I've often wondered what sort of effect simply passing a law that all representatives must live full-time in their home districts would have. It would certainly make lobbying uneconomical - instead of one lobbyist being able to wine & dine 535 members of Congress, they would only be able to wine & dine one member, or perhaps 2-3 in a densely-packed municipality. It might lead to representatives considering their constituents as their "tribe" rather than the government as a whole. It would probably slow down the pace of regulation, and significantly raise the threshold for what level of support a bill needs to become law.

> instead of one lobbyist being able to wine & dine 535 members of Congress, they would only be able to wine & dine one member, or perhaps 2-3 in a densely-packed municipality.

It wouldn't really affect the ability of rich lobbying organizations to reach all members of Congress, though it might somewhat increase how rich such orgnizations would have to be to even modestly effective, though, really, the effective lobbying organizations are already often the ones that lobby at all of the national, state, and local levels and are connected to grassroots (or at least astroturf) organizations that have broad geographic reach, so, really, it probably doesn't change that much at all.

Unless you eliminate the national capital district entirely and put the entire central administration on a constant cross-country tour (remember that Congress isn't the whole of the government), it probably also creates an imbalance in influence through access with those members physically located close to the capital having more influence. Face-to-face meetings still matter for influence (after all, that's what you are trying to leverage by removing a concentration of lobbying targets), but that also applies to face-to-face meetings between legislators and, e.g., executive branch officials, and legislators exert influence as well as being targets of it.

You mean convince the lawmakers to put themselves under house arrest? Yes, that is going to work. But only until somebody invents some tool or device that would allow people to communicate over large distances.

You could phrase it as "Spend more time with your family and out of the hustle of the beltway! Avoid spending a fortune on private schools, private drivers, and a second apartment in DC." There are several lawmakers who come from modest means, actually grew up in their districts, and have family and community ties there that they need to leave behind for Washington.

It'd probably work best after a significant changeover in Congress, when there are a lot of freshman reps all dealing with navigating capitol hill. Such a change would be a big power shift from people who have established relationships to people who have fresh ideas.

And the idea is that they'd be using e-mail, videoconference, Google Moderator, or some other electronic means to communicate with their fellow reps. The idea is to build stronger bonds of trust between reps and their constituents than between reps and lobbyist/other reps, so that they actually act like representatives instead of a separate caste.

> And the idea is that they'd be using e-mail, videoconference, Google Moderator, or some other electronic means to communicate with their fellow reps.

If those were as effective means of full-spectrum communication as face-to-face meetings, then moving them out of the capital to their districts wouldn't effect lobbyists ability to influence them -- lobbyists can use technology to communicate with members, too.

The point is that they convey information without building trust. Research has shown that face-to-face contact is essential for building trust, because there is a lot of subconscious emotional information conveyed in body language. E-mail and other electronic communication conveys the factual, logical information, but not the emotional information. So if you want representatives to collectively decide things based on what is rational and logical but not be subconsciously influenced by lobbyists or other politickers, cut the emotional channel out of their communications.

It's the same reason that Google makes promotion decisions by a committee located on another continent. You want people to judge based on facts and not impressions, so divorce the objective facts from the subjective impressions.

Some of the decisions can not be actually made based on facts, such as decisions about future performance of some person (there are no facts that can guarantee it) or future effect of certain policy (the facts may be lacking or subjective and depend on interpretation). So, unfortunately, in many aspects in the politics "decisions based on facts only" are just not possible.

This idea embodies what's wrong with political Ideology especially in the mind of a technically minded person, in my opinion.

The left think the problem is the rich. Rich people inevitably have the resources to buy power and the incentive to do so. Wealth begets power. Look at history. Get rid of the rich.

The right think the problem is power. The powerful inevitably have the incentive to sell their power. Wealth begets power. Look at history. Get rid of the political power.

Both of these positions are trying to tie the political economy in a tidy bow. Set up a few meta rules and all else flows from that. Neither are in any way practical. Both ignore other things like political inevitabilities of a democracy.

So take and ideological libertarian. She believes a government should enforce contracts, arrest criminals and (maybe) build roads. How does having this utopian vision influence her position on this issue in this world?

It translates to some completely irrelevant, theoretical position. "We shouldn't need a law banning money in politics because money should have nothing to gain from being in politics." This is insane!. In this world, politicians do have power and money does have an interest in politics.

We can't get rid of either wealth or power. Or, if you think we can, lets agree that we are not going to in the next couple of years. It is possible make and enforce a law that says bribery is illegal and use an effective common sense definition of bribery. If you want to campaign for you libertarian revolution or a gradual reduction of taxes and government spending, that's fine.

But, it is completely illogical to colour your position on what should be done now by what will or won't be necessary in some unlikely future.

