Conflating two things. Actually lobbying is the act of trying to persuade by meeting with a representative. Campaign contributions are also a way of persuading but are separate.
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.
100%. Experts need to talk to politicians who don't understand the issue in order to make them understand and make better laws. If we banned anyone from trying to talk to a politician ("lobbying") we would get enormously stupid laws all the time.
Its too simplistic to think that the only form of political signaling that should happen is ... one person one vote as a basis for a mandate to represent peoples interests. Its easy to see how that can lead to a tyranny of the majority situation. There does need to be a path for influence for those with special interests in an area to influence decisions also. I think the arguments usually come down to which types of special interests give which types of standing on an issue.. if we want to say a business working in an industry shouldn't lobby then do we also say that a local environmental group should have a say about some area they are experts on also.. Some things are also put up for general referendum even when they outweightedly affect only a small group.. I think a lot of places had made progress towords finding this balance of steakholder representation.. but now were just slipping back to creptocracy and tyranny eveywhere and forgetting it all.
Complete disagreement with tyranny of the majority. That is simply 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.
> Complete disagreement with tyranny of the majority. That is simply 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.
Experts need to talk to politicians, but it should be done so through a proper institutional structure (for example a public hearing). Not in private meetings.
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 think the fix is to make representative democracy recursive.
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.
When you look at the actual dollar amounts for these campaign contributions, they are often fairly small. They are in the ballpark where any well paid individual (doctors, engineers) would be able to afford a 1:1 coffee meeting with their representative.
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”.
I would take public lobbying anyday over outlawing it like where I live and it being restricted to people who have enough money to do it behind closed doors.
I would take the complete removal of meat-based politicians replaced with open-source AI with transparent training, weights, and decision/reasoning process.
Voting for amendments will be implemented as pull requests :)
I think this is wrong. The fact that elon musk or israel was able to fund a public PAC in US transparently is a good thing rather than behind closed door, unlike how walmart did in developing countries like India and got caught.
You seem to be stuck in "either or" thinking instead of "and". In other words, the closed door meetings will happen either way. Transparency is performative.
No I am not, I am not claiming absolute transparency I have only mentioned it incentivises it, and that incentive is better than anti incentive, it's shades of gray.
It's crazy that we need this article. It's just bribery with a single extra step. I never understood how everyone thought this was normal while growing up.
It is normal, at least it's how pretty much all human societies and governments have worked in practice forever. Public education and propaganda have left most of us with the impression that the system is/should be much better and cleaner than it is in practice, because government-issued schoolbooks usually don't spend a lot of time criticizing current government practice.
Lobbying is teriboe and the explanation cited is good for those unfamiliar.
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.
If I had an opinion on an issue but no dog in the fight; and if I were to explain my opinion to politicians in the hope they might learn from or even share it -- I may well be "lobbying", but I don't believe I'd be corrupt.
Not sure where in Europe the author lives, but in Germany we absolutely have lobbying, "donations", "connections" and politicians meandering between corporations and public offices that are meant to regulate the same corporations, all without any consequences
He was talking about the European parliament. The lobbying is organized and transparent there. But still some recent cases have demonstrated there remains some corruption.
Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
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.
If we define lobbying as using your financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy, then of course it’s corruption. It’s a non-level playing field. Disclosure or transparency do not change this fundamental fact. And it’s an embarrassment to any real idea of egalitarian democracy.
But others don't lack those means. Others always have financial resources and political connections, even if you banned lobbying. Of all the ways people can influence policy, this is the legal one. The other methods are not nearly as civilized.
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?
Yes, absolutely. Simply check. They’ve spent far over a billion over the past decade directly to politicians, PACs, etc. The teachers union is the largest union in the US, and I think even the world.
All of this is missing the ultimate underlying truth that capitalism (at least as it is implemented here and now) is the problem here. Capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality over time while nominally providing "equal opportunity" to all.
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
This is not an inherent truth to capitalism. It might somewhat be the case in America right now, but that’s because we have chosen certain tax brackets and other choices that allows for it.
One reason I'm fully in support of capitalism is that you're 100% free to create subsystems within it. Go get some people together, buy some cheap land in the middle of nowhere, and start your new socialist, communists, or whatever other system you might fancy utopia.
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.
The concentration of power and the crossed planetary boundaries...
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 : - )
Remove capital, and concentration of power is an inherent truth to any system, particularly one claiming to be socialist and controlling the economy on behalf of the people.
Humanity is beyond a political system. This phase is technofeodalism or tech fascism.
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.
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.
Ah yes. The two genders: capitalism or divine right
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...
