Lessig: Why Washington is corrupt
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I look back to the last federal election here in Canada - it was triggered by a vote of no-confidence over the budget, and 5 weeks later the whole process was done. the candidates only had 5 weeks to spend money. no matter how much money you are legally allowed to donate to a campaign, the candidate can only spend so much in such a small time frame. It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or not, it's impossible to garner much influence when the campaign period is so short.
of course, our voter turnout is miserable and the guy we managed to elect is pretty terrible, i'm not trying to say our system is perfect. but the year-and-a-half long campaign with elections every two years just seems so ridiculous.
This past election had nearly $2b between the two of them. Toyota spends less than $2b a year on advertising in total.
It just seems that the voices of a very, very small group of people who want to keep everything stalemated are drowning out the voices of reason that can push our society forward.
The first storm is what Lessig mentioned: simply getting the money or in-party approval to be on the ballot and run the necessary ads. If your first promises have to be directed towards any group of "Lesters", e.g. the exceedingly wealthy, then you're starting off on a bad foot.
The second storm is that the Framers of the Constitution set up our system to vote for individual politicians in individual seats by first-past-the-post voting. This has been elegantly covered by C.G.P. Grey in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo . The problem here is that we have a two-party system in the first place, because that is a fixed point of the voting process and the system converges to its fixed point over iterated voting.
Just to see why this is one of The Big Problems, a fillibuster rule would actually make sense if we had, say, 4-5 parties occupying the Senate. It would say that you need a 60% majority if some of the minority parties were so strongly opposed to the idea they'd filibuster it; in effect you can force the status quo with only a 40% vote, which allows a sort of "minority coalition" to come together on really hot-topic matters. This really gives a great deal more voice to minority parties than is seen in normal coalition governments.
> The problem here is that we have a two-party system in the first place, because that is a fixed point of the voting process and the system converges to its fixed point over iterated voting.
For more details on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
"plurality rule elections structured within single-member districts tends to favor a two-party system"
We could fix so many problems with a sane voting system, but it remains one of the most difficult things to change. Between the current system having elected everyone in a position to change it, the public perception of "one person one vote" as the most fair rather than one of the worst systems in common use, and the most popular alternative system being one of the only worse ones, I don't know if we'll ever manage to move to a better system on any large scale.
Which is this?
The biggest practical problem with IRV: it encourages people to vote for their preferred third-party or independent candidate first followed by their lesser-of-two-evils choice (common examples using US political parties: Green>Democrat>Republican or Libertarian>Republican>Democrat), but IRV then ignores the preference for the second choice over the third, which means voting for a third-party candidate still risks "throwing your vote away" and having your greater-of-two-evils win. So, IRV not only breaks fundamental properties that any sane voting system should have, it still doesn't actually address the single biggest problem we have with voting systems, and worse yet it pretends that it does.
I'd advocate approval voting if you need a system that's simple to use with existing infrastructure and doesn't require much explanation, or Condorcet if you have no infrastructural or political concerns blocking you from choosing the best option.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Strategic_voti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting#Approval_votin...
Which brings up the point of whether one of the basic theories of "pure" democracy is sound: that the public can rationally govern itself. I don't think current democracies really prove it one way or another, but if the theory doesn't hold water, then my idea would probably be a disaster. Fine-tuning the percentages could yield some interesting results though, effectively reducing the importance of who gets elected in the first place.
Agreed about the potential for the system to be hacked by powerful entities though, perhaps even worse than it is now...tough to get around that one.
Many government projects require a certain level of investment over a number of years or even decades. It wouldn't be efficient to start say a fighter jet development program if you might have to ditch it half way through because public opinion changed.
But your point about the fighter jet program could actually be an argument for this type of direct democracy. Let's say the public found out that the program was causing, or somehow will cause, the deaths of thousands of innocent people in a third world country. The military could then face spending cuts, directly dictated by the people, that would threaten the program, and rightly so.
Besides you would probably be able to work around this with creative accounting. Let's say everyone wants to defund the military and put more funds into education; military training establishments now show up on the budget as "defence studies schools" because they are issuing general educational certificates to soldiers.
I think fundamentally if you think some particular government is going to just waste large amounts of tax money you should really just not vote for them. You vote in a government because you want them to make sensible choices in how to allocate resources for public projects so you can concentrate on your startup or whatever.
Sometimes this stuff can work on a local level. For example schools can have governing bodies of volunteers (usually parents) who get some say over how the school budget is used.
The problem is that "fixed seats" are the wrong way to look at this; the fixed quantity is actually the budget money made available by the government. So, the last budget was a $3.54 trillion budget, and we might be able to "chunkify" the budget into $20 billion "awards" and thus "elect" 177 programs in the various departments and agencies to be allocated those awards. The US has 15 executive departments which is about the limit which democratic elections on this sort of scale usually take, so that would probably be the limit. Each department would put several large "programs" in order and you could choose some programs and some departments, or so; we then fund the most popular programs, followed by the top programs in the funded departments, until the department allocation matches the national average.
