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Comment by cjpearson | Hacker News Reader

It's a common misconception that increasing transparency reduces the power of lobbyists, when it actually does the opposite. [0] In short, the average voter doesn't care enough to find out who added a specific line to a bill, but lobbyists care a lot and they use the additional access to monitor and influence legislators. Legislator accountability is increased with more transparency, but they become more accountable to lobbyists than to their constituents.

There needs to be a balance. A democracy that operates completely in the dark isn't much of a democracy, but Congress currently has the problem off too much rather than too little transparency.

[0] https://congressionalresearch.org/TransparencyProblem.html

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That's not my reading.

It sounds to me like transparency does always increase accountability full stop. It just turns out that accountability to lobbyists is a greater driver of legislator behavior than accountability to voters.

The problem is therefore neither accountability nor transparency, but the disproportionate influence of lobbyists.

At the root of that problem is this:

1. If you organize a team behind a goal and persist in focusing on it, you are more likely to succeed than someone who does not allocate their attention thusly.

2. If you do the above, you need a way to pay for rent and groceries.

You might also find this academic paper interesting: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUTIS&aid=NGUTISv1

The title is a bit click-bait-y, but the argument is sound, I think. Forcing transparency changes how people do their work, especially what indicators of success they choose to focus on (which may be easy to relate, but bad indicators of success - like GPA).

Transparency does not automatically grant accountability.

I don't think we have a good handle on this problem, and we make the situation worse by assuming that transparency will solve the problems of corruption and government accountability.

> lobbyists care a lot and they use the additional access to monitor and influence legislators

This is ad tracking for lobbyists. If a lobbyist could prove they got a line into legislation, they’re worth an order of magnitude more than they are today, when one is left guessing if they did anything at all.

Just because the reckoning from citizens hasn't come yet, doesn't mean it isn't coming at all. The transparency is needed for citizens to find the bad actors in congress.

It is not coming because citizens do not have time.

Would also wager a lot of us don't care. Government can do incredibly fucked up things, but as long as quality of life of is high and the money train keeps flowing, I'm not going to do anything.

You'd really have to fuck some stuff up real bad for me to wake up and give a shit.

You're not addressing the problem proposed in the parent's argument - that lobbyists will be the ones who will use this, to ensure that the politicians they bought and paid for are doing what they want.

It seems like a pretty persuasive argument to me.

> You're not addressing the problem proposed in the parent's argument - that lobbyists will be the ones who will use this, to ensure that the politicians they bought and paid for are doing what they want.

That's not a problem, despite the characterization. That's a helpful side-effect. Now you have more definitive traceability.

> that lobbyists will be the ones who will use this, to ensure that the politicians they bought and paid for are doing what they want.

I don't know that lobbyist depends on an API for that!

Not all lobbyists are out to do evil, and not all politicians who do their job are doing evil. The alternative to listening to lobbyists and legislating is politicians who don't do legislation at all and instead spend their time fund-raising and running culture wars. That's not the better-world alternative I'm here for.

I think GP is talking about creating an incentive system that doesn't encourage or require a reckoning. There are plenty of systems which were designed by people in good faith who were unable to understand that the incentives they thought they were creating were not in fact that actual incentives. Creating line by line attribution sounds like one such case.

Transparency is a logical necessity for accountability. If we don't know who wrote a law, then we can't hold somebody accountable for it. Even if we take for granted the truthfulness of the "transparency problem", the solution doesn't lie in finding the right "balance" of secrecy and transparency.

Law is backed by threat of violence; what separates legitimate Law from the law of the jungle is its _justification_. Everyone who the Law applies to (that is to say, everyone) has a legitimate interest in knowing the justification, so that they can determine whether such Law is justified or whether their government has morphed into a violent gang. Ergo transparency is fundamental to legitimate law and governance.

The existence of lobbying isn’t a foregone conclusion. We can have transparency without the problem you’ve adeptly described if we eliminate or at least significantly diminish lobbying.

Good thing that only requires eliminating the influence of money on politics.

Lobbying is explicitly protected by the 1st amendment to the constitution.

The validity of a contract where a company, person, or community action group pays someone to lobby on their behalf is not.

That reveals another problem: treating the Constitution (and its many edits) as a foregone conclusion.

Enshrining corruption in what’s practically holy law. What a coup.

How are you defining corruption here?

I am skeptical, this sounds like 'trickle-down economics' where the theory is internally cohesive but the conclusions don't actually line up with reality.

Seems like the page you linked is an anti-trasparency advocacy org, what makes you trust them? Is there any data to back up this assertion?

If we went with its original name of 'chicken-shit economics' I doubt there would have been as much confusion about theory vs reality.

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