Larry Lessig’s Long Walk
medium.com
medium.com
FYI, the only one of those that is not a federal offense in the U.S. is spending too much.
2. It treats the symptom, not the problem. The symptom is that people will spend a lot to get people important to them into office. The problem is that the government controls so much money and so many things, that it is in your best interest to try influence it so that 1. the money comes to you and 2. the laws and regulations favor you.
3. The centralization of power at the Federal level exacerbates this problem, since there is one main body that you are trying to influence instead of lots of smaller ones.
2. Push governance down instead of centralizing, do more at the local and state level
3. Develop quasi independent institutions to carry out certain tasks and allow competition between them.
2. The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist. There will always be powerful people, and hopefully there will always be government, and it will always be in your interests to influence those powerful people so that they can help you out. So in any system where there is a government, there needs to be a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that representatives act in the interests of the public (which is the idea behind representative democracy) rather than the interests of their private funders.
3. Yes, of course it does, but again, that is just a symptom of checks and balances failing. In a system where there is a perfect representative democracy and a strong constitution, the people will never vote for a federal government larger than it needs to be. In the system we have now, the federal government swells in size no matter which party is in government (just depends whether it is the public service, or the military that grows). Private interests fuel this effect and governments wave their hands to make it look like cuts are being made, but they're not.
Lessig has nailed the arguments around why campaign finance reform is necessary - whether he's going to be successful is in question but I think most legal experts can see that the system is broken, with money being the core of the problem.
2. The problem I've identified is that the federal government has grown too large and does too many things. This is the problem, powerful people will be powerful and have an influence on society - through fame, money, etc.
3. Reducing the scope of the government could easily be accomplished if the commerce clause was read in a different way. If granting new power to the federal government required constitutional amendments then it would be better -- prohibition required an amendment, why don't modern drug laws? Additionally, returning the selection of senators to the state government instead of a popular vote would also be be an improvement.
I don't think he has nailed the arguments, I think he fundamentally simplifies and distorts the case. Money is a symptom, the problem is the size/scope/breadth of action.
1. Popularity is naturally limited - you can only be so popular.
2. Laws made by Congress have negligible influence on Ophra's popularity. Not so with money. Corporations fund laws that make them more money which they can fund laws with.
In general it's the old fallacy of equating people's natural variance in ability - limited, not susceptible to positive feedback loop with the money/power inequality - practically unlimited, strongly reinforced by a positive feedback loop.
I guess you're more trusting, but, personally, when someone is opposed to a rule, I'd take their claims about what the rule actually requires with many grains of salt.
The basic difference, of course, is that social capital is very much different than monetary capital. One is used to buy things, and the other is used to boost signals. One can be taken away by the same individuals who gave it in the first place; the other is taken away at a publicly specified rate, but can be given away freely or traded for goods and services.
Oprah can use her celebrity voice to endorse one or ten or one hundred candidates. There are diminishing returns, of course: how much of a signal boost would it be if Oprah endorsed just everyone? The only time she loses her influence is if she spends too much of it in the same category too quickly, or if the signal she chooses to boost is disagreed with by those who lend her credence and give her the social capital in the first place.
As a signal multiplier, its function is fundamentally different than the signal multiplier of money.
When money is spent, if enough money is available, it can be used to endorse one or ten or one hundred candidates with none of the same diminishing returns. It does not lose its effectiveness if it is spent too quickly on too many different things. If this were about a companies publicly endorsing candidates (and by doing so, putting their brand's reputation on the line) it would be one thing. But this is about companies (or individuals) being able to disproportionately influence policy without risking their own reputation by being associated with the crafting of that policy.
2. If you want to curtail the size of the federal government, one thing you might be interested in is campaign finance reform - so your elected politicians aren't as interested in doing favors for <AARP|Dow Chemical|The Teamsters|Focus on the Family|Goldman Sachs> and are more interested in the plight of their actual constituents.
3. It could be, but you're dreaming if that would ever happen with the number of favors owed the private sector by congress.
He's nailed the arguments, but I don't think new law is ever going to fix it.
The only way to fix it is by making money irrelevant to re-election.