The problem here is: with political parties, anybody can start one. But the executive branch starts new executive departments and presumably builds those prioritized lists. Suppose the executive branch decides that there is only one department, they could more or less set the entire budget as they pleased.
If that gets repealed then we can start working state by state to switch to some form of proportional representation.
As it is, they just file a procedural motion and bang, nothing gets done.
Lessig keeps pounding this drum, but Washington corruption goes a lot deeper than campaigns. Who do your representatives talk to every month? Who does their research for them? Who is a big fish in their home communities?
I don't know what the right policy is to address Washington inside dealing. But lets not pretend that limiting campaign money (thereby gutting independent campaigns) is the answer.
I think you need to explain this. Two considerations:
1. In other countries, independent campaigns with little financial backing have had success. The need for very large amounts of money to win elections seems to be distinctive of the US.
2. The independents with such money are "independent" Lesters, in Lessig's terminology (i.e., they are people with enough money to influence elections). So you are using the word independent in a way that seems to show that you are not talking about the same problem.
I would search for some citations if I wasn't about to get noprocrasted out.
To your point, you're right that restricting money is often worse for challengers than incumbents. This is because the challengers need to spend money to get their name out and prove they're "serious" as opposed to the incumbents who already have name recognition and can get attention without spending money. However, the issue that he's talking about is different (though related). The problem is that both incumbents and challengers require some small subset of people to support them and fund them.
http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Money-Corrupts-Congress/...
If that bias favors the kinds of insurgent candidates you tend to favor, lucky for you I guess, but I'm not sure how that supports the argument that this is good for democratic processes generally.
It has always been legal for very rich people like Mitt Romney to spend their own money on campaigns. McCain-Feingold didn't hurt them, it hurt guys like Ron Paul in 2007. We had tens of thousands of people ready to chip in $10k or more, but they were limited to $3k by the law.
You state this as if it's obvious. It really isn't.
The conventional campaign finance reform thinking, which a lot of us agree with, is that campaign money subverts the normal democratic process wherein people make their voices heard, their representative does what they want, and if they don't the people vote in someone who seems more likely to do the job.
You seem to be saying that in the absence of campaign money, nothing will happen at all. That can't be what you actually mean?
The secondary problem in today's U.S. election system is that the 2 largest political parties have baked all sorts of advantages for themselves into the law--for example, for a long time party committees were allowed to collect and spend a lot more money than independent committees. Citizens United did away with this distorting advantage, making it easier for people to organize support for challenger candidates outside of political parties.
This isn't true 100% of the time. In recent years people have been pretty eager to vote out incumbents, in some cases in favor of people who can barely speak in complete sentences...
> the only way a challenger can counter that is by spending money on ads and events.
There's also the press.
That last bit is interesting, thanks.
edit: I remain amused at what people will downvote
How many congressmen have kids, siblings, spouses, mistresses who work for companies in their districts? How many Senators have golden parachutes into the private sector after leaving? How many politicians, advisors, etc have book deals, speaking tours, etc.. which happen to be announced right after (days) their retirement?
And that's not even including the fact that Congress' staffs and spouses are not covered by insider trading rules: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/19/politics/stock-act-loophole
Not only that, but there's an overemphasis on the idea that donations are an implicit quid pro quo exchange for policy.
Let's say we could somehow ban any kind of "exchange" -- not just donations, but these other soft influence deals where money doesn't change hands directly.
We'd still have a fundamental problem: people who have lots of money can hire other people to represent their interests to congress.
Conversely, how many citizens spend time trying to influence their congressional offices? Not just via vote, not just via the occasional phone call or letter, but by actually meeting with congressional staff.
What I'm trying to communicate is mostly that when it comes to "buying influence", the problem is a lot deeper than any access/influence purchased via donor-driven fundraising. It's actually inherent in any arrangement where money can be used to hire people to lobby on an employer's behalf. And it's particularly unbalanced when most people don't lobby on a volunteer basis.
If you want non-mainstream candidates to get elected, wouldn't it make more sense to support proportional representation?
"In the final week of the 2012 election, MSNBC ran no negative stories about President Barack Obama and no positive stories about Republican nominee Mitt Romney, according to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. "[1]
It seems that any restriction starts to favor certain groups. For instance, unions organizing volunteers
"The A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, Richard Trumka, said on Thursday that the nation’s labor unions would have 128,000 volunteers working on the “final four days” of the 2012 campaign, saying these volunteers would knock on 5.5 million doors and make 5.2 million phone calls." [2]
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/21/msnbc-obama-coverag...
[2] http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/labor-unions-t...
