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Comment by marchingkazoo | Hacker News Reader

In The States, it's an actual constitutional right. I won't try to justify how positive the role is or could be. However, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

A lobbyist's literal job is "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

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we gotta redraw the relationships between government, people, THE people, and business/corporations which behave like people but aren't actually individuals

all as part of a renegiotiation of what "the public" actually means given that we have now digital internet, which forces a re-evaluation of what it evens means to "be in public"

it's like there's two publics: digital (or cyber or virtual) and physical (in real world), but our laws are not aware of this??? dunno

Say my friends and I own a business that will be affected by something Congress is considering. So we hire a lobbyist to go inform the politicians about that. How is that not people exercising their First Amendment rights? Our livelihood depends on what they do. It is a major part of my life. It seems like your view is that you are only “people” when you’re not engaged in economic production, that human beings only exist in leisure.

Because you are now exercising more power than one person is normally able to do so in democracy, you, your company and friends now have a distinct advantage in influencing policy that normal citizens cannot exercise. This is very relevant if your company is benefitting you and your friends at the expence of other citizens—which, unfortunately, is an all too common occurrence.

The bigger your company gets the more money you are able to put into lobbying and the more this distorts the democratic process. Big Business, especially Big Tech, is damaging our democracies beyond recognition.

This is why this barring of Amazon by the EC is to be welcomed.

But that's not the reason the EU gave for banning Amazon from lobbying; they said it's unreasonable for Amazon to lobby if they refuse to turn up to committee meetings.

I'm not keen on lobbyists drafting legislation. It saves the civil service effort and money, sure; but if the civil service don't have the competence to do the drafting themselves, who's going to review the draft?

Fwiw I think the bigger issue is that existing businesses are overrepresented relative to the businesses that don’t exist yet, or that would exist if rules were changed in a way contrary to the interests of some existing businesses.

So, kind of like a weird pro-life take on businesses then?

Seriously so, why would you priorotize some potential future business over an existing one? To pamper founders?

I don't know any examples but someone explained some pulling up the ladder trick: An existing business you can implement nice things gradually over a long time and have them written into law. It seems very nice but the future business will have to implement everything before starting.

No, the idea is that existing businesses will lobby for the government to prop them up. Politicians are inclined to think it’s reasonable to protect jobs and such. But maybe if they let the business fail, what rises from the ashes would be even better.

Individuals band together to lobby for issues they care about all the time.

There two situations:

1. You and your friends hire that lobbyist with your private funds.

2. The corporation as an entity hires the lobbyist.

They’re saying the second should be illegal and it’s unclear how your personal rights are impacted by that.

The corporation is the legal embodiment of our joint interests. It is the only reasonable place to put the lobbying efforts. The silly thing you propose would in fact be workable for a small number of owners like this hypothetical, but how would a public corporation with diffuse ownership engage with the government under this proposal?

It’s really no different than a company defending itself in court. A legislative or regulatory proposal can be just as confiscatory or punitive, or have as many unexpected consequences, as a lawsuit. In both cases, the business needs to lawyer up and represent its interests.

"The corporation is the legal embodiment of our joint interests."

You've just admitted the reason why you shouldn't be allowed to lobby as such—as I said earlier, your joint effort represents an unfair power advantage over other individual citizens.

Proof is in the pudding, take a good look at our fucked democracies.

So should all joint influence efforts be banned or just ones that have economically productive elements? Forming groups and trying to influence politicians is the only way to get things done. They can’t listen to 300 million atomized individuals. Are you suggesting the NAACP should be illegal?

The solution isn’t limits on people’s rights to debate and to advocate for their interests, it’s limits on the power of the thousands of elected rats running around DC and state capitals and city councils. We need less politics which means more centralization in the federal government and more power for the President.

"Groups" can have alignment among their members. Members can join/withdraw as they please.

Corporations are not a diffusion of their workers' voices, they're a diffusion of whoever owns 51% of stock - maybe even just one person.

When there was a Congressional hearing on Youtube's Content ID stuff, one of the people present was some millionaire country singer complaining loudly about how much money he was losing because of Youtube. And my thought was "what this needs is a poor Youtuber scraping by on near-minimum wage to talk about how Content ID fucks them over." Except those people can't individually afford to show up to Congress to complain at a hearing.

There is a fundamental asymmetry between rich and poor people that is a real problem and that we don't really have a comprehensive solution for. But banning poor people from pooling resources together to get someone to talk on their behalf is not a step up; it's moving in the opposite direction.

Poor youtubers can support the EFF, they can call/write or even visit the local offices of their congress critters. Most congressional hearings are nothing more than dog and pony shows anyway.

But that would be a joint lobbying effort that is unfair per GP's contention!

That’s exactly the point, the corporation wouldn’t:

Those small, diffuse shareholders aren’t typically represented by the board or executives, who are substantially controlled by a minority cabal. Do you think people with DIS in their retirement funds are happy Iger burned half the value on his politicking? — no, only his weirdo financier friends are. So why should we allow them to confiscate more assets from those small, diffuse shareholders to advocate their private politics and interests to the government?

If small, diffuse shareholders want to lobby Congress, they can do so individually as well, eg with a letter writing campaign or at public events.

A company has no interest in swaying the government, which represents the interests of the public. If the public (not the corporation) has concerns, they can privately advocate for those.

> The corporation is the legal embodiment of our joint interests.

Would you stand by this statement when the corporation is caught doing some illegal evil thing, like denying employers their rights, or damaging the environment? Even if you would, most shareholders of large corporations don't. They suddenly discover being a shareholder is a very "at arms length" thing.

Might work nicely if corporations were "the embodiment" at all times, or at no times. But selectively, it is quite bad.

If you intentionally undercapitalize a business to avoid foreseeable liabilities, the courts can pierce the corporate veil. Otherwise, limited liability is thought to provide the necessary incentives for widespread equity ownership and investment and desirable economic risk taking. In any case, limited liability is not a constitutional right and could be modified or abolished. Free speech and freedom to petition the government are guaranteed rights though. The government can’t just circumvent the first amendment by making waiver of those rights so economically necessary that every business has to do it to be competitive. The courts don’t buy that logic nor should they.

it's different from a company defending itself in court if only because a court is a judiciry power affair whereas lobbying congress interacts not with the judiciary branch of government but with the legislative

Part of my point is they’re not that different in practice. A law that bans your way of making money is worse than a lawsuit. And in a difficult tort lawsuit, the judges are making a lot of the same kinds of value determinations that a legislator does, such as whether the risk of harm from a practice is justified by the utility of it.

Corporations are owned by people. Should people not be allowed to combine together to petition the government together?

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