Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

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>They can pretty much push the same bullshit forever until it stays while you are devoting your life to prevent it.

This is the nature of democracy, and any way of stopping this from happening would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. This same process is how women's suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, medical marijuana and many many many other smaller victories for rights have been enabled over the years. Each one of those was brought up by politicians and lobbyists time and time again, defeated time and time again, until one day it wasn't and it stuck.

Personally I think that smaller, decentralized, local government is the best way to minimize the harm of this nature, but I fully recognize that it also means every group must fight the same fight multiple times in multiple places in order to secure their rights all over, and that's its own harm.

But I can't think of any way that you could "permanently" defeat "bad" bills that wouldn't equally have harmed those other movements.

Banning any form of paid lobbying, sponsorship, etc. All the politicians should be interested in are votes (eg the preference of the people).

It won't fix it, but it'll help.

> Banning any form of paid lobbying, sponsorship, etc.

The problem with this is then the only people that are able to meet with / influence your representatives are the people that are independently wealthy enough to travel to them and take the time off from work to do so. If you can't pay someone to speak on your behalf, and you can't afford to take the time to speak for yourself, how do you get heard? Are you personally willing to fly out to your representatives offices every time something comes up that the EFF lobbies against or for on your behalf?

how is this substantially different from the current situation, where people are able to simply purchase influence? At least banning paid lobbying has the advantage of forcing the wealthy to spend time rather than money. Everyone has only 24 hours a day.

So, banning lobbying is bad because it stops lobbying?

No, because you can't really ban lobbying. If you tried it would just move behind the curtains instead of being transparent and in public. I don't know about you, but I rather know who pushes for what.

You're arguing that the problem is that only wealthy people will be able to speak to their representatives. That's the exact situation now, but worse. Today it's not a matter of convincing your rep. The wealthy just buy them.

"here have 200k and swing that bill my way". That's just borderline bribery.

I'm arguing that wealthy people always have access to their representatives and the only way the non wealthy have anywhere close to a similar level of access is by the ability to pool their money and pay someone to advocate on their behalf. The ACLU can only do what it does because they can be paid to act on someone else's behalf full time.

>"here have 200k and swing that bill my way". That's just borderline bribery.

Agreed, and if you have evidence of that happening I'm sure there are plenty of people at the FBI and the FEC that would be quite interested in seeing it. But that's also not anywhere near the same as paying someone to lobby on your behalf.

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