I want to push back against that. Lobbying is not corruption. All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints. That is essential for good lawmaking. It should be open (and is in the EU) with lobby registers (author uses lobbying as a synonym for corporate lobbying, confusing the issues).

Lobbying easily involves corruption, and that has to be constantly worked against (Qatargate, Cash for Amendments in 2011) for example. Hiring EU lawmakers after they leave the office should have long cooldown limits.

Current problems with EU lobbying: Corporate lobbying is over 60% of registered lobby spending. Civil society interest groups, consumer groups, and labor unions have less money. Revolving doors, astroturfing from foreigin states and corporations, and too much reliance on self-declaration in transparency register.

These can be all solved: mandatory meeting disclosures, declaration of private interests and assets, MEPs should be banned on paid lobbying activities, and long cooling-off periods before MEPs can become lobbyists, independent refinforcement, public annex for all directives and regulation listing interest groups involved.

People should care and make these political issues.

Also, just to be clear, is the Teachers Union an embarrassment to democracy? Auto workers? Environmental groups? Or are there some forms of lobbying you're okay with as long as your ox isn't gored?

False. An excellent example is the vTaiwan / pol.is platform. It incorporates the interests of all stakeholders:

government, business, AND citizens

Success is hard of course, but you have the freedom to try.

And in the states, I think people would be very surprised by the kind of impact they can have on local politics - which also happen to be the politics that have the most direct impact on their lives.

No offense but this is such a naive, childlike view of how the world works that you might pick up in 5th grade social studies, but which should not survive contact with reality if you have an ounce of thinking ability. If you work two jobs and spend the remainder of your time trying to recover your broken mind and spirit then no, you cannot try to rally people to your cause and embark on a successful public relations campaign with no money and be on a similar playing field to ExxonMobile.

Frankly we both know you don’t even believe what you’re saying.

You have a very strange view of how most people approach jobs. And politics.

But there is such a rich, colorful history of regular people building civic institutions and movements in this country - from unions, to legal movements, to civil rights movements - you have to really work to not see it.

Progress is often slow, frustrating and filled with many setbacks and losses. We certainly have tons of headroom to even the odds between all the Davids and all the Goliaths, but any victories achieved on that front is probably going to be because some regular people decided they had enough and fought for it.

About 5% of the labor force works more than one job btw - and this number doesn't seem to fluctuate all that much. Not totally insignificant, but people with multiple jobs are outliers.

Here's what I see: We have immigrants from poor communities as members of Congress who influence foreign policy. We have activists on all sides organizing people into constituencies that flip our government every four years. I have a friend who owns a business, works 7 days a week, and still manages to serve on the local board of education. The mayor or my city is a small business owner. Every week it seems there are mass protests organized for some cause, and local politicians respond to them, and the causes filter into congressional debate. Not everyone spends their free time navel-gazing at their broken mind and spirit, I guess.

Citation needed.

There’s also no union for “the public” which is a little unfortunate since that should basically just be the government.

So yes, TLDR, first restore democracy and then we can talk about whether we need unions anymore. Until that time however, they are the only mechanism the public has to try to wield some degree of influence comparable to that of capital.

In other words, yes, big oil lobbying bad and auto workers union good.

So it may be more accurate to say that "a capitalist system that creates an increasing gap of wealth inequality and defines money as speech is a system that inherently tends toward corruption" but that's a bit wordy for a headline

Before you answer, consider all the castles, pyramids and other relics of past dynasties and aristocracies ruled by divine kings living in opulence while peasants subsisted on scraps.

If you notice, I said capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality. I did not however, make a claim as to what level that inequality is at, objectively or in relation to any other system. So your "Compared to what?" response is inane and irrelevant.

Nobody here is saying we should dispose of capitalism in favor of feudalism. Well as long as Musk or Altman isn't in the thread...

If you have your own actual point, feel free to make it.

If 99% of people are naked and starving, and one person has a granola bar and a loincloth, that's still massive inequality, even worse than what we have now.

And if there's one thing we know about people, it's that someone is going to hoard the granola bar.

The situation is the same on the other side of the pond. Money, power and algorithmic manipulation power have concentrated enough, that the premise of democracy can be ditched.

Read Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich for an update on the current situation, where tech has replaced democracy.

Or search THN for The Nerd Reich or tech fascism topics and see that most of the topics are flagged here for no reason.

You even get an instant all-inclusive free-trade agreement with the entire United States! All you need to be able to do is produce enough within your society to pay your land tax. By contrast try to start a little capitalist society within a 'social' economic system, and it'd be off to the gulags with you.

This freedom makes it quite difficult to take the hyperbolic claims against capitalism seriously. Obviously it has lots of problems, especially in the current crony capitalist system we have, but if the solutions were as simple as e.g. 'go be socialist instead' then people could prove it even within the system itself.

Money or economy is a social construct. The laws of physics and nature are, ehm kinda constant.

Eternal growth on a finite planet isn't exactly feasible and the planet is getting a mild fever as we speak. It'll recover, but it'll remove the symbiotic beings once they've turned into parasites.

And freedom in America is kinda joke these days at least anywhere else in the world : - )

https://www.migrationpolicy.org

I think a better summary is that capitalism creates more opportunities for all. Not equal, just more.

It creates more food, more clothes, more libraries, symphony orchestras, skateboard parks, cars, ships, planes, particle accelerators and space telescopes than any other system we have come up with, which means more opportunities for people wanting to be pilots, captains, skateboarders, scientists or violinists.

