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Comment by rockinghigh | Hacker News Reader

Lobbying just means advocating for your interests by trying to influence people in power. It's part of democracy.

funny how people with more money get more democracy - and people with less money get the end of a baton.

Money can buy higher quality and higher amplified speech, in fact there's an argument that is the primary reason for accumulating money for anyone interested in politics, at least in the US.

And it's not surprising that most people pay more attention to whatever they perceive to be better value for their time.

So it's not really those with less money getting 'end of a baton' but those with less convincing speech. It's unfortunate that the least convincing and credible are at best treated as outcasts, and at worst as criminals.

But how could a democratic society be structured differently? People can't be forced to treat every single individual the same.

My take on US democracy is that the level of representation needs to get back to the levels seen in the 18th century.

35000 people per representative. That would mean we would need a larger capitol building - but at least it would be harder to gerrymander and to bribe/lobby all of these people.

In this day of technology we could manage a large congress quite well.

In the US it’s a bit different than in other countries though. There it’s not “advocating” - it’s “paying”.

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