Yeah, why dont the poor and downtrodden just pay their lobbyists to change the law of the land... what?

The corporations have the money and the drive to get the laws changed, who else does?

I was hoping someone would start a popular kickstarter style site for this.

It seems pretty simple to me. If you want your laws changed, pool your money and go lobby the gov't just like every other corporation.

That exists: Mayday PAC. Lawrence Lessig organized it last year. They raised $11 million and tried to influence some key Congressional races, but it didn't really work. Now they're trying some different things:

https://medium.com/@lessig/we-tried-we-learned-we-re-trying-...

Interesting link, but $11 million bucks is probably not enough to buy even a single Senator, even if his district is an extremely cheap media market.

A recent Senate campaign in one of the nation's cheapest media markets (Jon Tester's) was run for ~15 million bucks[0] in coordinated campaign funds, plus probably-larger undisclosed amounts of "independent" campaign funding through PAC's etc.

In the same cheap media market, Senator Max Baucus raised >$5 million[1] for the coordinated campaign in his final Senate race, in which he ran effectively unopposed. Again this $5 million does not account for his pre-existing war chest from thirty five years of Senate campaigns or the (vastly larger) fundraising of his GlacierPAC or other related "independent" political organizations.

So the minimum single-senator campaign cost is probably somewhere between those two bounds. Therefore I don't regard the core idea of Mayday PAC as a failure; instead it seems like they need to scale it before we can decide if it's workable.

[0] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n0002...

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n0000...

Yeah! None of this one-man-one-vote crap, back to some good old fashioned plutocracy. After all if the top 10-20% own 90% of the wealth, it's only right and proper that they also own an equivalent share of the political power. ;-)

Nobody said it was right, just that it's less bad than having just the rich lobbying.

Do you play board games?

Any rule set can be gamed / broken.

To keep the game going, sometimes players just need to do the right thing, thereby honoring other player's investment in the game.

And law is so much more complicated than a board game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...

Changing the laws requires a sizable investment in lobbyists and bribe money before any ROI can be achieved. Most individuals simply don't have enough taxable income to make the investment worthwhile. Megacorps do. The situation is not morally symmetrical and not practically symmetrical.