Whenever someone has tried to remove the inequality aspect of this, it has resulted in a loss in opportunities for all. Including the opportunity to have food every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

(You've sufficiently established your personal opinion that capitalism > communism but that's kind of irrelevant to the actual claims you were making)

What assertion are you lacking citation for? The hubble and webb telescopes vs the ??? communist space telescopes? Tony Hawk vs the ??? communist skater? John Carmack vs the ??? communist game developer? VW and Toyotas 20 million cars per year vs Trabant?

Maybe you could provide some examples of how communism has provided opportunities to all in a way that capitalism hasn't?

This statement assumes that there exist a solution to this problem, a system that doesn't create inequality. As they say here, "Citation Needed".

AFAIK, failed experiments at such systems so far demonstrate that capitalism remains the only system capable of improving living conditions of the whole population over time, but I stand to be enlightened with the proof to the contrary.

Simply google the question, plenty of sources.

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=Q11

That’s a situation ripe for corruption.

[0]: I'm not saying they should be, since that's what political representatives are for.

I don't get this "voting every 4-6 years" story in most past of the world. This leads either to the political apathy or to the riots, like it is now in France and in Belgium.

We have to have a habit of voting in order to be efficient at it. For the same reason, my spam filters are relaxed and every day I read a few spam messages that slip though, to stay alert of what the spam is, and how it changes over time.

This definition is sloppy. If I buy a tacky "In this house..." sign and place it in my yard, I am using my financial resources to influence policy. Restricting that by law would be a disaster.

I think a better point could be made about the relationship BETWEEN financial resources and political connections. We should seek policies that limit the extent to which financial resources can easily buy political connections. This can be done by placing restrictions on public servants instead of restrictions on the public.

Of course, you're never going to totally remove the connection without totally destroying freedom of association.

In other words who would you trust to create a sensible encryption policy, Google executives or Chuck Schumer?

I know who I would pick

In reality, many companies would get Schumer attention on crypto, and other regulators, the companies would use their expertise to craft sensible policy, politicians would work with that, run it by lots of other groups and politicians, and if it passed enough tests along the way, it might come up as a bill.

It’s not like Google, or any company, likely can just put in ludicrous things, and use wizard powers to make laws. If a company breaks trust, they will lose the ability to get ears. If politicians, or parties lose trust, they get unelected. So, in order to have sane laws regarding any complex topic requires huge specialist inputs, and those specialists became expert by working in that field.

There’s simply not a pool of such people sitting around unassociated waiting to write laws to specifications of random internet people.

If we accepted your definition then it should follow that if you have political connections then you cannot influence policy without being corrupt, which seems weird because having political connections probably indicates political interest or knowledge of the issues.

Now you may feel that is an unfair description, that one can influence policy to the same extent as those without political connections and thus not be corrupt, but the problem with that is if you have political connections they will probably hear about your attempts and they will be influenced through that connection no matter what you try, not to mention that often your political connections are exactly the people that should be talked to, and in this way we see that people with political connections must be locked out of the process by your definition if we want to fight corruption.

Locking people out of the process seems as problematic as being corrupt, but luckily I follow the model of there has to be some personal benefit involved with the corruption so I don't need to argue for locking anyone out.

I'm not sure what you mean by financial, for example financial resources to affect a decision often includes advertising on the issue. I agree this can make things unfair, because someone with a lot of money can buy more ads than someone without.

In that case one could put funding limits on political ads, but so many issues are not directly political but still you can move the emotions of the public on them via advertising that it does not seem possible to really control. Maybe it should be attempted.

That said, although I believe it will invariably be unfair, unfair and corrupt are not synonymous.

[1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...

A) Vagaries that most people don't actually care much about.

B) Tradeoffs that didn't go the way you personally want.

No. Modern democracy is supposed to protect the minority and allow regular peaceful transitions of power. That's why we need individual liberties and constitutional rules that protect the individual and prevent the majority to take away their liberties.

I might just trust a random redditor more...

"He goes to my church/eats my traditional food/wears the jersey of my favorite sportsball team. I trust him!"

People decide someone is their friend due to some superficial similarity which a charlatan has dressed himself up in (and conversely that others are their enemy due to some superficial dissimilarity), and then their "friend" steals their political power to do bad things.

And people are too committed to their self-conception as savvy judges of character to admit their error. The error becomes a religion, a folkway, and is persisted across generations. You have to keep committing the error in order to honor your ancestors who were first fooled.

Just like the original post, make a definition that mistakes a pathology of the system for its core function (also: structural inequality is not corruption).

If you are a purist and eliminate all resource-backed influence by banning pooling money, hiring researchers, and organizing campaigns to influence lawmakers because "others lack those resources," you effectively ban organized labour unions, consumer watchdogs, civil liberties organizations. A well-organized national labor union has more leverage than a non-unionized gig worker in the EU. Asymmetry an inequity issue, not corruption. Well organized will trump over those who are not.

Corporations should be able to lobby, but they their lobbying should be limited more heavily.