What political-economic system doesn't produce increasing levels of inequality? It's not a bad-faith question. I truly haven't heard of one. I find the standard utopian takedown of capitalism to be unconvincing because it generally posits a state which has never existed, and which I think probably cannot exist due to the nature of humans.
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.
>Capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality over time while nominally providing "equal opportunity" to all.
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.
I provided citations for my assertions, artificial interference in capitalism (by means of communism) has caused famine.
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?
> ...capitalism (...) is the problem here. Capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality over time while nominally providing "equal opportunity" to all.
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.
Those groups are representing people, and yes, in an ideal world, in which politicians simply represent their constituents, they would be unnecessary. In a democracy, public policy is supposed to reflect public opinion. Yet, there is endless political science research showing that public policy usually has very little to do with public opinion. That is because under capitalism, capital concentrates, and it then uses that concentrated capital to influence public policy through legalized corruption (lobbying). If whatever some megacorp is lobbying for were actually in the public interest, and public policy reflected public opinion, there would be no need for their lobbying. They lobby because their interests are not aligned with the public’s interest.
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.
This is why we have freedom of speech and association in the US. If you have the will, but not the resources, you can rally people to your cause. You can try to find like-minded individuals with shared goals and with your collective resources, you can build influence.
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.
> If you have the will, but not the resources, you can rally people to your cause. You can try to find like-minded individuals with shared goals and with your collective resources, you can build influence.
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.
On the contrary, yours is the naive view. It's just disguised with extreme cynicism, but they are often one and the same. Everything will fall short if measured against Utopian, wishful thoughts about how democracy/society ought to work.
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.
Your profile says you're a SWE at Meta, not working at a nail salon and a daycare. You work for one of the most powerful and wicked companies on the planet, and you're here to tell us how jaded you are and how hopelessly naive the idea of keeping a republic is? The poster you're responding to doesn't sound so naive, and probably isn't as privileged either. They said specifically that it wasn't easy, but that everyone has a chance.
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.
That doesn't always work though, since citizens aren't given a vote on every policy issue[0]. Also, in the UK at the moment we have had a long stream of unelected governments, which make policy that isn't in the last manifesto that had a vote.
[0]: I'm not saying they should be, since that's what political representatives are for.
Citizens should vote more often, Switzerland shows a good example, be we can go even further than that.
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.
> If we define lobbying as using your financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy
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.
Officials at the highest levels like MEPs don't really need to have freedom of association available to them though? They need to work the hardest of all the people they are trusted and charged with improving the lives of, under more scrutiny than any subjects the bodies they belong to govern. Personal freedom and agency are small concessions we should expect those who are put to shape the world based on their promises forego
you crossed a really big gap moving from 'communicate' to 'creating policy'. I certainly do not trust Google in particular to write any policies, given that their whole business model is to attempt to sit at the boundaries between consumers and companies, or email senders or recipients, or job seekers and hirers. not a fan of Schumer, but Schumer should be soliciting input from Google, who is free to submit a public white paper, and NIST, and DJB, and citizens groups, and everyone else that might have a stake in the outcome.
If Google communicates to Schumer, then do you think Schumer would then sit down and write the policy, knowing very little about it?
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.
Government tried to ban encryption when it was first developed. Private organizations had to fight hard to make encryption standard. Still do in places like Europe
So... the Red Cross using their financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy is committing to corruption?
No no no, you don't understand. It's corruption when groups I don't like do it, when groups I like do it it's fine. Just like when my side wins elections it's democracy and when the opposition wins elections its fascism.
Democracy is supposed to have something to do with majority rule or at least having policies that benefit the greatest number. When corporations that answer to no one use their disproportionate financial resources to hijack the political system and push policies that hurt the common people, that is fascism, yes.
Which corporations "that answer to no one" (no publicly traded companies) have hijacked the political system and which policies have come about as a result that have hurt the majority of people actually represented by that system in ways that aren't:
A) Vagaries that most people don't actually care much about.
B) Tradeoffs that didn't go the way you personally want.
> Democracy is supposed to have something to do with majority rule or at least having policies that benefit the greatest number
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.
Not a great example. After the Haiti Earthquake donations poured into the Red Cross, helping them raise half a billion dollars. Those half a billion dollars were ultimately used to construct 6 permanent homes. [1] These are the exact sort of people I expect to be involved in lobbying politicians, and the last sort of people I want anywhere near anything relevant to me.