You might argue that there's no corruption here, because I never had direct dealings with that organization, or the people funding it. But the potential for corruption is still there. Once these organizations exist, it will be clear to every candidate what he or she must do to win their favor. Politicians will have an incentive to advance these organizations' agendas, even if the politicians and the organizations never talk to each other. Further, it is quite possible (and indeed probable) that some politicians would cheat and deal directly with such organizations, even if doing so violated campaign finance laws.
Since he shows no interest in moving decision-making power back toward the people themselves, I conclude that he's not unhappy that people (as individuals) don't have enough power over their own lives; he's unhappy that the system he and his Harvard friends have built for the elite to rule The People (as a mass) doesn't yet have as much unrestrained power to do so as they would like.
As a small example, I actually think that USA would be better off if you had a much stronger federal government and reduced the states to minor importance. However, my opinion doesn't count much because I live in New Zealand!
Or Detroit, Chicago...
... and those are just some obvious ones.
As long as the power of Chicago's socialists is limited to Chicago, you can escape the dystopia that emerges from their absurd policies by escaping their jurisdiction. But if all (US) power can be centralized in Washington, then the same people who produced socialist dystopias in Detroit, Chicago, or San Francisco, will impose them on everyone in the country. I will no longer be able to take my pick by leaving their jurisdiction, and that's what they define as "progress."
Except that, no, wait, my job, my dwelling, my friends, my family (if I had one), and my community are all tied down to the place I already live.
Implementing a "free market in local governments" has the massive negative externality of entirely destroying people's capacity to build roots and communities by staying in one place, and effectively turns the population into permanent ideological/lifestyle/economic migrants.
I find your example ironic, given how many Israelis are in Israel because they made a choice to leave their jobs, dwellings, friends, etc., in one society to join another. Few did so after one lost election, but most Israelis I've talked to have been very glad that they had alternatives. Many would have been happier if they had had a good alternative closer to home, but those back home who preferred large-scale governments deliberately eliminated the possibility of local alternatives.
More right-wing nonsense! Because a government large enough to provide health-care is automatically LARGE ENOUGH TO COMMIT MAJOR GENOCIDE AND DRIVE YOUR WHOLE ETHNICITY OUT OF THE COUNTRY!
We had better implement a system of permanent migration in the American style to make sure nobody suffers genocide by letting everyone flee to everywhere as soon as someone passes an income tax!
Or, you know, we could, unlike you, decide to base our politics on something other than childish, paranoid anarchist hysteria and actually implement an effective democracy that lets us run our lives without having to hoard guns and gold bullion in the family caravan.
"Off Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
Lessig's geek-relevant copyright background does not magically make his every political opinion relevant. There's nothing in the article or the comments about technology or intellectual property (or anything else that would make this relevant).
The underlying problem is the disengagement of the electorate and the horrible process of running a campaign. There are lots of reasons for those things but if you want one big villain to point a finger at, then it should be the media. The media have turned elections into a scandal-driven celebrity-driven mess, almost completely divorced from the issues. Sane people avoid running for office partly because of the horrible negative impact the media will have on their lives.
And then you get a process where good candidates are actively driven away early and where nothing of substance is seriously discussed in the media. And we wonder why the system is full of narcissistic glory seekers who think they can get away with anything.
Voting via net worth is just the easy equilibrium we found.
1) Calling Washington corrupt devalues the word "corrupt." Dhaka is corrupt. Moscow is corrupt. Washington is dysfunctional, but not corrupt. Americans couldn't even process what an actually corrupt government would look like. They have no frame of reference. There is an important reason to not throw the word "corrupt" around willy nilly. If you convince Americans that this is as bad as it gets, they will become apathetic. After all, what's the point of doing anything if the government is already in such a huge hole there is no climbing out? Overplaying the "corruptness" of Washington draws eyeballs, but it ultimately undermines your overall goal.
2) Blaming money is a diversion. Talking about how "money corrupts the political system" ignores the problem. And the problem is this: the people agree with the corporations. On nearly any substantial political issue you'd like to name, there is not just money but votes on the pro-corporate side. If you want to shut down heavily-polluting and destructive coal power in this country, you have to fight not just the corporations, but all of the people for whom coal is a way of life. When Obama and Romney got on stage during the last debate to see who could get the coal industry's dick the deepest down their throat, they didn't do it because of the money the coal industry donated to their campaigns.[1] They did it because ordinary Pennsylvanians,[2] treat attacks on the coal industry as an attack on their livelihoods and their way of life. If you want to break up or regulate big corporations, you can find plenty of ordinary people to say: "the government shouldn't be messing with those businesses."
The only things that attract broad political opposition are things that don't matter (e.g. "earmarks" which account for approximately 0% of the budget). The only things that attract universal condemnation are wiggle-words like "corruption" and "pork" and "wasteful spending" on which everyone can project their own viewpoint and still act like they are in agreement with everyone else.