I think that it's very common for people to work for corporations that are actively working to undermine their workers rights, and using the political clout that their workers grant to do i

Edit: Unions do this too of course. That's probably the number one accusation that people level against unions to discredit the whole idea of unionizing labour. The union management will eventually work for their own self interest instead of for the union members

Turtles all the way down

If the only way to have that ability is money and access, then it's corruption for all intends and purpose with other name. Just because it's accepted doesn't make it not corruption. And I think that's what people mean when they say they want to take lobbying away, they don't want private meetings between interest groups and lawmakers, without public input

Why do lawmakers need to talk some interest groups? If they don't have enough information to make laws, they should appoint expert groups to collect information. Talking to money bags is going to help only one thing.

In other words, they’re selling a product to their buyers, and the product is politicians.

So... you'll have the representatives make their own lobbying groups? Also, each "expert" will have their own bias, so in doing so you'll inadvertently (or intentionally) block hearing from the wider community.

A lobbying group is dead-set on their preferred policy or solution to a problem, an expert group would be much more open-minded and exploratory. I don't see how these are comparable.

> Also, each "expert" will have their own bias, so in doing so you'll inadvertently (or intentionally) block hearing from the wider community.

Everyone has a bias, you can't reasonably remove that. Besides, hearing from the wider community will not make you less biased if the majority of the community is also strongly biased. However, a lobbying group has a pile of cash backing up their opinion (even if it is false), while a group of experts would be both more knowledgeable and likely have a more diverse set of views. It would be so much better.

Point being, it's impossible to build incorruptible institutions, groups of experts, etc, but we need them nonetheless.

Lobbying in it's most basic form is simply the act of petitioning politicians that represent you, which is pretty essential in a democracy.

If you've ever called your Senator or representative to tell them you oppose a law that will negatively impact you - you've just done a little lobbying

I wish that was the case, but it is not.

Take, for example, the recent time zone changes in Canada. It's obvious that every single electronic device capable of showing current local time needs to be updated and that's first order effect of the law. And yet Manitoba gave ~4.5 weeks notice w/o speaking to anyone.

TBF Canada is not an exception and governments do that quite often, but that's does not make the situation better. One can only hope that the US and EU will give enough time to prepare for DST cancellation.

I think there's a problem with definitions here. How the general public, especially here in the U.S., tends to think of lobbying is essentially always in the form of monetary value or gifts. In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.

In theory any exchanges of monetary value or gifts should be well documented and must be disclosed. In actuality, it's much harder to document than meets the eye. There are so many ways around it that it's almost worth saying it doesn't exist (admittedly it seems especially egregious in the US but I'm no expert on how its done elsewhere).

But then, at the same time if we conclude that it's hard to document then it's hard to ban it. Its just a slippery slope all around. Institutions must be allowed to petition their government, but making sure that doesn't go too far and lend itself to corruption is difficult to enforce.

So that is likely where the author and the rest of us lead to the conclusion that the eventual result of lobbying as its implemented in essentially everywhere in the world is corruption.

Removing possibilities of corruption from MEPs means removing their power and moving it into deeper government bureaucracy where it is harder to spot. Now you have non-elected people who work whole their life in government using more power.

What many people dislike about government in the US and in the EU is that the unelected bureaucrats tend make hiring and promotion decisions based on ideology with the result that each generation of career bureaucrats is more ideologically homogeneous and more extreme in its commitment to whichever ideology is best at spreading, which in the US and EU over the last 95 years has been Leftism.

Elections are a powerful check on this process because there isn't a similar mechanism at work in the general population of voters (or at least the mechanism is much weaker in its effects).

Also we can start to see why actors who oppose Leftism or who oppose ideological hegemonies in general sometimes want decisions to be made out of self-interest: even most zealous ideologues are more motivated by self-interest than they are by advancing ideologies. I.e., allowing decision makers to act out of self-interest is one tool in the toolbox for opposing ideological hegemony.

Academics and researchers are prone to groupthink and monocultures. To quote a form of Sayre’s law “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”.

Researcher’s policies might be disastrous for society or industry yet they’ll often be insulated from any consequences, even just to their reputations.

This is prohibited, not in an ideal world, but in essentially every Western democracy except the United States. I appreciate the political difficulty of implimenting this (or indeed any useful structural) change in the contemporary American political climate / level of dysfunction. But outlawing corruption is not some utopian dream.

I think we need better infrastructure for tracking who is operating on who's behalf so we can build systems that fix these problems.

If you try to handle nuances like that up front, and somehow select for who gets the politician's attention on the basis of some parameter besides population, you're going to end up with a government that only works for the rich, because they are disproportionally able to game such things.

I don't know what this means, and there's no way to operationalize this where "do what's right only if the right lobby represents enough members" is better than simply "do what's right".

What you're advocating is going to do the exact opposite of what you're hoping for. It will increase the power of the rich and special interests.

It's common for a large special-interest lobby to face no comparably organized opposition, even when its preferred policies harm a much larger number of people. Look at the National Association of Realtors or the National Automobile Dealers Association. These are large, well-organized lobbies that promote their own special interests and harm the rest of us. There is no anti-realtor lobby.

Right now, anyone can write to or call up their representative and argue their position. That's lobbying. You don't need to get X signatures or form an organization with at least X members for the right to be heard by your representative. Putting up barriers like that isn't going to hurt the lobbies. It's going to restrict the opposing voices.

(To be clear, I'm not saying there would be an explicit threshold where a lobby needs a certain number of members. But no matter how you implement this proposal, if it has any effect, then there is some implicit threshold where that number of supporters pushes the lobby over the edge so their position is considered.)

