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Comment by HardlyCurious | Hacker News Reader

Well, the brides aren't actually legal, they are just very difficult to prove.

Unless we want to make political donations illegal, how do you prove a donation to a politician as a bride instead of support for the politician whose politics you agree with?

One could make a claim that stuff like student loan forgiveness is unethical if it benefits those who voted for the party. Is it not illegal to use tax payer money to pay for votes? I think if any politician said, "anybody who votes for me will get a bonus in your tax refund this year" we would have no issue seeing how that is unethical.

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I used quotations around the term bribe for a reason. By definition, if it's legal, it's not a bribe although it may walk like a duck and quack like a duck. One of the issues is an incentive problem: those who have the power to make it illegal are also those who benefit the most from it being legal.

>Unless we want to make political donations illegal

I think this is displaying dichotomous thinking. There's a lot of room between a political donation free-for-all and making political donations illegal. In between there are many proposals for a more mitigated approach. One being Lessig's idea of "Democracy Vouchers"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic%2C_Lost#Democracy_vou...

I think any reform to the process such as democracy vouchers are just a shell game. Ok, that money can only go to candidates or issue campaigns. Meanwhile other money will be spent in multitude of ways to shape public opinion. Where do the DNC and RNC get money from? What can they spend on? Just to name one of many entities with skin in the game that can't be funded by the democracy vouchers.

These reforms are going to end up just changing to rules to help one side or the other. Whether or not the ideas were formulated originally with that intent, by the time they get implemented they will be bent for that intent.

>other money will be spent in multitude of ways

Sure, and other systems would be needed to provide the necessary guardrails. At no point did I allude to the idea that one simple approach would be a panacea.

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