Lessig goes wrong from the very first sentence of this article: "We Americans are disgusted with our government." The basic issue is that people aren't discontent with our government. Sure they have a general distaste for it in the same way they have a general distaste for going to the dentist, but if you sit down and really look at the issues, the big questions of governance, there is no collective consensus about doing anything important differently. Bigger military or smaller military? Tougher on crime or more protective of individual rights? Less religion in the public sphere or more? More taxes or less taxes? More privatization or less privatization? More regulation or less regulation? If you get out of Boston or San Francisco, you can find tons of ordinary people around you to take either side of each of these debates.
What you can't find much if any of are substantial, meaningful issues that everyone agrees should be changed, in a specific way, but which are nonetheless held to the status quo by our "corrupt" government. That is real corruption.
[1] People dramatically overestimate how much money corporations actually give out. First, it's illegal for corporations to donate directly to candidates. Second, both Obama and Romney raised more direct contributions than the amount of money spent on their behalf by PAC's and non-profit organizations. And direct contributions can and are limited and not affected by Citizens United.
[2] And Pennsylvanians are really important! There is a joke: why did God put all of our oil under Saudi Arabia? Well, god put all of our swing votes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, etc.
True for Obama, but from the numbers I can find [1], not true for Romney. Obama raised $750m in direct contributions, and pro-Obama PACs spent another $300m. Romney raised $450m in direct contributions, and pro-Romney PACs spent another $725m.
[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/cycle_tots.php?cy...
Also, WSJ has different numbers: http://projects.wsj.com/super-pacs/
Also see NYT's breakdown: http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance
Looking at the NYT data, the candidates together raised $1.2 billion on direct contributions (which are capped at $2,500). Even going by the Open Secrets number, the fact is that Obama and Romney raised more money directly (with a relatively small contribution cap), than PAC's spent on the entire election for all candidates.
Now, there is something troubling about the information in the NYT article: $1 billion raised by PAC's, the vast majority of it coming from donations of more than $100k. Is it going to spiral out of control from there? Or is the dismal failure of PAC-backed campaigns going to cause 2012 to be the high watermark? Who knows.
But what we do know is that 2012 was unprecedented, and Citizens United only happened a few years ago. Was Washington broken 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago? It's hard to argue that the government is appreciably more corrupt or pro-corporation than it was in they heyday of Ronald Reagan. But all of that was before Citizens United and before the rise of Super PACs. I would assert this: if the government is broken, it has been that way for awhile. But total outside spending was $50m or less through 2000: http://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/cycle_tots.php
To the extent this is true, it's because the consent is effectively manufactured by the media.
A big part of the trick is, when presenting the choice of Shit Sandwich or Turd Burger at the election, focus on which offering has sesame seeds instead of the fact the primary ingredient of both offerings is shit.
To add on a few additional points of evidence: 1) In the most recent set of national elections, there was not much correlation between money spent and probability of victory [1]. While second-order effects may still be problematic, I think it's worth reemphasizing.
2)Congressmen doing things that are against the will of their constituents leaves them massively open to primary challenges. See what's happening with Chambliss or other republicans in the recent budgetary crisis.
3)I do think there is a particularly pernicious form of corruption in Washington, stemming from the fact that lobbyists and other non-governmental entities often draft a large number of bills. This doesn't manifest as a specific national policy goal not being achieved, but rather causes subtle aims to be achieved in quiet fashions. This is not a problem of money, though -- it's simply a function of availability, and the convenience factor of who sees whom on a daily basis. Perhaps this could be fixed by empower congressmen and senators to carry larger staffs (staves?) than they do today?
[1] http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/11/09/how-much-did-m...
"Some 19.6 million Americans work for companies employing fewer than 20 workers, 18.4 million work for firms employing between 20 and 99 workers, and 14.6 million work for firms with 100 to 499 workers. By contrast, 47.7 million Americans work for firms with 500 or more employees."
The line between 'small business' and 'big business' is arguable, but in any case small businesses are generally politically aligned with big businesses.
Is it any surprise than that our government supports pro-corporate policies?
My wife was a lobbyist and she once gave me an interesting hypothetical: Excelon (big power company in Illinois) doesn't have to donate any money to get the ear of any politician in the state. All they have to do is look at their records and call up and say "we've got 7,000 employees in your district..."
2) Most of what the government does is not big issues, it's small ones that actually have the biggest effect on our lives. How should airlines, financial firms, telecommunications, etc., be regulated? Most people have very vague ideas about what they want, and are strongly swayed by poll wording. Organizations being regulated, however, have very strong ideas about what should and shouldn't happen. In theory, they should be one voice of many; in practice, we get regulatory capture.
Broadening can also imply diluting.
