Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

No, we are all very aware of how Congress works. Whoever has the most money to pay them (why it's not called a bribe, I'll never know) is the person who gets their ideas put into law. Congress hasn't been about the needs of the people they represent for some time now.

View on HN

That's the cynical take at least. It's a great way of telling yourself that trying is futile and therefore not worth the time.

It's one of the things I detest about politics in Italy: ordinary people are so convinced that nothing can ever change that they make zero effort to do anything, and, surprisingly, things do not change.

Dude, the amount of money that politicians get in campaign contributions is tiny compared to the amount of money that is spent on lobbyists. The problem is that we have this class of people who are personable, who are well informed, have spent years creating relationships with other people in Washington, and who are very experienced at providing simple, one-sided explanations of the issues to congress-critters.

If campaign contributions were entirely banned I doubt it would make much difference, because legislators are too busy to pull information on every topic that they feel they need to Do Something about, and its the people with lobbyists who succeed in pushing out the (fraction of the) information needed.

If that's the case, then how does that explain SOPA? Take the two primary backers, the MPAA and RIAA: 2010 revenue for the movie industry in the United States was about $10B, while the 2010 revenue for the music industry was approximately less than or equal to that figure (RIAA's FAQ suggests $7.7B in 2009). Compare that to tech companies: Apple alone had $28.57B in the Q3 of this year (to say nothing of yearly revenue). Certainly revenue does not equal profits or market share, but the point should still be made: one technology company is arguably larger than both the movie and music industries in the United States. If the matter were as simple as money equaling laws, then SOPA should never have seen the light of day.

It is only tangentially profit related. It is directly related to money spent on law making. RIAA understands this and spends quite a bit. Tech companies either don't or don't care enough to play the game, so they don't spend.

That is what I was insinuating.

Why bother insinuating? The data tells the story well enough:

http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-hr-3261/1019110/tot...

More generally, this kind of legal corruption is an obvious and yet unacknowledged flaw in representative democracy.

By obvious, I mean in the game theory sense i.e a system of selfish rational humans acting under the rules of "democracy".

The U.S. system has some factors which make it worse e.g. "first past the post" voting leads to a two-party system from which the electorate cannot break out.

If you actually believe this then I would argue that you don't actually know how Congress works. There are numerous examples of citizen action overcoming superior funding on the other side; the entire environmental movement is one example.

Congress: "No, we are all very aware of how the Internet works. OMG P1R4CY!!!1"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com