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Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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.

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