> Roughly half of congress goes in to lobbying after their terms end, with an average pay hike of about 14x. You think that doesn't "corrupt" their loyalties?
So let's make their salaries $2.5 million per year. It'd be a drop in the bucket.
> How should airlines, financial firms, telecommunications, etc., be regulated?
I bet you couldn't even get people on Hacker News to agree to answers to those questions.
> Organizations being regulated, however, have very strong ideas about what should and shouldn't happen.
The organizations being regulated are also the only ones who have any idea what is going on. Regulatory capture is the inescapable result of a basic problem: people who aren't in, e.g. the finance industry don't understand how it works, so the only people who can regulate it are the people who go through the revolving door. No amount of "taking money out of elections" is going to change that. (Isn't the battle cry here that people who don't understand the tech sector shouldn't be legislating on it?")
If you're opposed to regulatory capture, then you need to get rid of regulatory agencies. But even here on Hacker News I don't imagine you'd get overwhelming consensus in favor of that sort of action (it'd devolve into some fundamentally philosophical debate).
The organizations being regulated are also the only
ones who have any idea what is going on.
This presumes that the unregulated results will be better. This may be the case, but doesn't automatically follow. An alternative is to watch carefully and object loudly when you see problems, ideally with structural supports to check agendas and realign incentives. Of course there will still be failures; they may or may not be worse or more frequent than in the deregulated case - I would expect this to vary substantially by field and particular systems involved.
I'm not saying it would be better, I'm saying that if the goal is to get rid of regulatory capture (and that's your only goal), you need to get rid of the regulatory apparatus.
If you do have regulation, you need to accept that capture is a characteristic of it and design around that. It's engineering. If you use a particular type of metal for a pipe, it has advantages and disadvantages and you have to design around them. Just wishing for the perfect pipe doesn't get you anywhere.
Don't you think that's a false dichotomy? People can often agree with corporations and it can still be a bad idea to allow corporations (or even individuals) to finance campaigns.
The $1 billion in PAC money in 2012 seems to have had very little impact on the election, other than to pump up the people who already agreed with the messages in the ads.
There are at least three ways that money can have an effect that come to mind. The first is determining who wins; this is the kind you're talking about. The second is determining who can run; the winners of the primaries in both parties have as far as I can remember also been the top fundraisers going in to the primaries. Is it sticky which is the cause and which is the effect? Of course. But I have no doubt it's an amplification.
The third way is, I think, the most perverse. Only a very narrow range of political perspectives are capable of making it to the mainstream, since they first have to win the money election in order to make it anywhere.
Frankly we have no idea what the political landscape would look like with citizen funded elections. Maybe it would look exactly the same, in which case your hypothesis that the government we have is already representative would be proven correct. Right now we have no idea, and that's why I support citizen funded elections.
It would be great if somebody can "hack" the entire political process and be elected without "big money".
I have bridge I can sell you. Don't worry it's in the US and not corrupt at all.
e.g. "earmarks" which account for approximately 0% of the budget
Great, then completely eliminating pork barrel spending shouldn't hurt anyone.
Really, earmarks are bad because they're a corrupting influence that encourages legislators to vote for bills for reasons other than the bills' individual merits.
Earmarks are like catalysts in a chemical reaction. They may not appear on the balance sheet for chemicals consumed in a reaction, but without them the reaction wouldn't happen at all or at the same speed.
This article turned up in a quick google: http://www.defensenews.com/article/20120705/DEFREG02/3070500...
So for being such a small percentage of the budget, earmarks were hugely influential to congress members in getting them to vote. Even though earmarks haven't completely disappeared, their reduction is forcing Congress to rework motivation for getting votes for bills. We need to move beyond the "earmarks is a small percentage of the budget so they don't matter" meme. Think about why and how they're there and you quickly realize that they're bad even if they directly consume 0.00% of the budget.
2. People agree with corporations because corporations frame the question, the debate and the answer. Same thing happens here in oz, where murdoch owns 70% of the papers. People are so content with their gov in the US that they vote in ever increasing numbers?
People don't care and are not engaged by politics because they are taught from a very young age to accept that they can have no effect on the system. You can choose between tweedledum or tweedledee (or kang and kodos, if you prefer). This was lessig's point. Money has corrupted the process before you even get to a choice.
"More regulation or less regulation?" People are always going to disagree over process. Especially if you frame it in such oversimplified terms. Regulation on disallowing a company to pump cyanide* into the water supply? Find someone who disagrees with this!
*and no, this is not hyperbole, just lack of regulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Baia_Mare_cyanide_spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_Environmental_Disaster
You can find millions of ordinary people who will fight for the right of companies to endanger aquifers with fracking fluid.
It's an arrangement where a small group of people:
- Is in a position to accept bribes in exchange for influence.
- Decides everything for 300 million *individuals*.
