Hacker News Reader

Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Politicians love the people until they get their first lobbying check. This phenomenon isn't isolated to any particular ideology.

View on HN

Only one particular ideology tries to pretend these are their values, though.

You seem to be insinuating that the only political party that isn't full of shit is the one you align with, when that particular disease is and has always been everywhere.

That is not what is being insinuated. The charge is that Republicans advertise themselves as being the party of small government and the free market. That charge is true or false independent of the hypocrisy of other parties. Those hypocrisies can be brought up another time.

Do you believe the Republican Party in North Carolina is being hypocritical in this instance?

I think four state representatives wrote a bill. State houses are full of idiots and really stupid bills are put forward all the time. Unless we're all residents of North Carolina AND there is a sense that this bill has traction, it is not worth any attention nor should it be thought of as representing a party's position.

Not a follower of US politics, so this might be simple ignorance, but I’m not sure what the democrats represent. Obama for instance didn’t seem to run a campaign on the virtue of big government and socialism. As someone who lives in a socialist country, I’m certain the Affordable Care Act wasn’t socialism, it just sanctioned pre existing monopolies and regulated them, while forcing everyone to buy from the monopolists or pay a fine.

So then what is it the democrats want?

The Republican Party is far more cohesive on its message to voters and on how their elected members vote. Democrats have much more variation. Obama was a right of center President by the standards of 1980. The Affordable Care Act is, in its essence, the same plan that the Republican Mitt Romney instituted as Governor of Massachusetts and it’s the plan endorsed in 1993 by the conservative Heritage Foundation. In spite of this the act was labeled communist by Republicans. The strategy Republicans have employed since 1992 is to go further right of anything a Democratic President wants. Hence the absurd labeling of Biden as a radical leftist.

There are some Democratic Socialists in the Democratic Party but they don’t have enough power to push their agenda through. Since 1992 the the power structure of the Democratic Party has endorsed slow, incremental changes provided those changes don’t disrupt the corporatist polity that we have.

It goes even farther back the Massachusetts health care law was originally a Republican plan dating back to Richard Nixon. The Republican had been holding it in their back pocket for decades planning to implement it as a compromise when the Democrats tried to push for real socialized medicine. Instead the Democrats put it in place undercutting the Republican as they had nothing to push in its place. that's they it has survived despite the Republican holding congress and the white house for several years they just didn't have anything to replace it with.

This is the primary danger. The Republicans have become an extremist group, pulling the entire country into more and more extreme positions, labeling what amounts to middle of the road moderate policies as socialism and communism.

And even this idea of the words socialism and communism being bad is a mislabeling they’ve been successful in deploying. It’s as if public school, libraries, roads, etc. are somehow bad.

Of course socialism is bad though. Statements like this seem terrifying to me, what are we teaching in high school history?

Soviet union, Mao's socialist China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia. All of these were as horrible to live through as Nazi Germany. Empirically, we as humans have tried socialism in every sort of country and it's always a disaster of extreme poverty for regular people and corruption among rulers.

Government run services isn't socialism. Maybe this is like defining "racism" where different people are using wildly different definitions.

Free market capitalism provides the bounty of productivity and wealth creation which can then be skimmed off of to provide safety nets, infrastructure, etc. We should be looking to places like Singapore and Switzerland as models of governance.

That's what I learned in high school history. Then, over the next decade or so, I learned that was indoctrination, and that in reality the US has a brutal history of resisting and toppling socialist regimes and installing capitalist ones. That's before even mentioning the horrible things we've done within our own borders, which rival even Nazi Germany. Did you know the Nazis used our Jim Crow laws as a model for their own?

I'm not saying this to minimize the examples you gave — just to show that things are not neatly binary like that.

Systems are made up of people. Look around the world and throughout history, and you'll see people abusing their power in all sorts of ways. There's no magic system that can prevent that. It's just us in here.

Agree. This extremism has to stop, it's tearing the USA apart. I think I speak for many when I say that capitalism is a wonderful system that is being threatened by corporatist Republicans and moneyed interests who are attempting to turn the USA into a corporate state. This is the new battleground now...do we want a corporate state and an oligarchy? I do not.

When the asshole is in the "other team": "What a scumbag that whole team is!"

When the asshole is in "your team": "They're all equally crooked anyway!"

There are individual politicians who try their darndest to be clean, but heck, if a little bending of principles gets your constituents that funding, it's probably easier to do so rather than fight hard for that funding "the right way" and get nothing at the end. Are lobbyists that evil that they offer money for politicians' noble causes? There's already the "we'll open an office in your constituency" that actually helps people with jobs...

You're not wrong, but the amount of blatant hypocrisy on the right is just on another level, particularly among the hardcore Christians. At least the democrats typically have the decency to be sex positive or openly gay before having a scandalous affair.

There's a reason I don't align with the political party that's full of shit - because they're full of shit! It didn't used to be this way - I used to be a Republican (I'm no spring chicken, I've been around the block a few times). The Republican Party has earned my repudiation! And hey, the Democratic Party may earn my repudiation also but due to Duverger's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law) I'm pretty much stuck with being a Democrat until they become the worse option than the Republicans. At this point I don't see that happening for quite some time.

Donate money to the politicians you like. Politicians with a large number of small donors don't need to take money from lobbies.

Campaigning isn't cheap and if you don't pay them, the lobbyist will (or will get them replaced).

