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Comment by shortlongterm | Hacker News Reader

It's easy in America. As soon as your industry becomes big enough you can afford to petition (lobby) the government to write regulations that favor your busines in your industry.

Fortunately any American can petition their government. Collectively we could hire our own lobbyist to write better laws (and regulations).

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lobbyists aren't supposed to write laws, but the reality is they probably do.

Politics are pay-to-play. We do have organizations that started as citizens coming together to try to influence government, but unless you have a lot of money to throw around, your public interest research group is almost impossible to hear. Who do you think has outized influence- a group of citizens proposing common-sense reforms, or industry lobbyists paid a lot of money to protect an industry's bottom line?

I mean, take ALEC for instance

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

Laws written by corporations.

Also, anybody who doesn’t think corporations buy legislators is being very naive.

Maybe we should all dedicate a percentage of our income to hire lobbyists that would represent our interests to the government /s

And call them politicians?

Meanwhile the EU food safety regulator is okay to continue using it.

https://www.politico.eu/article/glyphosate-is-safe-to-use-in...

The Drilled podcast covers in detail the history of how corporations in America engineered their right to use their money and influence for political speech.

Our representatives are supposed to be our lobbyists. Part of the problem is people ignore when their lobbyist is doing a bad job when they wear the right color uniform, and refuse to acknowledge any good they do when they wear the other color uniform.

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