Hacker News Reader

Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

You'll never find a politician worth his/her salt taking cash from a company.

The way its done is to push through favorable laws for a company with a wink and a nod, and then come back and work for the company as a consultant/lobbyist with a minimum 1 million dollar per year salary.

Billy Tauzin did this quite well with PhRMA (lobbying group for pharma companies). He headed up the committee which oversees drug companies and led the push to pass the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill which was quite favorable to drug companies. The bill among other things allows drug companies to set an arbitrary price for the drug without Medicare having the option to negotiate on prices.

As soon as the bill was passed he retired from Congress to lead PhRMA with a $2.5 million USD per year salary. Mission complete.

View on HN

To attempt to avoid this, Canada has a category of "designated public office holders" whose post-office employment is restricted in various ways for five years, in an attempt to avoid them becoming lobbyists or being paid by lobbyists immediately after leaving office. Sort of like a 5-year noncompete agreement for politicians, perhaps.

There are some similar provisions in U.S. law, but they are easily circumvented by "consulting" rather than "lobbying."

Additionally, the U.S. Constitution does not really permit blanket restrictions on employment for individuals. Among other things, this ties in with the 13th Amendment that bans slavery and indentured servitude. You also have a free speech right to lobby.

In fact, the current restrictions are probably unconstitutional.

Anyway, these measures are treating a symptom. The real problem is that the federal government is vastly too large in size and scope. Reduce the power and programs run by the federal government, and radically simplify the tax code, and you'll dry up the opportunities for corruption.

Yes, because once all that power exists at the state level instead, the companies will all surrender and stop trying to incentivize officials into giving them a competitive advantage.

No, more likely they'll just move to the state level. And it'll probably cost them less at that, since state officials are significantly less visible and will have less power.

>No, more likely they'll just move to the state level. And it'll probably cost them less at that, since state officials are significantly less visible and will have less power.

Isn't this also a function of our federalized mindset? This country was designed to function almost exactly inverse to the way it works now -- the more local the representative, the more powerful he should be. It was set up this way to allow more influence from individuals and less influence from outside forces; when you have 3000 or 30,000 constituents, it's a lot easier to pay attention to individuals and to engage in meaningful discussion than when you have 3 million (or more) constituents.

If we fixed the system and put power back where it belonged, wouldn't the prominence follow the power? Wouldn't individual state-wide media outlets become more important than national media outlets? Wouldn't our state representatives become visible again as the primary movers and shakers?

The federal legislature was intended primarily to deal with international affairs, boring stuff like treaties and tariffs. We should keep that their only sphere of influence. At least then corruption would have to work 50 times over to take effect in every state, whereas now you can buy a handful of corrupt politicians and the whole country is stuck with the results.

> It was set up this way to allow more influence from individuals and less influence from outside forces

Empirically that's not what happened: 19th-c local and state administrations were hugely corrupt, in bed with businessmen and power brokers (some local, some national) and largely unresponsive to their constituents. In fact that was some of the reason federalization was popular, to reduce the power of the local machines (and was also one of the reasons behind going to direct election of Senators). The 1950s-60s saw another wave, as the lawless Southern local governments and police forces had to be overridden by the national government.

The difference though is that as you move to a more local level, the ability of people to organize in opposition or support gets greater. There are problems on the state/local level, but not quite the same as on the federal level.

I was in Jakarta recently and saw a diagram of the process to get an ID card. Very clear flow chart, going around in an infinite loop. The way out of this infinite loop, I am told, is to hire an agency to process your application. Of course we call that corruption, but when we pretty much require an immigration attorney in the US to navigate through bringing one's spouse or fiancee into the country, we call that professionalism. I think on one level, we have to accept that some level of corruption is inherent in human organization and it is a problem to be managed rather than eliminated.

Is the incentive any different at the state level? Or are we talking about vast deregulations?

> Anyway, these measures are treating a symptom. The real problem is that the federal government is vastly too large in size and scope. Reduce the power and programs run by the federal government, and radically simplify the tax code, and you'll dry up the opportunities for corruption.

And that would only treat the problem of government corruption while exacerbating issues of social inequality. I'm all for fiscal responsibility but the empirical evidence seems to suggest that cutting social services and public good projects leads to net harm for society as a whole (see: Texas.)

As a whole, I find the prevalence of libertarianism among tech types curious. As a whole they (we) are often rationalist and evidence-based in orientation but the libertarian position derives more from principle than empirical evidence -- the same charges many libertarians would level against religion-based politics.

I wonder if it has to do with techies being a lot wealthier than almost any other type of industry as a whole.

I can see it from the perspective of a non-empirical rationalism, which attempts to analyze from first principles how markets/societies work (Austrian-school style), and sees it as a sort of rationally understandable clockwork. Although in my case the rationalist approach is actually what makes me skeptical of libertarian positions, because if you analyze from the first principles of dynamical system theory, you get a very different picture of what an economy is, which doesn't have much to do with efficient allocation of anything.

You seem to have jumped from the GP's statement that, "[we should] Reduce the power and programs run by the federal government, and radically simplify the tax code, and you'll dry up the opportunities for corruption." to an assumption that social services and public good projects would be cut. If social services and public good projects were cut at the federal level, that doesn't necessarily mean they would not be transitioned to the state or municipal level.