Complaining about money in politics is like complaining about the rain being wet. So might as well buy an umbrella like every other dry person did.

Or just ban lobbying.

How is that supposed to work?

Are we going to ban public comment? Are we going to leave politicians to make decisions entirely on their own without any expert advisors?

You can ban or limit financing. Make an upper 10 or 20k limit per campaign per person. Lobbyist can still participate in public comment, offer dinner at three star restaurants, write the law proposition/amendment for the politician, but the checks will be limited.

Would require overturning a supreme court precedent or amending the constitution.

Because the current settled law is that throwing money at politicians and them then spending it is speech that’s protected under the 1st amendment.

Then why can't I throw money at a cop to persuade them to not give me a ticket?

We can and do limit actual donations and gifts direct to elected officials. Or at least have laws about transparency. Certainly more to be done here, but the margins of the debate are usually around things like media spending.

So, yes, you can buy an ad, or host a rally, or a fundraiser for a city-council candidate, to persuade the city council to raise the speed limit, or make parking free or whatever caused you to get a ticket. You can even schedule a direct meeting, or maybe even take out a representative for a meal to express your concern. The later case might involve some kind of disclosure, but you can probably do it.

  > the current settled law is that throwing money at politicians and them then spending it is speech

iirc the ruling is only about donating to pacs (political action committees) and not politicians directly (small distinction i suppose)

> iirc the ruling is only about donating to pacs (political action committees) and not politicians directly (small distinction i suppose)

It's about independent expenditures groups that do not coordinate with candidate campaigns (which have, after the fact, gotten the name “SuperPACs”; normal PACs can legally coordinate with and donate to campaigns, but cannot receive unlimited donations.)

right right, super pacs, forgot that specific point, thanks for pointing that out

Lobbying is banned on Brazil but it's ineffective. There's a profession called "doleiro" that basically is a guy that facilitates money laundering and exchange of favors between politicians and business. Corruption is so pervasive that politicians job is basically to create all sorts of bureaucratic impediments for everything so if a company wants to do anything it has to pay for special treatment.

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

I thought this till I listened to a very nuanced, long discussion on the topic. It turns out that politicians actually need information from the industry to make educated decisions. Where to draw that line between getting information and corruption/ regulatory capture is easy on some cases but hard in general, especially given that those forms of corruption can happen over time not through a single event

Is it the argument that they are making educated decisions now?

just think how much worse it could be

Also, the "bad lobbyist" is always someone on the other side, or nebulous wealthy private actors, or big-bad corporations. Rarely do be people consider things like the efforts of their favorite advocacy group "lobbying" - for example the ACLU, AFL-CIO, or League of Women Voters, should they be limited in how their outreach is is performed? Remember Citizens United was NOT about campaign contributions, but rather independent expenditures that were on the same topic of an election, not coordinated with a campaign. Should LGBT+ groups be limited in how much than can spend to stop odious restrictions of their rights, or planned parenthood campaigning for maintaining the Roe/Wade status-quo? The cost of that is advocacy, influence pedaling, and media spending by other groups you may not support. This is why free-speech is always under-pressure. On the other-hand, we can do much more to require transparency.

This assumes you (for any size of "you") can exceed the amount lobbyists will pay.

Considering the lobbyists in question represent the wealthiest people on the planet, that requires a very large amount of money.

I think I'm done donating for a while really. The sheer quantity of spam I get on my phone and email from random, semi-related causes and politicians all around the country is so irritating.

Omg yes. I'm not donating to any political campaigns again unless I can do so without giving my contact information. I donated to a Democratic campaign years ago and I've had hundreds of emails and calls since then, despite clicking several unsubscribe links, telling several people over the phone to take me off their list. It never ends. I've managed to create a Gmail filter that is pretty good at catching them, but it has some false positives every now and then. And I've just been ignoring the calls and texts for the last year.

I would love to give more but I simply cannot abide any organization that has zero respect for privacy as politicians do. I've given to a handful of charities but only when they have a clear privacy policy that is explicit about not sharing or selling information and has explicit opt-in for marketing materials

It is so unbelievably rude the only way I can think to stop it is to just simply never donate again. They must do this because it works for them.

I actually don't get hassled much by charities aside from some occasional junk mail, which I think is fine. They don't seem to pass my info around as aggressively as political causes.

Random thought, would you use a fundraising website to be the middleman in making donations, with commitments to not share personal information beyond your name?

> Campaigning isn't cheap

Isn’t it a two way street? Politicians(or lobbyists) invest in campaigning because they hope the investment will pay off if the get elected.

If you make being in office unprofitable then campaigning will get cheaper as there won’t be any competition.

Yes, but that is a function of the influence that office has in the world. If the position can influence billion dollar decisions, then there is incentive to influence the office-holder in the direction most favorable to the interested parties. The only way to deal with that is to reduce the scope of government.

We could outlaw private lobbyists. We could limit campaign spending. We could make PACs publically show all their contributors publically. Corporations are not people.

It’s practically impossible to donate to campaigns in a meaningful way, especially with the limits on donations removed. Imagine you got 1 million people to donate $10 to a specific candidate, which is a very overly optimistic outlook. How can that possibly compete with companies and people like Robert Mercer throwing tens and hundreds of millions at elections?

It is possible to have a system where politicians cannot receive donations from corporations. This is the case in BC for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com