(edit: let me put it in a different way than all that stuff about cognitive dissonance and social capital. You ask what the difference is between an Oprah endorsement and a campaign contribution; I'll ask you: what is the difference between a Facebook status update that gets shared 1,000 times and a Facebook status update the author of which pays for it to show up on 1,000 timelines?)
Absolutely, but that's exactly why the government needs to be large and do lots of things. Take minimum wage for example. Assume that tomorrow the government revoked the power to control wages. What happens next?
Fast food chains and big box stores would push their wages as low as the market will bear. Some employees will quit, but a lot will stay because working 80 hours a week and living in abject poverty is still better than literally starving. There's still a minimum wage, it's just now being set by corporate entities that don't (and shouldn't) have any motivations beyond their own company's self interest.
Or maybe the employees unionize. They get organized and set terms for as high a wage as they can extract from the employers. The employee's quality of life goes up, but the business owners now have no recourse but to pay the demanded wages or close. And the new employment contracts start including clauses about mandatory union membership (including dues). Again, a minimum wage is being set by someone, just not someone who has (or should have) any interest in the larger economic repercussions.
The power exists, and it's going to be wielded by somebody somewhere. The government, at least, is ostensibly motivated by the best interests of the populace at large. That interest is, of course, frustrated as often as its honored in the real world. Still, I don't see how taking power from an institution that only intermittently pursues my best interests and handing it to an institution that never does is in any way an improvement.
The problem is the unnecessary concentration of power in the hands of very few politicians. The key to solving this problem lies less in reducing government powers, but in distributing it better. By the principle of subsidiarity, regulation should always happen at the lowest possible level. At first sight, it sounds inefficient to have slightly different laws that govern the same things in every state. But there is a lot of value in diversity, as it allows for direct comparisons and thereby the system as a whole to evolve much more naturally. Also, it allows for fine-tuning of regulation to local situations.
It's not free speech if those with money can use it to drown out other voices in the public debate.
1) Money has diminishing returns in elections. Once you have flooded the system with campaign ads, get-out-the-vote volunteers, analytics teams, etc, additional money eventually stops buying additional votes.
2) The wealthiest donors in our country donate the maximum to all candidates in an election. This is not buying an election, it's buying favors from whomever gets elected. There is a difference, and from what I understand of the type of campaign finance reform Mr. Lessig is advocating for, it fails to do anything to address this issue.
3) Democracy comes in all flavors, but IMHO the best is not the most democratic (gives the most people a voice), it's the one that distributes power most evenly across a population. I firmly agree it's the concentration of power, not the influence of money, that corrupts any system.
I would add that Lessig is spectacularly self-unaware as he goes about raising money for his cause. I have no idea how I got subscribed to the Rootstrikers mailing list, but I stay subscribed for the occasional lulz.
If every voting-age American spent $100 on electioneering, they'd be able to swamp the "special interests". I think it would be great, and so I'm in the tiny camp of people who think we need vastly more money in politics.
Lessig has actually said that he supports the Citizens United decision for exactly this reason. I'll badly paraphrase from "Republic Lost": Lessig says we should exhaust tools to encourage broader campaign funding (and thus political speech) before we should do anything to limit speech. This clearly implies that there may come a point where limiting political speech is called-for, but I agree that we're not there yet.
He was originally in favor of strong controls but realized that the free speech problems were too large. Now he favors supplemental approaches to enable candidates to compete without going after large donors.
2. But how will you reduce the government under the current system? Isn't campaign finance reform a necessary step?
3. Ditto number 2.
You reduce government by advocating for it. You promote ideas and candidates that will cut government income, control, and spending. The problem is that Government is too big and too powerful. Merely trying to make government function better, without intentionally cutting it, is like trying to make a severely obese man more comfortable by treating his diabetes, high blood pressure, joint problems, etc, but not restricting his caloric intake: it just makes the problem worse.
In computer science, a common way to solve complex problems is just to reduce their size. You sort a big list by splitting it and recursively sorting the smaller lists. You could make the problems of the US government much more manageable by simply abolishing the Federal government and making the fifty states independent. There would still be problems with government, but the problems would be an order of magnitude smaller. Repeat this process until government is truly local.