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Comment by jeremiep | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that we don't live in a true democracy. What we live in right now is much closer to fascism. I'd even go as far as to say that the concept of lobbying is a fascist idea.

This guy has huge ties to IBM, I'd have a very hard time believing he has the public's best interests in mind. He's more likely to pass laws which would help his rich friends instead.

Note that I'm not a strong believer of government to begin with. My rationale is that if society is anything like software development, management should be seen as counter-productive.

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The primary reason that lobbying is so pronounced is that we have a framework where micro-managing the economy is an accepted 'tool' of governance.

If you think that, in the abstract, the government should be able to favor/disfavor particular businesses (e.g. mandating Ethanol in gasoline, taxing tanning salons, prohibiting large sugary-drinks, etc) then the logical consequence is lobbying to ensure that your particular business is favored or at least not disfavored and that right (the right to petition the government) is built-in to our Constitution.

The way out of this mess is not to try to micro-manage lobbying (e.g. it is OK for a non-profit to lobby but not a for-profit or it is OK for individuals to lobby but not on behalf of a corporation) but instead to tackle the larger problem that governments should not be micro-managing the economy.

So argue for things like removing loopholes and special cases from our tax code, ditching all sorts of direct subsidies to favored entities (PBS funding, for example), and otherwise advocating for simple, consistent, and broad-based government policies rather than complex, inconsistent, and narrow government policies is the right direction, IMHO.

I'm not holding my breath, though.

Nice.

Simple. Consistent. Transparent.

These should be the guidelinses of every goverment agecny.

That why I am for things like the flat tax, NGDP targeting (monetary policy), open data goverment ...

> I'd even go as far as to say that the concept of lobbying is a fascist idea

The people living in democracies without lobbying wholeheartedly agree. We genuinely can't believe you let it happen.

Lobbying is an essential and legitimate part of every democracy. Although it often has negative connotations, the process serves a very important role in the input of policy decisions. In the US, lobbying is constitutionally protected, without which citizens would have no guaranteed way to communicate with elected officials.

Your assertion that you and others live in democracies without such a process is false. Moreover your implication that lobbying is wholly negative and unique to the American democratic system undermines your position and demonstrates what appears to be a bias against the United States in general rather than an honest critique of the way lobbying is conducted in that country.

> In the US, lobbying is constitutionally protected, without which citizens would have no guaranteed way to communicate with elected officials.

Yet de-facto in the day-to-day it is not you-and-me average citizens lobbying at the highest level but HugeCorps because they have the connections and means to pay the right lobbyists that actual average citizens could never afford...

And the very word itself already has a bad connotation. It is not "democratizing" or "participating", it is "lobbying" and nobody associates a positive, generally beneficial democratic process with that.

I don't want to argue for lobbying, which can get pretty sickening at times, but I suspect other major democracies just aren't as blatant. How does your democracy remove corporate bribes from the equation? How do people, in aggregate, push specific issues with their legislators?

>How does your democracy remove corporate bribes from the equation? How do people, in aggregate, push specific issues with their legislators?

By voting for all issues directly, like it's done here in switzerland.

Other systems where you vote people into office to do the actual decision making for you can hardly be called democracies in comparison.

And then do coalitions form to influence the popular opinion of specific things that might be beneficial to them?

In many US states, they allow ballot measures, but they are often worse than the options that would come out of the legislature because of the free for all nature of advertising for them and the general public's lack of knowledge of the details of the proposal. They do, however, allow issues such as gay marriage/pot to come up if it's too controversial for the legislature.

All issues? Even obscure, or technical laws? I'd love to hear more about how that works out. Certainly, the parliamentary system in Canada is a mixed bag.

Absolutely. The claim that the form of government in the United States is a "democracy" is one of the most impressive propaganda successes I've seen.

Switzerland has no requirement that political donations be reported, unlike the us. US states have referendums all the time.

Agreed, the American lobbying system makes even an Eastern European country look more democratic, because there, when people get caught "lobbying" like this with money, they are actually accused of corruption. In US it's all legal and plentiful.

In all honesty: such a place exists?

Possibly not. Here in NZ lobbying goes on, and companies get named and shamed periodically, but while corruption exists (Dotcom case running close to the line with 1 or 2 MPs) it is very low by (the abysmal) international standards. Low corruption countries exists. I should really get a better link, but here is some info http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_New_Zealand

Yet another reason I want to move to NZ.

FYI, the European Union has a similar model (and in many aspects much worse because unlike in the US there are virtually no rules and no transparency), and more and more power is being transferred from national governments to it.

That's a little much, IMO. Lobbying is a right acknowledged in the Constitution[1]. We live in a republic, and yes it has more power than the government has ever had before, but we also have more freedoms than we've ever had before, at least in the US. Zimbabwe is actually a fascist country.

This guy is just a mundane man defending his existence. Nothing more, nothing less.

[1] The right to petition your government.

However, back when the constitution was being written corporations did not have the legal status of a person. Lobbying was never intended as a tool for corporations to gain a much bigger voice than the general public, yet this is what we have now.

One man's bribery is another man's method to reach a real person in the government instead of a feedback form (like complaining on HN about some way you got screwed by google's automatic processes).

The good side of lobbying allows for some interest group, lets use the people who do commercial fishing in the gulf as an example, to pay attention to their interests and let someone know about problems in legislation they foresee or notice after the fact. Without them, each congressman (or some subset of them) would have to employ someone who knew a thing or two about marine/environmental biology to read all their legislation for ways that it could harm x. It's really unpopular for congress to spend money on itself, so this probably wouldn't happen and we'd ignore environmental impacts of a wide variety of things.

This, of course, is in theory. I whole heatedly agree that the balance of power between interest groups and of interest groups isn't at any sort of ideal point, but I can't see removing their ability to communicate with politicians as a good thing. Lobbyists do a whole lot more than just donate to crooked politicians.

If not exactly fascist, it is certainly corporatist.

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