Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

For the political experts out there, what would happen if we stopped allowing lobbying? That seems to me like the most obvious source of corruption.

Edit: ok, I should have worded better. What if we stopped allowing corporate lobbying through donations to elected officials?

I understand there would be loopholes to close, but isn't this the obvious source of government corruption?

View on HN

The broad concept of "lobbying" is really just people bringing their concerns to elected representatives. I don't really see how you would ban it entirely.

I think they wanted to talk about getting money out of politics.

The problem is actually in the wide gulf between illegal bribery, and regulated lobbying. The law says "This is lobbying, these are the rules, and required reporting", and the law says "This is bribery, and these are the punishments". There's a lot of activities involving politicians and money that don't fall under either.

And removing the legal stuff (candidates get publicly disclosed campaign donations from companies in all the industries they're favourably disposed towards the status quo in, which gives a pretty visible hint to any voters who care about how they're going to vote on the issue) potentially backfires by making the grey area stuff more powerful (candidates have much smaller campaign budgets from capped donations from private individuals, but mystery benefactors are spending a disproportionate amount on astroturf campaigns against some of them anyway)

There seems to me a massive difference between corporate interests openly bribing lawmakers in a brazenly material fashion vs. a group of concerned citizens merely voicing their concerns, yet the two are always conflated. Money is not speech and corporations are not people, I don't see why people tolerate this.

Bribery is not legal, never has been, and is not being advocates for.

If you want to call lobbying 'bribery' in a sort of exaggerated way, go ahead.

In my experience most of the rhetoric around bribery is reapoy just interested groups doing regular politics stuff--like 'if you do not support bill xyz we will tell our million newsletter subscribers you're a bad person'.

There is very clear bribery going on though… speaking engagement fees, expensive vacations that are under the guise of lobbying, etc.

And it’s very clear that at least people in congress are very happy with this situation.

Well we do have laws against openly bribing lawmakers.

Lobbyists aren't handing over wads of cash, they are spending money on things like ad campaigns, surveys, studies, talks, busing people in to talk to their representative, etc which are meant to legitimately sway the opinions of both the elected officials and the electorate. Maybe to get more politicians to show up the lobbyists pay to serve nice steak dinners at a talk, and in the extreme maybe the talk is just a thinly veiled guise for what is really an expensive gift of steak dinner, but conceptually it's no different from any other potential catering option, and there is no simple way to ban it. Sure you can make specific schemes illegal, but there will always be another loophole. So long as you allow people to interact with their elected representatives and speak freely, there will be people who have their politician's ear. You might be able to eliminate lobbying by sequestering the politicians throughout their term, but that's going to have the opposite of the desired effect of making government more democratic.

Easy.... congresspeople are public servants. As such make them be required to have a single bank account for their campaigns. This bank account has a $1 million limit.

Outlaw PACS/Super PACS.

Ban politicians from holding seats on corporate boards for 10 years following serving in any office, except they be returning to a board they already were on. (End revolving door/jobs).

Ban companies from donating at all to all elections.

Require news networks to supply free ads for candidates w/ equal airtime or ban all political ads period (I'd love this one). Let people get picked by merit of their debates alone.

I think the parties should also hold their primaries on the same day nationwide, so there's no 'game' or 'sport' it's just flat out - vote and be done with it, to the victor goes the spoils (the rest of the campaign$$ each candidate has amassed.

We also need ranked choice voting so that 3rd parties can have decent sway ...diluting the current duopoly and making it so interested parties and special interests if allowed would have to work harder and spend more to more parties to get their point across.

There's probably a slew of other things you could do. Of course this requires people in power to take away their own power...like that's gonna happen.

Lobbying, as it manifests in our (the United States, in my case) current form of governance, is a direct consequence of the fact that 538 people control how 30% of GDP is spent.

It has been pointed out that Daniel Webster was on retainer from various business interests while he was a senator. I don't know the figures for federal share of GDP in those days, but think it must have been much smaller.

538 (elected) people. Seems far more (rather than too few) than is necessary. If it were 10 elected people for example it becomes harder to hide in the crowd. Look how much scrutiny is applied to the supreme court.

I'd guess that the main issue they were highlighting was the "30% of GDP" part, which was actually more like 34% pre-covid (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=8fX). There has been a consistent upwards trend since the '50s, if not earlier, and there are people alive today who remember a time when we didn't even have a federal income tax.