All the money in politics - the campaign donations and the Super PACs - exist to try to get votes. Campaigning costs money. If you start requiring a threshold of votes, signatures, or members before a political position can be considered, you are handing more power to the rich and powerful. The well-funded NAR would get their policies by default unless we could organize a bigger lobby with more than their 1.5 million members.

Requiring votes, signatures, or members won't solve this. People cannot stay informed on every little issue and every special interest group. These groups are well funded, and they will campaign for their positions. Often their arguments sound convincing. Often they're misleading or dishonest. And they win. This isn't hypothetical. It happens all the time.

Now, if you mean I shouldn't be allowed to take my representative on a Caribbean vacation, then we're agreed, because bribery is (or should be) illegal. And yes, I'm including many forms of campaign donation as "bribery".

when is the last time you lobbied 50 million dollars as a citizen? is this something you do frequently? maybe ask these questions before your gotchas

I think degrading and dismissing someone's point because of a stupid grammatical mistake is much worse in practice. If you can only engage in conversations where everyone uses perfect grammar, then maybe you should just use an LLM to rewrite people's comments. It seemed like a good suggestion to me.

If you mean they donated 50 million in dark money to a PAC, then we're agreed - that's bribery and should be included in anti-bribery laws. SCOTUS fucked up egregiously when they allowed unlimited dark money to flow into campaigns.

"wHaT dOes ThE wAtEr iS wEt eVeN mEan"

By contrast go buy a top dollar lobbyist, and he'll go endlessly push your issue to all his old buddies. He'll even compose legislation that can be rubber stamped by the reps that your lobbyist will know are most inclined to agree with. You'll get better than direct contact and over a sustained period of time if necessary. I don't think the two are in any way comparable.

And yes, phone is sort of a black hole. If they note your satisfaction/lack thereof, you’ll be lucky. But you can schedule a live meeting (as I said I a sibling, for congress that’s going to be with a staffer unless you’re bringing a group and can convince them it’ll be worth their time).

Anyways, my point in all my posts in this discussion is we need to agree on definitions, because lobbying literally is making your case to the representative. The whole campaign fundraiser/PAC thing we have in the US is just legalized bribery. IMO.

Trade and especially the shared European market required industry input which you might call lobbying. Regulations had to be homogenized to create a level playing field. To attack what matters European law makers needed lobby input. This happens all the time on a smaller scale with trade agreements. Think of the famous chlorine-washed chicken in the US situation. If a country prohibits this their chicken industry might want a for-export exemption when a trade deal with the US is made.

You also have lobbying that could be seen as genuinely good. Insurance companies lobbied for a lot of car safety standards and fire safety standards. (That said I'm libertarian enough that I don't actually see enforcement of standards that protect the occupant by law as positive but most people do)

The trouble with democracy, of course, is that most people don't have (or don't think they have, at least) the time or resources to participate.

> long cooling-off periods before MEPs can become lobbyists

They already earn a public pension. They should be banned for life. Corporations know too well the internal workings of the government what allow them to corrupt it. But cooling-off periods could be a good first step towards that.

Lobbying spending isn't really "incomprehensible." The small group HN readers can easily fund lobbyists if they really want to.

https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...

Can't speak for other countries, but lobbying the way it typically happens in the US is pretty much straight-up corruption.

"GOTO considered harmful" :)

No politician or party is willing to listen to me since I'm not a 'paying customer'.

In principle that statement is not incorrect in that lobbying means that one is able to represent a view.

However had, if money flows, then this skews all bias towards that money addiction flow, at the expense of everyone else. And most lobbying is due to money, that's also a fact.

See here as a good example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...

If you get to "talk to lawmakers" by giving them money, it is corruption.

Ah yes, Europe, famously friendly to business interests. Hence so many large multinational influential corporations domiciled in Europe and being started every day

American Exceptionalism.

California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania being the few exceptions that are net positive contributors that largely subsidize every other state (the other 43).

Why can’t they pick up the phone or write a letter like the rest of us?

And you are also free to visit your representative's at their offices.

For example, Congress is open to visit - you can request a pass for specific sessions, you can schedule meetings with congressional staffers (face to face with the actual congressman is harder, but theoretically possible), etc. Local and state reps are typically easier to visit.

That said, for single-person "I want to tell you about thing X", a staffer probably works just fine. That's why they're there.

For a local politician, who likely has much more impact on your day to day, this is all far easier. They're generally less busy, less travel, and more approachable. And, they're the ones setting real estate taxes, school policy, and other things that make places truly livable (or not).

The problem is our (USA) definition of bribery is too permissive. We allow lobbyists to bribe politicians through massive fundraising dinners and donations to preferred causes (see Trump's current relationship with TechBro billionaires and Russian oligarchs).

"All" is carrying a lot ow weight here. Should we publicly fund interest groups so they can go to Washington? How big or small does the group need to be? Are not I, alone, an interest group?

No. No more lobbying. What we need is a more direct democracy.

> Lobbying is not corruption.

Cool story, lobbying is corruption.

>All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.

Me accidentally paying for a 3 star restaurant for an MEP isn't "talking" to lawmakers. It's buying them off. Total can do it 20 times every day. You can't.

Buying the house that a Supreme Court Justice's mother lives in, that's corruption.

These kind of down putting responses make everyone worse.

> paying for a 3 star restaurant for an MEP

Like I said, that's corruption in lobbying, not lobbying. Lobbying is the ability to talk to government officials.