So, I'm curious where it was implied that there would be no social services and/or public good projects unless they were undertaken at the federal level.

The media's censorship of Ron Paul's campaign is predicated on exactly that idea - that without the federal government there would be no social services.

For example, Conan's satirical RP ad http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-08/politics/3048...

That's definitely a possibility, but it's difficult to provide social services without having some sort of control over "immigration", which states and municipalities don't have. With no control over movements, a city offering particularly generous benefits will just get a lot of unemployed people moving there solely to get the benefits (a typical adverse selection problem). Countries mitigate this by having immigration screens that try to filter out people who are only moving there to collect welfare.

A possibility is to phase in benefits based on how long people have lived in a place (e.g. you get 10% of the max Pittsburgh city benefits for each year you've lived in Pittsburgh), but that would put a damper on labor mobility within the US, since people who moved around a lot would always end up with poor benefits (sort of like the old problem with non-portable pensions). And in any case the Supreme Court struck down Alaska's attempt to do that, so it isn't currently an option: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/zobel.h...

If anything, I'd be more interested in going in the other direction in order to enhance intra-US mobility; it'd be nice if I didn't have to change health insurance just because I moved to a different state or got a new job, giving me the freedom to decouple my healthcare choices from other lifestyle choices.

> Additionally, the U.S. Constitution does not really permit blanket restrictions on employment for individuals.

As far as I know, blanket employment restrictions for individuals in the form of "will not do X for N years post-employment" have never been struck down under a U.S. constitutional rationale. Some states (such as California) ban or heavily restrict them, but federal law doesn't appear to.

It wouldn't be unconstitutional for private contracts, i.e. you can make any private agreement restricting your speech - but as a condition of being in public office.

I think one of the root problems is how Senate and House committees work, i.e. almost completely unaccountably. I'm sure they have a few debates, but nothing is public. They then present their findings to Congress, which is too busy to properly examine every committee recommendation.

I would honestly support some sort of provision where politicans were never allowed to work again, give them an extremely generous pension (even a million dollars a year pales in comparison to the cost of corruption). I think this is the only real effective way to combat the "revolving door" bullshit.

The problem is that a law like you suggest is unenforceable. I It would be more effective to reduce the power of the central federal government.

It would be unenforcable in the same way its impossible to stop every crime, but the fact that it is illegal + the fact that they are getting so well paid anyways, it would greatly disincentivise such activities

If anyone's interested in reading more about Tauzin, there's a long read from the Sunlight Foundation here:

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2010/02/12/the-legacy-of-...

Also available as a $0.99 Kindle Single that acts as a small donation to Sunlight:

http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Billy-Tauzin-House-PhRMA-ebook/...

Disclosure: I work for the Sunlight Foundation.

The really frustrating thing about Tauzin is that he and his party love to say that government can't do anything right or efficient. Well, government certainly can't do anything right or efficient if laws are written specifically to make it less efficient. There are plenty of examples of Democratic politicians doing the bidding of vested interests for pay so I'm not claiming this is a problem for only one of the parties.

I wonder if the system would be less corrupt if the difference in pay/lifestyle from the top 1% to the top 0.1% were much less. That is, if incomes were taxed at a much higher rate. Going from a $200000 salary to a $2.5 million salary and keeping most of it is too much of an incentive for corruption.

I suspect that countries with the least amount of corruption have the least amount of income inequality.

> You'll never find a politician worth his/her salt taking cash from a company.

I guess that means there are no elected congress-critters who are worth their salt eh?

The last two non-corporate-funded ones were Feingold and Grayson who were both defeated in 2010.

Our Congress is now fully corrupt.

Short of Ron Paul, where do you find politicians, nay, statesmen who don't take cash from companies?

You don't. They are human too, tempted by greed or afraid of what happens to them when they are done serving.

It goes along with WANTING to be in a political position, if one did not want the money or the power trips then that one is likely also a nutjob of zealous flavor.

The flaw with this logic, is that the ideal politician does not want the job, this could make them incorrigible or careless. It also means almost nothing gets done by the incorrigible politicians (which I have to see as a good trait for any government) and poor quality work is done by the careless ones.

Or, as Douglas Adams puts it: "He who most wants to lead is the person who should in no way be allowed to do so."

and also

"To summarize the summary, people are a problem."

There's Buddy Roemer. He's better than pretty much all other candidates including Ron Paul when it comes to campaign reform. No superpacs. 100 dollar donation limit. It's in every citizens interest(regardless of party affiliation) to make money less influential in politics.

Buddy Roemer on MSNBC's Morning Joe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oMoAMnFczY

Then there's Lawrence Lessig. He's not a politician but he's also working to limit systemic political corruption.

Considering it's illegal to take campaign contributions from corporations, I don't think you find many serving politicians who are doing so.

SuperPACs...

Not any more it isn't. Freaking supreme court. 8(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...

I'd rather put my efforts into reducing the power of the President and move toward more of a parliamentary democracy in the US, which will increase the number of parties and diminish the power any particular party has, and therefore companies won't have such a lock on legislation.

You'll never find a politician worth his/her salt taking cash from a company.

I appreciate the sentiment, but you're using a One True Scotsman fallacy. Try again!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com