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Comment by mullen | Hacker News Reader

> There's a reason we cast secret ballots in elections,

You get one vote and the other people get one vote. With Dark Money, one side gets access to control a million votes and you get one vote. That's wrong.

> and I don't see much of a difference in the risk/reward equation when it comes to donations to nonprofits and social causes, whether political or not.

NonProfits and Social causes are about fixing issues directly. Giving money to a shelter that supports Runaway Gay Teens or a Pets or the Homeless is not the same. A single person giving millions of dollars to a single organization that is designed to influence the vote and lives of millions of people is not the same thing.

Also, corporations are not people, so a corporation giving to a cause (No matter the cause) should be known by everyone.

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> You get one vote and the other people get one vote. With Dark Money, one side gets access to control a million votes and you get one vote. That's wrong.

No, that's not correct at all. "Dark money" doesn't control anything at all, and is usually just used for outreach and advocacy in an attempt to persuade people to make choices consistent with certain aims or principles.

The "million votes" you're referring latterly to are the aggregation of the "other people's" votes you mentioned formerly, and those people decide for themselves whether the arguments being made by advocacy groups are sufficiently persuasive to factor into how they are casting their votes.

> Also, corporations are not people, so a corporation giving to a cause (No matter the cause) should be known by everyone.

Corporations are just organizational models used by people instrumentally to pursue their goals. They have no concrete existence or any independent moral agency, and so factor out of the discussion entirely.

>Corporations are just organizational models used by people instrumentally to pursue their goals. They have no concrete existence or any independent moral agency, and so factor out of the discussion entirely.

This is incorrect. Corporations have a concrete existence nd extreme power fully controlled by a tiny board of directors, not by "people" but by "select people" and your attempts to suggest we all use corporations when it's really just a few elite rich people using those corporations is bullshit obfuscation popular among corporatists and plutocrats.

Society consists entirely of specific people with specific goals and incentives engaging in specific interactions with people. Everything is "select people", and the purpose of law and politics is to mitigate conflicts of interests and divergences in values between different "selections" of people. There is no single set of interests attributable to the public as a whole.

And there are millions of C-corps, S-corps, LLCs, partnerships, and other formal entities used by millions of Americans to organize their business affairs at all levels of scale and complexity. And millions more have their savings invested in the stock market and are responsible for electing the directors who sit on the boards of publicly-traded companies. The idea that corporate structures are only used by "a few rich elite people" is abjectly false.

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