Any mechanism that has a pathway of converting money into political influence is inherently rotten and will eventually have its flaws discovered. I don't even really see how your proposed policies are going to stop this - all the declarations, disclosures and oversights only work if there are hard lines drawn with someone watching them. We don't live in a rules-based world, so every point in the system has to be perfect.

Or we could just ban lobbying. It's never going to be equal anyway, because the interest groups of the wealthy can spend all their time and endless money to secure the best everything for themselves, even if that money doesn't literally go to the politician. Grassroots groups are composed of regular people who don't get paid to do this, have their own lives and don't have that much money to put down. It's always going to be unequal.

no, the default internet response is to try and be a contrarian arguing minor points while missing the whole societal context and leaning into weird word games etc while pretending like that makes you the adult in the room and your opponents are "emotional", "don't know what they're talking about", etc. Which is basically half this thread (or this whole forum for one).

How often to the non-moneyed interests win the legislation game? Money gets you face time and attention while paying for politicians' political campaigns so they can stay in power.

It's corruption.

Yes, all citizens deserve access. And they have it, Except it's Animal Farm: all pigs are equal except some pigs (the rich, the "Super PACs", and the corporations) are more equal than others. Because they spend money for influence.

Corruption.

Political organizing is the democratic process of building agreement amongst voters and then pushing for change from the ground up. It revolves around action, protest, nomination and election.

Lobbying is a system whereby people and groups with money, spend those funds to influence politicians and policy without the need to build a coalition of supportive voters. Its aim is to turn money into influence.

Lobbying is indeed corruption with a suit on.

-- Winston Churchill, 10 November 1942

I say this because you could make monetary contributions illegal and lobbying would still be legal and ethical. We talk about campaign contributions as a separate issue and they have been treated in the courts separately.

I agree that putting strict limits on campaign finance is an important battle that is still ahead of us.

Campaign finance is [currently] corrupt. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

This either means that a) buying our elected officials is cheap or b) we’re not looking in the right place to see the actual transactions.

A much more likely (and hard to regulate) form of corruption is “back-door lobbying” where there isn’t a clear payment now but a promise of bigger payment in the future. Such as “you helped our industry do X, so once you retire from congress we’ll reward you with a high layer do—nothing consultant’ role”.

considering that the two main candidates in the last prez election raised about a billion dollars each, I beg to differ

yes, individual contributions may be capped at $25K, but the PACs can spend unlimited amounts thanks to Citizens United

that's not a crazy amount if you think about the potential ROI of a few of these meetings vs. blowing money on an ad campaign.

there's no way that its this cheap to buy our representatives, which is why im convinced that looking at on-the-books campaign donations is a red herring.

Look no further than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for a plethora of modes of corruption used in the American system.

What influence groups say to policy makers has to be able to be challenged by opposing interest.

Not only that, but it's important for these advocacy groups to disclose their financing for all to see.

Its always going to be a cat and mouse game because ultimately corporations want to have undue influence over politics, it helps them greatly.

The first stepping stone needs to be to acknowledged that the interests of corporations can and in many cases will be against the interests of the majority of constituents and so we can't allow for our laws and practices to just waver this fact and institutionalise corruption through lobbying.

It's very naive to think consumers and the general population can organise to the effectiveness and level of a corporation. But that doesn't mean people don't care, or don't deserve to have their interests protected.

I can indicate other citizens that I trust on the basis of their expertise, and they can further indicate others in the same way.

The roots of those trees are my representatives for whatever domain, they have unequal standing proportional to the size of their constituency, and I can reconfigure my pointers towards different representatives at different times, or I can point them all at myself and show up in person for some direct democracy.

On the other hand, the idea of one person one vote should also be applied to lobbying. It is possible to legislate into law that all lobbying attempts must publicize a list of signatories behind it. This empowers non-corporate lobbying, since they have the backing of the people, not solely money.

By enforcing lists of signatories, and mandate publication of signatories from all lobbying attempts, we provide transparency in the influence of government, which is a vital component in a well governed democracy.

Democracy in this form can be quite ugly. Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, they had large popular movements behind them. That pure democracy doesn't work was well known by Plato already.. it seems pretty crazy that modern people in working democracies with balance of powers keep forgetting what the balance of power is for. Reminds me of how the US removed a bunch of banking laws "because we haven't had a financial crisis in decades" only to immediately have one every decade.

this one is new https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__108e.html

edit:: honestly germany is maybe one of the most corrupt countrys in the world because it was not only legal but best practice to work with the professional advise of the industry.

Us little guys probably want to hear the contents of those meetings so we can check that they do make sense. Private influencing is dangerous.

We also don't want people going from the Ministry of Defence or the Army straight into working for a defence company - that should be illegal and yet it happens a lot here in the UK.

Civil servants and politicians should get a comfortable pension and be unemployable for 3 years after their term.

Here are some organizations that lobby:

- Cancer Society

- ASPCA

- Associations of students

- Local cities and counties

- Trade unions

- Regular every-day people (you can literally just go schedule a meeting with your representation. That is lobbying.)

Of course, if everyone gets to lobby, corporate interests can too.

Without this function, legislators would largely be blind during policymaking.

Lobbying does not, on its own, imply corruption or involvement of money. In California and federally, money spent for lobbying is tightly tracked and publicly released.