Maybe a better word would be "corrupting". Lobbying causes people to act in a way that is contrary to what people expect at face value, since it changes the incentives: if we assume that politicians choose what is best for them personally, their actions change from "what makes me popular with the most voters" to "what gives me the most money and power". This is often (not always) to the detriment of the voters themselves.
if we define anything in a way we want to define it to get the meaning we want then it ends up meaning what we want it to, however corruption in most definitions that I am aware of includes some sort of benefit to those making a political decision for the results of that political decision.
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.
It is way more nuanced than that and it depends on whether the outcome you are influencing to causes benefits to you and negative externalities to others or if its just benefits. Most of it is bad in the sense that it has huge negative externalities while being marketed as all good. The madd lobbying recently causing incrementally insane drunk driving laws or the arc fault surge protectors that solve a problem that doesnt exist while quadrupling construction cost come to mind
I would usually agree with this kind of reasoning. Yes there is good things too... But also too much abuse that clearly don't go in the interest of the people... So to me yes... It is corruption
or we ban lobbying _and_ we force transparency on meetings, finances and all these problems solve themselves when we investigate them and they're found guilty of corruption.
> 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.
I think that you're arguing against something different. Visiting your MP at their surgery or lobbying them at their office in the house of commons is not the same thing as buying them two and a half grands worth of spectacle frames.
"Lobbying is a form of advocacy that legally attempts to influence policy decisions"
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.
The alternative is that paid government officials and government/EU research institutions supply their research results to lawmakers and refuse to read gray papers from corporations or big civil influence groups. That's all well and good as part of the mix, but on its own, a very narrow viewpoint in a complex society. (The fight over who is nominated to these research jobs becomes even more political.)
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.
The things about unelected career bureaucrats is that they usually have no legal mechanism for directly benefiting from the outcome of their policy suggestions. They can't even accept lunch from outside groups without facing disciplinary action. I would prefer those people have the power of opinion rather than someone who benefits directly or has a perverse incentive to accept "campaign money" in order to further a change in law.
They don't need to lobby, because they're already on the inside. 95% of the government is run by the bureaucracy, so they can directly implement their ideological preferences. That's how you get situations like in Europe where the policies don't change regardless of which party is elected.
That depends. I know first hand a local bureaucrat who bought a piece of land designated as forest and a year later that forest got designated as construction area (or whatever the English term is) making that land worth at least 10x as much. And who was the person who changed that designation? A colleague of theirs in the office next doors. Quite a nice retirement gift. And those people are small fishes in a very small local community. One can only imagine how things are done on a larger scale.
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 the primary inhibitor of 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).
So how do the people effect change? As career bureaucrats generally cannot be fired, how does a government elected in a landslide make change when they only people they can solicit information from are the career bureaucrats from the prior regime?
Yes exactly academics and researchers not dealing with the real world should not decide policy.
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.
> In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.
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.
As others have already stated, lobbying solves a problem that doesn’t need to exist. It’s absolutely corrupt when you fix a problem with more problems.
What do you mean "a problem that doesn't need to exist"? What's the specific problem you are thinking of?
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)
If I call my local representative on the phone, or email them, that's lobbying. Am I not allowed to contact those I've elected to represent me?
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".
Depending on what you mean by local, you're never going to be able to directly contact your representative. Your phone call, if answered by a human will be an intern or other sort of assistant who will basically end up marking you as a tally on whatever side of an issue. You will have near zero influence. Emails are even worse. I'm sure now a days you'll get LLM slop but 'back in the day' you'd get a response that always came down to "Thanks for your message. Representative Joe Blow likes good things, and dislikes bad things. And he even thinks important things are important! Thanks for your message, and remember to vote for Joe Blow! Bye!" Even better, you get subbed to a bunch of donation begging mailing lists.
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.
> Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
"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.
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.
Theoretically possible. Is it practically possible? Because if these groups are meeting with my members of Congress and I practically can’t, then that’s not the same.
I don’t disagree with the proposals you suggest, but all that proves is the central point you’re trying to disprove: lobbying, in its current guise, is legalised corruption.
I would add to limit lobbying money. Information and transparency are fundamental. But knowing that you are being screwed is not the same that avoiding corruption.
> 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.
> Current problems with EU lobbying: Corporate lobbying is over 60% of registered lobby spending.
Ah yes, Europe, famously friendly to business interests. Hence so many large multinational influential corporations domiciled in Europe and being started every day
Without the US Federal government, most states would be bankrupt (all the time).
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.
Right, the corrupt thing is when lobbyists are listened to in a way that is proportional to some parameter besides the number of people they represent and when groups of people without the means to hire a lobbyist go unheard.
I think we need better infrastructure for tracking who is operating on who's behalf so we can build systems that fix these problems.