The incentive for lobbying would remain and turn more deeply to black markets. To end lobbying you'd need to remove the incentive for lobbyists to seduce lawmakers.

Instead, remove the power of lawmakers or reduce/decentralize the power as much as pragmatically possible.

In Plato's ideal republic the lawmakers, or protectors, were instead removed from society living in a parallel society dedicated to service. Therefore they would be incorruptable, or difficult to corrupt.

Which leads to Nassim Taleb's "no skin in the game" problem.

Or in the case of robot overlords no skin at all.

And how would one stop that, or would you really want to?

I consider campaigning to one's representatives a cornerstone of democracy and political activism. To get rid if that because groups we don't like also use it is anti-democratic.

One of the arguments I heard around corruption caused by lobbying is that centralization of power makes it worse. It kind of boils down to persuading one person is easier than convincing many people.

Maybe in theory but in practice even in less centralized systems there is still generally just one person you need to persuade, and that one person is generally easier to persuade than if they were more central. If you compare local governments to state governments to the federal government, there is substantially more graft in the smaller governments. Local officials are cheaper to influence, have less of a spotlight on them (both from criminal investigators and the electorate), and have fewer competing interests to worry about.

> For the political experts out there, what would happen if we stopped allowing lobbying?

You mean, if you prohibit people (including other government decision makers) from communicating with government decision-makers about their preferences for government decisions?

Nothing good.

Lobbying is not actually that harmful when it's relatively transparent: i.e everybody can look up who funded who, which this kinda applies to US.

Many US citizens think lobbying is the source of the problem.At a first thought you may think that, but without lobbying you de facto have "unseen" lobbying: which is corruption, more or less.That's why in 'democratic' countries where lobbying is illegal, there's way more corruption.This is not to say that lobbying reduces corruption, no, but it's a way to somewhat keep transparency while influencing and pressuring politicians, which happens, happened, and will always happen.

There have been a lot of attempts to curtail wealth driven lobbying. Capital somehow overcomes all of them.

This inability of capital to help itself from corrupting lawmakers is apparently the fault of the state, not the fault of capitalism for reasons I can't quite fathom but might make sense if I had a lot more money.

If somebody emerged from poverty in the third world though, and capital was tangentially involved then lavish praise is apparently due.

>There have been a lot of attempts to curtail wealth driven lobbying. Capital somehow overcomes all of them.

Exactly. It’s called “capitalism” for a reason. Karl Marx understood exactly how it worked when he started using this term to refer to it. It’s also the basis for Marx’s “political economy” which understands the politics are inseparable from the economics.

Not a very useful thought experiment once you accept that you’d have to out-lobby the lobbyists to get it done.

I would guess the parent comment is referring to paid/corporate lobbyists.

Yes, we have political processes that have undefined read write access to unrelated settings and data.

You will have to format the drive and install a new Government.

Lobbying is just communicating your desires to your elected representative.

If we stopped it, we stop democracy?

If we are discussing in good faith, the parent was probably talking about lobbying done by moneyed interests. Which is not necessary for democracy, itself a very broad term in its initial definition which does not include think tanks, political action comities and privately held mass media.

Wait what? You’re saying groups (think tanks, companies) shouldn’t be able to petition their elected representative as a condition of democracy?

Yes, companies aren't citizens.

Secondly, petitions are one thing, petitions with a hidden $1billion folded up in the middle is a bribe.

Bribes definitely should be illegal.

If I were to call up my senator, I should get the same 'attention' as Elon Musk would get if he were donating a Hospital to their hometown.

If that were true(lobbying is just communicating), people and corporations would write a letter rather than hire a lobbyist.

A letter would work too if bribes are paid.

Lobbing in the US at least I’d typically referring to large institutions , not citizens. The elimination of lobbying in the US is most often reference to the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court.

We want to ban large institutions from communicating with their elected representative?

Why wouldn't we?

The elected representatives represent Human citizens not Corporations.

Companies are not people.

Huh? I communicate with people every day without giving them money. We want ban large institutions from paying elected officials. Genuinely unsure if you are trolling or not.

You could compare it to a messaging protocol. If the message is attempting remote code execution you would want to remove the possibility to do so and/or [perhaps] drop the message.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com