Or do they lobby around a $200,000 chemotherapy treatment that increases (or decreases) the patient's life expectancy by 0.2%, or about two weeks?

associations of students - yep, american tuition, backed by the government, is highest in the world and the education is worse and worse. Or is it 18 year-olds with barely any life skills actively participating in federal government, with daddy's money? Or it is lobbying without money?

local cities - that's part of a government. A city is a government.

regular people - yep, I have certainly lobbied!

I'm skipping ASPCA until the acronym is expanded, you don't make meaning by appending random letters one after another.

and trade unions... are a kind of a forced monopoly, and don't forget to pay your $500 monthly due. they are a kind of corruption themselves. For example, what on earth is a police union?! So the government (police) is arguing with the government, to protect the government (police) from the "bad" government? Riiiiiiiiight.

Every single one of these is corruption. If you think a city lobbying itself is not corruption, you should wipe your glasses to see more clearly. And don't get me started on city councils.

- The American Cancer Society lobbies against big tobacco. Warnings exist on cigarettes because of their lobbying work.

- Associations of students are distinct from associations of administrators or institutions. All of them lobby government. There are associations of this kind at every level, including for public city colleges, some of which don’t charge tuition at all.

- The simple practice of lobbying your legislators does not imply or require money. Donations to campaigns are a totally separate thing and are regulated tightly as well. For example: hosting a dinner for legislators to learn about some topic is lobbying; donating to a campaign so they can buy ads is campaign finance. Both are tracked and regulated and the data is public.

- Local cities/counties: yes, those are governments, obviously. They are still stakeholders in the process of making policy just like anyone else.

- In the US, a state government is distinct from a local government. So a local city informing the state of impacts on policy, and the state factoring that in to new or changed policy, is totally normal and reasonable and also a feature, not a bug, of a healthy democracy.

- ASPCA = American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

- Trade unions are affected by policy and law, and therefore deserve a voice at the table just like everyone else. Whether unions are a good or bad thing is entirely outside the scope of lobbying as a concept.

Every single one of these is normal and not necessarily corruption. Corruption is errant in a system; lobbying is the system working as intended.

Policy should be made by people who are aware of what their policies will do to other people. Simply put, lobbying is American democracy’s solution to that problem.

If you live in America, work in America, or have interests in America, you can lobby, too. You don’t need to register or obtain permission or a license. Just call your representative and set up a meeting.

Re: Cruelty to Animals. I'll tell you something that people who are close to animals told me. First, the constitution affords precisely zero rights to animals. Second, in order to tortune animals all you need is to get a license. All of that is more bureaucracy, or as a sane person would say, more corruption.

Re: "lobbying... [] does not... [] require money." The original statement was: lobbying is corruption. Lobbying is bribery. Here you say the opposite: lobbying is not bribery, because it doesn't involve money. But we all know that it does. So, you may want to retract you statement that lobbying does not involve money, because it does.

Re: "trade unions... [are] outside the scope of lobbying as a concept." The original statement was: lobbying is corruption. Your counter point was: trade unions lobby and they are not corruption. Now you say: trade unions are irrelevant to lobbying. I think you have to retract some of your contradictory statements. (Trade unions are not people. If you think or imply that a government "deserves" to rule over people, you are about as wrong as a human can be.)

Re: "Corruption is errant in a system." Be careful with your grammar please. Errant is an adjective. Phrase your thoughts better.

And speaking of phrasing your thoughts better: trade unions do not "deserve a voice". You are saying that corruption deserves a voice. No, it does not deserve a voice. A wrong statement does not deserve to be expressed. Understand this.

Like I said, and I think you and I can agree on this. The system works as intended. Corruption *is* the system working as intended.

Your notion that corruption is normal might exist in some places on earth. Do politicians go to jail in your country? Because they do in mine.

Cruelty to animals doesn’t have anything to do with the Constitution. Many things are not listed in the Constitution. There are laws anyway.

There is no Animal Torture License anywhere in the United States. Torturing animals is illegal. Can’t believe this needs to be stated. I think some other license qualifies by this description in your head, but I can’t imagine what it could possibly be. For example, a medical testing license is not a torture license and I have to believe you are capable of understanding that.

My counterpoint about trade unions is completely misstated in your comment. Nobody said unions are not corrupt; sure, some unions engage in corruption. They all engage in lobbying, even the ones that do not commit crimes. They are in fact lobbying organizations, they are advocacy groups. That is why they exist, to advocate.

Corruption is errant[0] in a system. That sentence is completely valid English. “Errant” is an adjective, yes. I am using it as an adjective to describe corruption. Please learn to read.

Trade unions are just like everyone else in America: they are in America. Therefore they get a voice whether they are corrupt or not. Engaging in corruption can put you in jail; advocating for your opinion (lobbying) is protected by the 1st Amendment as it is considered free speech, and furthermore still has nothing to do with money by definition.

No, we cannot both agree on your closing statement. It just repeats your position which I clearly and blatantly disagree with. Corruption is errant and you can tell because people who do it and get caught go to jail.