We absolutely want politicians to listen to lobbyists in a way that is proportional to some parameter besides the number of people they represent. The should listen to who is right, not which lobby represents the most members. Self-interested groups lobby for bad legislation all the time. When the harm to society is diffuse, they don't always have a large lobby opposing them.
Certainly somebody needs to identify cases when a minority voice needs disproportional consideration because they happen to be onto something special. But it's the job of an elected official to make that determination only after they have considered their options in a proportional-to-population way.
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.
> But it's the job of an elected official to make that determination only after they have considered their options in a proportional-to-population way.
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.
>> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
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.
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.
> So... you'll have the representatives make their own lobbying groups?
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.
We have groups of experts that advise lawmakers. For example, institutions that advise lawmakers on public health - currently headed by world class health expert RFK Jr.
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.
The industries have many of the most knowledgeable people. Ideally you would have an adversarial process similar to US courts. People representing different viewpoints vigorously representing their opinions with agreement on facts and on what the actual points of difference are.
> If they don't have enough information to make laws, they should appoint expert groups to collect information
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.
The idea that lobbying is corruption is ironically helps corporate lobbyists the most. Lobbying is what gave us Civil Rights. The only thing calling lobbying evil has accomplished is reduce grass roots lobbying, which means corporate lobbyists get more bandwidth from politicians.
No, this is when the no-nuance answer is sensible. Wanting to reform lobbying is the answer that normalizes the status quo and doesn't address the disbalance of power that it always inherently introduces.
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.
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.
> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints
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
I'll go a little further and say "corporations are bad". Maybe we don't need to expand beyond liability. It's often quoted: "a computer can never be held accountable. therefore a computer must never make a management decision", but why is it OK for corporations?
> Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
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.
You seem to be confusing lobbying with political organizing.
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.
There are typically two words for every act in English - the positive and negative spin (bribery, lobbying). Lobbying is lobbying because the elites consider it to be within the bounds of fair play. In some sense it isn't bribery because bribery is the act but when it is illegal.
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.
The man on the street may not understand the problems of companies that manufacture components for e.g. airliners. Those industries probably do need to be able to communicate what's affecting them and the government probably does need to at least consider such things in the overall plan. The question might be: how much do we need to consider it. e.g. Big tobacco - should we care if they die out completely?
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.
Lobbying is an essential part of the EU. It’s a regulated activity, with its whole processes. I have no idea why the author believes it’s something Europeans aren’t familiar with
Lobbying is corruption.
That is a fair statement.
Of course, the dictionary definition of lobbying is by no means corruption. But it is the thing most easily grafted onto corruption.
Drugs can also function as “medicine.” In the same way, lobbying can “function.” But drugs, like corruption, make things prone to decay.
The beginning of lobbying was very good. Cocaine, too, was very good at the beginning.
The fact that a means can perform a legitimate function does not mean that the possibility of its abuse and its harmful consequences disappear.
Lobbying is, in particular, centered on the asymmetry by which groups with money and organizational power can gain access to policymakers.
So what is the problem? Decisions that are “legal” but morally bad have been produced. Through legal lobbying, a minority group can exert excessive influence over policymaking and cause harm to the majority.
Policymaking does not reflect the interests of various citizens fairly at all.
Unfortunately, as a "European", you are no better off.
The US has messy, semi-decentralized bribery because there's more local and provincial power. You have an unelected oligarchy out of Brussels ruling over very different groups that apparently has little regard for their interests.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
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
Look no further than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for a plethora of modes of corruption used in the American system.
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
Voting for amendments will be implemented as pull requests :)
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?
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50029630
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?
That’s a situation ripe for corruption.
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=Q11
Simply google the question, plenty of sources.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
False. An excellent example is the vTaiwan / pol.is platform. It incorporates the interests of all stakeholders:
government, business, AND citizens
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.
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.
[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.
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.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
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.
> 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.
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.
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 the primary inhibitor of 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).
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.
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)
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".
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.
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.
"GOTO considered harmful" :)
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
No politician or party is willing to listen to me since I'm not a 'paying customer'.
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.
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.
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.
If you get to "talk to lawmakers" by giving them money, it is corruption.
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.
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 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
Can't speak for other countries, but lobbying the way it typically happens in the US is pretty much straight-up corruption.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Policymaking does not reflect the interests of various citizens fairly at all.
Unfortunately, as a "European", you are no better off.
The US has messy, semi-decentralized bribery because there's more local and provincial power. You have an unelected oligarchy out of Brussels ruling over very different groups that apparently has little regard for their interests.