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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Should, could, would - are all nice and all.

Convincing democratically-elected representatives to stop receiving money, money they use to buy votes, is a futile fight. Even if you do, many will just be corrupt and still accept money or other kinds of payment. IMHO, I'm starting to think that this system is really good - at least you have the means to find out who paid what and to whom.

Killing Hollywood, or at least doing something to make them think twice the next time, now that's doable.

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I think the money needed to buy votes is a rather US specific problem and maybe not that hard to attack. As example - in Germany we have 2 laws for reducing the dependency of political parties on private sponsors. The first is that TV stations have to send a certain amount of political spots before elections for all acknowledged parties and the parties only have to pay the self-costs of the stations for that time (around 35% of the price for commercial advertisement). The second law is that parties that get above 0.5% or 1% (depending on the type of election) receive money for each received vote (up to certain limits to prevent that parties just take part in an election to make money from that). I don't say it's perfect and there is still a lot of financing going on beside that, but it shows that the fight at least isn't futile and that it is possible to reduce the dependencies on sponsors.

If countries outside of the US can manage to run their government without extreme interference of lobbyists, then there is certainly a way for us to do it, too. The problem here isn't "well, how will politicians get accurate information without having to spend loads of time doing research?" It's more an issue of the culture in the US. If we make a shift towards a system more like the one in Germany mentioned above, it will become the cultural norm in the US. The problem is making that shift and breaking our current financially-driven habits.

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