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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Define letting? The political system has de-criminalized vote buying by re-branding the bribers as 'lobbyists' and protecting it as a 1st Amendment right. Even Guilfoyle's controversy was asking for 100k to her Amex account from a "lobbyist". In most countries it's a jailable offense.

This lobbying means that the politicians might be elected by "us" but they work for "them" - the "lobbyists."

Does this answer your question sufficiently?

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Even worse the Supreme Court has actively made it quite difficult to pursue bribery cases recently basically requiring the parties to be stupid enough to put in writing "I will pay you X to vote Y on Z" and then "This is the payment for your vote that would not have happened if you had not voted Y on Z".

And the Supreme Court did this because the Republican Justices were caught accepting bribes. It's become just another corrupt Republican institution, the same as the Presidency and Congress.

I mean the Chief Justice was asked by Congress - "It seems that every other part of the federal court system has ethics guidelines and processes, but not the Supreme Court. It seems reasonable that the highest Court in our land should have those." And he replied, almost verbatim, "We're not going to do that and we're offended that you feel the need to ask."

I do hope a congress soon has the spine to fix the courts and some of their recent missteps, the list is getting very very long though.

I don't know what this has to do with the topic, but buying votes is more transparent now. They offered $5,000 for every adult if they win.

If it truly went to everybody to me it is just government paying dividends to the people. Which I think is far preferable and useful compared to corporate bailouts and tax cuts and most other allocations. We gave money to people during covid and it wasn't catastrophic.

How is that different than democrat socialists offering free healthcare and universal income?

Free healthcare, I think you mean single payer healthcare or a public option for healthcare, exists in most countries in the world. How is it different? How about how is it the same?

Healthcare is a comprehensive quality of life improvement that indivuduals can't waste in fast fashion and such, which reduces the wealth gap, which will remain after election campaign, which is a cornerstone of societies of many developed countries.

It's different because democrat socialists would presumably continue to vote and argue for those policies even if they lose. 5 grand handouts, on the other hand, are not some deep rooted policy out of the Republican playbook.

If you can’t tell the difference you’re stupid or you support trump style fascism.

One is a bribe the other is a health insurance program.

I can’t speak to UBI but it’s not a common platform anyways.

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