- Uses other people's money (or conjures more out of thin air).
- Is not responsible for their actions.
In this case you, who are apparently an extreme idiot, have written a diatribe saying that the "underlying problem here is the existence of Government itself."
It is not, in fact, a strawman to describe your argument as being for the dissolution of the U.S. Government entirely, and currently Somalia is well-known for the absence of any effective government.
- Somalia has a government, regadless of how "effective" it is, and that alone makes it an invalid comparison.
- The absence of government means the absence of coercion, and that everything would be based on voluntary trade. It does not automatically follow that every place without a government would be a hellish shithole. That soup requires other ingredients besides "no government-controlled police force".
> You seem confused. Arguing against a strawman involves describing an opponent's argument falsely and then attacking it.
- I pointed out that the existence of Government is a problem.
- You implied I was advocating emulating Somalia (originally calling it "governmentless", but now covering your ass by adding "effective").
"Strawman" seems appropriate. Who was the idiot again?
Lessig will be considered one of the greats when we look back on this generation and ask our selves what they did. He in fact will be known as the man who struck at the very Root of our so called Republic. If your not following him, or know nothing about him, I would extremely and utterly suggest you take the hour and watch his Google Talk. He knows corruption and he has my dedication.
The problem with the US government is a tragedy of the commons (ie the district-by-district and state-by-state pork barrelling).
The original intent of the Founding Fathers and the view held by libertarians and traditional conservatives (rather than the neoconservatives and religious conservatives that dominate today) is one of limited Federal government for specifically this reason. A minimal government is one not worth buying. A big and intrusive government is one totally worth buying.
Representatives and Senators raise so much money to get elected because the payoff is huge. Both in terms of direct power and the indirect financial reward (many become lobbyists for huge incomes). Lobbying isn't the problem; it's a symptom (of government being worth buying).
Davy Crockett [1] is oft-quoted on this subject.
This is why I found the "living document" "ideology" so subversive. I say "ideology" because I find myself agreeing with Justice Scalia that it is no ideology at all. The Constitution doesn't say whatever you want it to say. It says what it says. If you want pass laws or amendments otherwise well there are processes for that and it's the job of the legislative not the judicial branch to create new law.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I think the bigger problem in US politics is that the country itself is divided and so many people think the means justify the ends.
Take how elections are organized. It's clear that some states seek to suppress traditionally Democratic votes in the names of striking convicted felons off the electoral rolls. Other states try and manipulate the vote by the density of polling places and the hours they are open.
I compare this to Australia, which holds elections on a Saturday, and those elections are organized by the AEC (Australian Electoral Commission). Voting is mandatory not optional and the duty of the AEC is to ensure that everyone has ample opportunity to vote. It seems that some combination of cultural factors, the smaller size of the Australian population and mandatory voting has made this a largely nonpartisan endeavour and voting has only ever taken me 10 minutes. On Saturdays they just set up in schools and other public spaces.
Redistricting too is a hugely political issue but the big problem here is that voting patterns are so predictable that you can buy maps telling you how specific city blocks vote.
Half the country votes. Of that half, 40% always vote Republican. 40% always vote Democrat. The remaining 20% (meaning 10% of the population) actually determinate the outcome of the election. The largest electoral victories in US history (Nixon in '72 and Reagan in '84) each only captured ~60% of the populate vote.
You see the effects of this on Congress with reelection rates [2]. Being a Representative is now a career and that (IMHO) is a problem.
"Winning" on issues for many has trumped the rule of law and the Republic itself (again, IMHO) and that more than anything is the most dangerous thing.
I get what you're saying. If a government barely has any powers, they yes, it's not worth corrupting, but I really don't think we're headed in that direction any time soon. Surely even a medium sized-government would still be worth corrupting?
Moreover, why can't we have both? A government with smaller influence, but still freer of money-influence than today's.
It seems to me that the current political reality is that Lesig's proposals would be much easier to achieve than bringing our government's influence to a level more agreeable to a libertarian.
I would speculate that democracies like our own broadly tend coverage to the middle of extreme views. If that's the case, then we won't achieve a libertarain-sized government, unless you convince a good majority of voters. Hence, it seems clear that we should focus more on the quality of government, right now.
That feels like asking, "why can't we have both a simpler software codebase, with less abstraction and code, while adding all this code & logic over here to try to squash the symptoms of having too much abstraction?"
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I feel like you're asking us to get to simplicity by adding more rules, which isn't really how simplicity works.
I would take the idea more seriously if its something that can be rigorously demonstrated; i.e. there is no way to amend the US government without adding so many rules as to frustrate the situation even further.
That being said, any government that consists of human beings is going to have an emergent agenda of some sort or the other. It seems to me that job number one of any government would be to police it self so that that agenda is generally in the people's favor, first. I would have thought that that's really what democracy means, maybe I'm wrong.
