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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Lobbyists aren't the problem. They are doing what they are paid to do.

If you donate to a large charity, there is a good chance some of that $ goes to lobbying, as it should. (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)

If you work at a large company, 100% chance it lobbies, for good reason. Large employers lobby for better mass transit (because parking garages are expensive), more housing (because it is cheaper to lobby than pay employees more so they can afford $$$$ houses), or friendlier business laws (no one likes paying more taxes).

Lobbying is everything from "help us use orphans as a source of cheap protein!" To "keep the national parks funded".

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"Keep the national parks funded" sounds like a good use case for lobbying, until you realize it's only needed as a counterweight because lobbying diminishes the relative role of the democratic process itself in meeting needs.

We recently made a fairly large donation to a children’s hospital to support a specific research program. They directly told us that the highest-impact way to deploy the funds would be to pay lobbyists to try to get earmarks injected into federal bills. Like, >10x expected ROI.

Not all lobbying is straight-up mustache twirling. But it definitely left a bad taste in our mouths.

That kind of is mustache twirling. Instead of spending your donation on research, they would use it to divert money from some other cause to their own. Your donation may harm a different - and possibly more deserving - research program.

This would all be fine if the lobbying $ was only being paid to the lobbyists. The moment the $ flows to the politicians, it is what other countries would call a bribe.

This is a misleading characterization of the issue here. Let me pull up another very relevant analogy here. Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official? You are a responsible adult, after all. Bribes are needed for everything from housing permits to your kids' food assistance. How is it bad when it gets good things done?

Is this how you reason about corruption in government service? Unlike your argument about about lobbying, the problem is very conspicuous here - you're supposed to get those services without paying anything beyond the nominal service charges. They're your rights in an society where you already pay taxes to fund them. The government officials are already being paid with your tax money to do this job. What's even worse? If such loose and open-ended bargaining is permitted for basic essential services, then the only ones who will get those services will be the ones with money, not the ones who need it. Your housing permits and your kids' food assistance will become increasingly costlier and harder goals to achieve. That's why bribes are illegal.

If you look at this scenario carefully, it isn't much of an analogy. It's exactly the same situation, but with different players! When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests - because the public are the primary stakeholders in a democracy, and it's the utilization of their tax payments that these politicians are debating. Those politicians are supposed to be the people's 'representatives' who are elected and paid to listen to their constituents and lobby on their behalf. The public shouldn't have to 'lobby' with them too, especially for basic essentials like nutrition, national parks or tax filing!

What you call 'lobbying' in the US is known as 'political corruption' in most of the rest of the world. It's just a weasel word used to underplay the seriousness of such corruption. And as I pointed out earlier in my analogy, the rich ones outcompete the majority public here too. It's abundantly clear that even town councils favor big corpos even in the face of loud vocal opposition from the majority of their constituents. It's clear how much special treatment these professional grifters called 'lobbyists' get when they walk into the town hall just minutes before the discussion of a topic, while the town's people have to wait there for one and a half days without proper food, water or sleep in order to speak a few words in opposition. This is what happens when you legitimize corruption with cute terms like 'lobbying'.

> Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official?

We formalized it! It is called an application fee, and it is set high enough so they the government employee doesn't need to take bribes outside of their salary.

Other countries set application fees so low that government employees barely earn enough money to eat, so they take bribes.

NYC solves a huge part of their police corruption problem by just paying officers more.

> When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests

I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!

The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.

> I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!

I touched this point in my previous reply. But let me reiterate it again. Those politicians are supposed to just talk to their constituents and represent their interests. That's their job description. If the voters who sent them to the legislatures have to lobby them afterwards, what is the purpose of these politicians anyway? Is their job to con the public into choosing them, so that they can leech the same public? Evidently so, and that's the fundamental problem with democracy in US these days.

> The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.

While EFF and ACLU do a commendable job, their existence don't justify lobbying. It's the other way around. Lobbying make them a necessity to regain some semblance of balance and fairness. They wouldn't be needed if the politicians were doing their job in the first place.

> (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)

Is 'goy' a typo? I only know of its meaning as 'non-Jewish person'.

I'm sure they meant "you". שלום־עליכם

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