[0]: “Errant is an adjective meaning straying from the proper course, behaving wrongly, or moving about aimlessly” - Merriam Webster

when you said "corruption is errant in a system", that didn't make sense, and also was false. It's not like corruption is breaking or experiencing a hickup. The corruption is doing just fine, thank you. You can say: voltage is errant in my welder. That means voltage is not working. When you say corruption is errant - you're implying the corruption is not working. But in america, the corruption is working just fine, thank you. You are acting like there is no curruption in the united states. Just look at biden! Or if you are the other kind - just look at trump! Look at Ilhan Omar. What, all of a sudden corruption exists in america, but it's only limited to just this one person, ilhan omar? Or if I mention Katie Zacharia, what, you'll say that only two people in usa are corrupt, only ilhan omar and katie zacharia? What are you even talking about? corruption exists somewhere else far, far away, but not here?

> Do politicians go to jail in your country?

What does that mean?! Do politicians go to jail in your country?

> Cruelty to animals...

I said, in order to legally torture animals, all you need is a license. That's corruption, do I need to spell it out? C.O.R.R.U.P.T.I.O.N. Search #beaglegate

> Nobody said unions are not corrupt...

Cool, we can agree on something: unions are corrupt.

> Corruption is errant[0] in a system...

No, corruption works as intended. When there is no corruption, when a system is perfectly fair and honest, then you say, corruption is errant in the system. What you mean is errant as a noun, which is wrong, and you are wrong. Do not confuse truth and false, you sound fundamentally corrupt. In fact, you are just wrong overall with this word. Improve your grammar, use a different word. Do not use the word "errant".

> trade unions [] get a voice

Absolutely not. people get a voice. trade unions are some abhorrant misguided concept of an organizational mechanic. People have voices. Your weird convoluted contraptions do not have a right to have a voice or an opinion. You can argue back and forth that people have a voice via trade unions. Whatever, but the argument must be human-centric. Trade unions don't have a voice, or any rights. Get it straight.

In fact, if organizational structures deserve a voice, then the Confederacy "deserves" a "voice" and must be reinstated. What now from you - silence?

> No, we cannot both agree

No, but we can, whether you like to, or not. : ) We must agree on this: the system acts as intended. From your point of view, because the system is pure and innocent, like a beautiful flower. From my point of view, because corruption is inherent (ie native, do not confuse with nonsense "errant") in american political system. See? You must agree. The system works as intended.

Lobbying and corruption are different things. Sometimes one involves the other, just like commercial enterprise also sometimes involves or creates corruption.

I wasn’t taught this in school, by the way. I was the youngest registered lobbyist in California state history, at age 16, because I lived nearby and decided to go lobby my state senator about vocational education law.

Hardly the spitting image of corruption, or the bleak fantasy in your head about American life.

I am lucky I have been afforded considerably more access than the average person to sway government workings to my benefit, though I do not.

This HN discussion entails three parties: the naive, the just, and the exploiters.

Popular belief is not a defense for ignorance. Just because the practice of lobbying is misunderstood by the public does not render it illegal or wrong.

> highly undesirable to the regular guy

On the contrary, the “regular guy” (whatever that is) has many interests, and most, if not all of those interests, engage in some form of lobbying, even if that is just a letter or email sent to your legislators. The “regular guy” benefits greatly from many of these lobbying efforts: the American Cancer Society lobbies so that the “regular guy” gets cancer less often and has more choices in responding to it. As I shared in another part of this thread, warning labels on cigarettes are (partly) a direct result of their lobbying work.

Plus, the “regular guy” can just engage in lobbying. So your point makes no sense.

> It is your choice to focus on the language instead of the phenomenon

Really, did you read anything I wrote? Maybe about the part where I registered as a lobbyist myself and became an expert on FPPC filings? I gave a TED talk about it, actually.

> I am lucky I have been afforded […] sway

Well it sure seems to me that you are a “regular guy” on hckrnews. Or are you a titan of industry incognito? A maharaja of some kind? If not, please refer to your own argument about you being a “regular guy” and yet sustaining the ability to “sway” government “workings.”

You are essentially proving my point as a byproduct of your weird brag here.

> though I do not [sway the government in my favor]

Well that is nice of you but everyone else does all the time. So you should, too. It’s a little strange to ask for honor points for not engaging in what you just described as corruption.

> This HN discussion […] the naive […]

Truly! I can’t believe people walk the earth whom think the American Cancer Society or American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are somehow evildoers. Wild thing to argue

Did you not call everyone else naive at the end of your comment? It seems to me you have exhausted your position.

Or did you want to substantiate why lobbying to prevent cruelty to animals is bad?

Sometimes you’re just wrong. Stand there in your wrongness and be wrong and get over it. The sooner you do that, the sooner you can be correct.

Anyone who is an expert in their field knows that the government is completely clueless and ineffective when it comes to regulating what you do. That’s normal and fine, nobody can be an expert in every situation of every field, including regulators

When experts give feedback to the government, that’s lobbying.

And practically, corruption got much worst after supreme court legalized more of it.

Voting for amendments will be implemented as pull requests :)

(aww downvotes.. can't believe people still willingly suck up for politicians)

Come now, do you seriously, deep in your heart of hearts, believe that it'll be WORSE than what we have had so far?

Can you recall 1 fucking year from all of humankind's entire history when there wasn't a war going on?

and the reasons for those wars?

then went on to bomb many more people

Do you honestly expect a handful of humans to make decisions for billions?

Or do you expect a million bureaucrats to coordinate efficiently and fairly?

If you mean literally every person should have an equal vote, how do marginal groups get to have a say?

Lobbying is corruption, and it's also pay to play. Noone gets anything good out of it.