Surely even a more libertarian government would have policies in place to fight its corruption?
I cannot scientifically prove this hypothesis, as I am not dictator of the world, or even of a small island. (Technically, I'd have to be dictator of multiple worlds to prove my hypothesis, as I understand the scientific method.) Most political debates have this problem, so I'm not inclined to lose sleep over it. Of course, I don't expect you to accept the idea wholesale, either. I just threw it out there for discussion.
> That being said, any government that consists of human beings is going to have an emergent agenda of some sort or the other. It seems to me that job number one of any government would be to police it self so that that agenda is generally in the people's favor, first.
It's my understanding this is why we have 3 branches of government, yes. Even a relatively simple system can still verify results with other parts of the system (for example, setting up a Pingdom account to verify that yes, the website is returning HTTP 200)
> Surely even a more libertarian government would have policies in place to fight its corruption?
(a) I extrapolate my experience with architecting complex software systems to political systems. Perhaps what applies to the one is entirely different from what applies to another. Software is what I know, politics is an interesting mind game for me, and it seems like some lessons may carry over. Also, applying software architecture disciplines to business procedures has brought me continued success over the past few years, so I'm inclined to think that some/most of these principles may apply across all complicated systems, including political ones. But again, I can't prove it.
(b) I think there is a difference between letting multiple systems "battle it out" (e.g. Pingdom verifying an HTTP 200 response and perhaps even rebooting the server automatically if it is down), and a multitude of automatic failover rules within a system. For example, how many times have we seen recap blog posts from AWS or other large, abstract cloud systems which identify the root cause as "a system we wrote to automatically heal our main system screwed everything up?"
All that said, I agree with your original post's main point: sometimes you've just gotta throw duct tape on stuff yesterday, or in this case, add rules to limit political corruption. I think my point is simply that planning for both long-term seems conflicting: you throw the duct tape on today, but you don't plan to leave it there forever.
The eventual plan is to refactor to a simpler system and get rid of the duct tape.
Yeah, we're on the same page.
I think the critical thing with the software/systems-analogy is that it's far easier for us to understand these technologies, and more over, the technologies generally lend them selves to reproducible experiments. You can collect 'lessons learned' and do experiments, and based on that knowledge, refactor. It's much harder in politics for the reasons you mentioned.
The whole reason we have 'free' markets is that we lack the knowledge that would be required to efficiently run a command-economy, so we let the market decide, and apply duck-tape where appropriate. Same goes with democracy: we lack the knowledge to build a benevolent dictator which maximizes its people's happiness.
So I guess democracy + duck-tape is the best we can do, for now.
WRT Australian voting, in 2010 the voter turnout was around 92/93%, with a further 5.5% informal (donkey). Around 20% of the electorate voted for the minor parties / independents.
All this translated to.. 90% of the seats to the two major parties. Nope, no corruption here. In a very real sense the system is designed by the parties that run it. I mean, we all remember what happened in Tassie in the late 90's?
More like not putting all your server room and home entertainment system equipment (televisions, ipads, etc.) in your car, sitting on the front seat with the doors unlocked.
Your car needs to get you places. If you make it the central storage location for all the cool/expensive stuff in your life - don't be surprised when people open your doors or break your windows to take it. If in the process of storing all your junk and having it broken into - don't be too surprised when your car is no longer functioning as simple transport.
The point of my analogy was that government has some specific functions spelled out by the Constitution. If we stuck to government's main functions rather than trying to have it do everything for everyone - we would make it less of a target for corruption.
Historically, we were able to fund those functions consuming far less of a percentage of our GDP.
You are, how shall I say this, late to the party.
You should probably read some of Lessig's works - I suggest Republic, Lost - which very directly and at great length address this.
Also you should probably not read works of fiction about historical personages such as Davey Crockett and then believe that they represent, well, anything.
Not even Scalia would object to the notion that the federal government is strong. In fact he regularly rules in favor of a strong federal government, including against Larry Lessig in Eldred v Ashcroft.
The fact is that the Founders didn't really agree on how strong the Federal government should be, but they all agreed it should be stronger than the weak national government that existed under the Articles of Confederation. And the Federalists wanted a very robust national government indeed (and remember, the reference point of the British Parliament, which has nearly unlimited power, was the framing in this situation), while others wanted to preserve the nearly unlimited power of the states. Nobody wanted a "weak" government--it was a battle about who should hold the power.
And it was a battle that the Federalists won in the first several Congresses and during the Marshall era, and finally consolidated at the point of a sword during the civil war.
The original intent of the Founding Fathers and the view held by libertarians and traditional conservatives (rather than the neoconservatives and religious conservatives that dominate today) is one of limited Federal government for specifically this reason. A minimal government is one not worth buying. A big and intrusive government is one totally worth buying.