I'll give you a corollary. I think that drugs should be legal worldwide. Good or bad, I think people have a right to ingest whatever they want and it's inappropriate to put them in jail for such decisions. The demand for drugs can't be stopped and criminalizing drugs creates enormous criminal industries.

In some producer and transit countries (eg Mexico), this global prohibition is causing an enormous harm, destabilizing the country with a lot of violence. The solution, in my opinion, is to decriminalize drugs worldwide. This might happen to some extent at some point, but it won't happen in the next few years. Meanwhile, it makes sense for the Mexican government to do whatever they can to reduce the harm being caused now by drugs.

Their domestic policy on marijuana has little or no effect on the level of violence from the cartels. It's not relevant.

> "...thereby automagically reducing lobbyism."

Only the visible stuff. Any sufficiently well-resourced organisation can simply adjust its tactics to suit this environment (a Global Active Adversary?). For example, just buy up enough media outlets and adjust the reporting to support your worldview. This probably happens to some extent now but it's probably easier to just keep a lobbyist on hand.

Buying up media outlets is already centralization of power if you truly build a system to distribute power you will limit the number of media companies one entity can own.

You need to understand that this is nonsense.

First of all, there is lobbying and power politics in really, REALLY local politics. Also it costs a lot less to influence a low level guy. If all I have control over is a school district, you might be able to buy my support with a few tens of thousands of dollars put into a football team. If I am a state senator, I'm going to want considerably more, something that helps my whole district. Hundreds of thousands of dollars towards a major fund. If I'm a US Senator, then you're gonna have to get me more again, and it's probably not going to be money so much as other considerations. Maybe I want a bridge built. Maybe I want some naval destroyers built in my state's ironworks rather than the one up in Maine. Whatever it is it will be tricky as hell to outright buy my influence on anything. It may be cheaper and more effective to just buy up all the local town councils in the state by hosting a party for each of them than it is to get ahold of a US Senator.

Meanwhile the local guys also make major policy decisions, in aggregate. For example, if I can get every superintendent in Texas to buy a particular schoolbook for their schools, one that deals with Creationism as a legitimate 'alternative theory' to evolution, then I've actually just made it uneconomical to print other schoolbooks. So now everyone from California and New York and Delaware and Vermont also get a schoolbook pushing creationism, and a whole new generation of blue-state kids are being indoctrinated into my ideology. Boom.

A lot of ordinary people seem to be barred from doing anything by willful ignorance. It seems to be a rational decision too; if they let themselves fall into Stockholm syndrome, they won't be weeded out for 'fighting the system'. Just having an attitude your employer doesn't like is enough to be denied opportunities, or work at all.

^People need relief from this fear, and time to read and become informed.

You might be interested to know that there was an Amendment to the Constitution that was only one state short of being approved that attempted to address this problem early.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_State...

According to the text of that Wikipedia article, Article One would have no effect on the present Congress. "nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons" means that each representative must represent at least 50k people; the smallest congressional district (Rhode Island's 1st, at 527,000 people) exceeds that by a factor of ten.

Power is granted by the beholder. When you no longer believe in an entity's power over you, it is shattered.

Sure. Keep saying that when you are at a barrel of one of their guns.

Remember that well: what gives them power is an unerring force to use deadly force at a whim. "Make pot brownies using hash oil? No knock warrant with potential life sentence"...

What gives them power is the illusion of the ability to unilaterally use deadly force on a whim. No nation has a standing army or security force of sufficient dimension to quash a unilateral uprising through force alone.

Sure, an individual ceasing to believe in the power of a state is a drop in the ocean, and ultimately will not end well for the individual in most cases.

If a mass of individuals, however, cease believing, then the state's power evaporates. Witness every revolution, ever. It's not a question of the people assuming power, rather just the people refusing to grant the state power, en masse.

No, what gives them power is their very real ability to unilaterally use deadly force on a whim. What lets them maintain power is apathy on the part of the proletariat, their desire to be ruled, and individualized fear of authority. The illusion is actually that those in power can't hurt you, and it's something you only get when you unite with others and begin to equate the survival of the movement with your own survival. "I can't die, there's a thousand of us and only one of him."

Also you talk about the state's power evaporating, but a shitload of peasant rebellions have been put down by those in charge. Like, almost all of them ever. Even the USA would have been utterly demolished if the Brits hadn't said "you know what, these colonials don't actually have enough value to fight over this. And they'll come crawling back anyway once they figure out they can't trade because Britannia rules the waves."

This is silly. Yes, the worker holds the means of production and blah blah blah but if you're not united with all the other workers then the local lord can just murder you and now everyone is scared and climbing over one another to argue that he was right to do it.