And women have been able to vote in the U.S. for decades longer than the governments of the E.U.'s largest countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) have existed in their current democratic forms. When women got the right to vote in Wyoming, kicking off the movement towards national women's suffrage, the French were on Napoleon III, Spain had a king, Germany wasn't even a country yet, and Italy was a recently unified Kingdom.

MADD [1] is a lobby group but they don’t have influence by donating billions of dollars.

Its makes much more sense to just reverse the changes in lobby rules (Citizens United) than to “ban” lobbying.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving

MADD does not pay politicians. MADD does not bring politicians gifts. MADD does not invite them to an expensive restaurant for three hours of one on one. MADD does not do any of the things a lobbyist does that is, for all intents and purposes, corruption.

So you know what ? Yeah, let's silence the don't kill puppies group, if it means that the leeches at the european commission also don't get their ways. "oh but then it will be done secretly" good that means it's officially corruption and we can jail everyone involved.

Then we went to our current system and both proliferated. In balance it seems to have been quite a mistake.

It would make a great documentary.

There's a fairly simple solution to this:

https://youtu.be/CgqhywW9Cto?si=uZBJB0-SbEzij7_S

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50029630

Also, political ads in the U.S. have become so obnoxious. I don’t know how it is elsewhere.

Ads in the U.S. are personal attacks at the opponents character or lies about them. There is currently an ad about how an opposing politician supports sex change surgery without parent consent. Nothing is believable about the ad - yet somehow it’s not slander or libel.

This is the ad. https://youtu.be/WFISHnLCmms

It is illegal under U.S. federal law for corporations to give money to campaigns.

However, "gross wealth" ala billionaires needs instead to have a definition of bell curve based (statistical) analysis, and outliers above X standard deviations need to have economic sanction tools used against them. Doing this means that no matter how inflationary or deflationairy the currency is, we're measuring gross wealth by standard deviations of the mean, rather than some number that can and will be gamed.

And how the billionaires got their money is never by their work, but instead the mass extraction of millions of people and scraping over the top. Of course, when 'scraping over the top' involves piss bottles, injuries and deaths 3x higher than industry average, and more abhorrent things, yeah you need to fall. Hard.

Huh? What Europe are they talking about?

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparen...

And although lobbying is generally bad public lobbying is a much healthier equilibrium than what a lot of countries do - everyone playing pretend that the government officials are acting out of some sense of noblesse oblige and there aren't powerful interest groups. Humans don't work that way, they've never worked that way and the whole idea that they might is quite likely a propaganda campaign by some very ugly people who would never be allowed to hold power if there was any level of public debate on what they were doing.

There is a huge issue here that alternative approaches must address - if wealthy, powerful people can't get what they want within the system then they'll destabilise the system until they can. The poor and powerless have, over the millennia, proven far too disorganised and unprincipled to stop the wealthy and powerful. It is almost always factional conflicts between wealthy, powerful people that move the status quo around.

Did anyone go to jail for that or that was lobby ?

How former chancellor of Germany suddenly got a big title in Russian oil company , went on Putin birthday to celebrate and no one asked questions?

Or maybe Iran expert initiate ?

Or entire Austria chancellor fiasco ?

Caviar diplomacy maybe ?

At least lobby is transparent.

America half way out of their shame moment , Europe … not sure there’s ever way our due to how they distributed are . France and Germany entering the room in the next election cycle . Hungary before , Slovakia , Bulgaria , Czech Republic now

There has never been a time when human power structures have been incorruptible nor will there ever be. The very existence of government implies corruption, and so the wise move is to find a way to exert as much influence as possible so the corruption benefits you.

May the best bastard win!

But it is a bribe. It is not the fault of the people if legislation has been undermined in democracies to suit the rich.

This is a problem pretty much all democracies have, to varying extent.

1 - Companies employ taxpayers.

2 - Companies are taxpayers.

Remove companies' right to advocate for their interests gives disproportionate influence to employees and the unemployed, resulting in economic policy that discourages investment and hiring.

Transparency -> yes, emphatically, and that's good enough.

Policymaking does not reflect the interests of various citizens fairly at all.

It is ALWAYS a coterie of specifically placed individuals, who have navigated complex social arrangements such that they are maintaining social dominance of the coterie, which itself “controls” previously seized materiel and personnel from some group of conquered people

There is no mechanical or mathematical way to actually give singular direction to more than about 1000 people at a time that has any type of explicit consensus.

Here is a web page from the European Parliament using the same terms; https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparen... including a whole paragraph on why lobby groups are important for europe. "This is a legitimate and necessary part of the decision-making process to make sure that EU policies reflect people’s real needs."

But let's be real the blog post author only wrote this to dunk on americans. It's just embarrassing they did it from such a clearly ignorant perspective.

Transparent talks is the key part. Without transparent talk how do you know if your representative is doing corruption behind your back? Representatives are elected in democracy to represent the interests of people of their constituency. Technically, since now technology has grown enough for each person to represent themselves, we really don't need representatives anymore in order to do democracy. We would still need some people to form government, which is different from representative in legislature.

So then, are they stating that all lobbying is corruption, including European lobbying, and Americans refuse to understand this while Europeans understand they are corrupt?

Is the author suggesting that only in the US is lobbying corruption while in Europe lobbying is just and moral activity?

If one group puts more resources on a specific topic, they may have an outsized impact. We certainly see this with the teachers unions.

How is this different than anything else? Legal matters? Healthcare? Automobile purchases?