You were doing so well until you veered off into right-wing proprietarian ideology!
If the US government is subject to a Tragedy of the Commons due to its mode of subdivision, then eliminate the subdivision. Amend the Constitution to shift to a Mixed-Member Proportional parliamentary system.
I see no reason not to solve the engineering problem rather than declaring that having the government do more than enforce private-property titles is immoral.
I figured I'd read through the article to get the solution. This is how it ends, "We need to find a way back to Madison's original design, so that we can find a way to restore again a government that works. Leaving Lesterland is the critical first step." Thanks Mr. Lessig.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." - Henry David Thoreau
Lessig endorses the idea that this is the root issue of modern (US) times.
2 Have strict limits on campaign costs and have public service party political broadcasts carried on the major tv channels.
3 Remove all patronage civil service jobs from the president no nice jollies as ambassador for your buddies.
4 Implement better rules of debate no more slipping pork in as an unrelated rider.
5 Have independent speakers of house and congress.
Rather than some half assed version of what you have now.
For example, a huge part of the corruption of our government comes from Congress' micro-management of the economy, which should not be happening. The legislature is supposed to put broad, systemic foundations into place that work universally, not this inept and incompetent meddling in the smallest details of how a dime is spent or not spent. That body of our government lacks universal principles that can be tested against to validate their actions.
That manifests itself in the blatant, overt corruption of bribery and favoritism; not to even touch on the subtle forms of corruption which make up the forest we can't see for all the trees.
addendum:
Something else that is a rather touchy subject but also a relevant one is that we are operating with a hobbled-together framework that was meant for a whole different era of humanity. Universal suffrage in its current state is corrosive and inadequate. There really need to be qualifications for voting and the power and influence through access of the legislative and executive should solely rest in those who qualify.
Now, before you get all upset; it should be a qualification that is universally accessible, e.g., spending time rather than money. Everyone has a more equitable amount of time available for themselves. Some poor will find it difficult to find the time to spend, but so will the wealthy who, e.g., have no interest in putting in time spent with the poor in community forums and colloquium, i.e., the more time you spend attending and participating in public discussions across all economic and political spectrum the more access you have to legislators and the executive.
It's fair, its universal, and it's equitable; which is why the wealthy and those who have perverted the current system in their overwhelming favor will vilify and fight dirty to the death to preserve the current con job they have going.
Money is speech. No money, then you have no distribution for speech. It has always been this way. Now party bosses cannot dictate every primary.
But what if I'm trying to advocate to citizens rather than to my congresscritter?
That's fine for direct campaign contributions, not so much for 3rd party messaging which is where a lot of the current mess lies.
The Constitution guarantees the right to petition the government. It says nothing about the "freedom" to deliver those petitions in briefcases full of cash (slight hyperbole, but you get the idea).
Personally, I'd be willing to live with Citizens United if (a) the less debatable parts of election rigging were struck (i.e. gerrymandering, closed primaries, and private campaign finance) and (b) the rule against direct coordination between "independent" producers and campaigns they assist were extended to a ban on hiring anyone who had worked on a campaign for at least five years.
As it stands, people who have been deeply enmeshed with a campaign, who know all the players, and who know the strategy cold, can "quit", go to work for an "unrelated" PAC, and proceed to produce media that "happens" to mesh with the "unrelated" campaign.
It's bullshit, floor to ceiling. Truly independent political speech is one thing. The current reality is something else.
So I guess we're not going to discuss this like adults?
Like I wrote, I am no fan of money in politics, but if there is money in politics, there is always going to be a way to use that money to the advantage of someone else, by means other than "literally handing a check to a person with regulatory power over your commercial interests" - the only way to prevent that is take money entirely out of politics, but that does affect free speech.
Truly independent political speech is one thing. The current reality is something else.
Agreed. Now, how to you get one without the other without impacting one's right to free expression?
The law is that you can't hand a candidate a check bigger than $2,500, nor can a corporation hand the candidate any such check. Citizens United does nothing to change that (because the Congress derives its power to ban that from its control over the candidate, not the donor).
What was at issue in Citizens United was precisely the question of advocacy on your own dime.
That is the _entire point_ of this whole movement (i.e., the one Lessig is helping push).
So, yeah, you're missing the point.
Money is a big deal in politics because money means advertisements and advertisements mean mindshare and mindshare means votes. All you have to do is bypass that.
Those two statements are contradictory. Even if they weren't, "a better internet, and a more engaged public" doesn't automatically mean that people get to hear your message.
We need a better inter-networked commons.
All rights must be balanced against each other when they come into conflict. Free Speech Laws vs. Election Campaigning Laws. Can't have both. How/Where does one draw the line?
I'm OK with better elections.
Can you succinctly name a right that never needs balancing against another?
The right to free speech is simply the right to not be forcefully coerced, as applied to the realm of speech.