople themselves. Any consumer regulation that directly targets an industry is more often than not a call-to-action for the lobbyist to dedicate more of their budget to the lawmaker(s) in question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lobbying_in_the_Uni...

Because the purpose of a govt is to make laws for everyone. The tyranny of the majority is just tyranny in the end (this is what authoritarian govts, ironically, fail to understand about democracy...debate and disagreement seems weak and decadent to them, it is not, I think that US politics has relatively weak controls on lobbying but the perfect outcome is not a ban on lobbying...most successful authoritarian govts operate by claiming to represent the voice of "the people"). And btw, this is how US politics is designed, the people who created the US constitution were very aware of how democracy ended the first time.

> the people who created the US constitution were very aware of how democracy ended the first time.

Being conquered by a foreign power?

How does that relate?

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