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Comment by shawn-furyan | Hacker News Reader

So voting for a politician that takes advantage of a strategic opening by promising things he/she likely has no intention whatsoever of following through on is going to fix the police state? I mean, the administration's positions throughout this entire NSA scandal have been diametrically opposed to promises and assurances that Obama made while campaigning. Until you solve the problem of politician trustworthiness, then you have no hope of fixing systemic problems stemming from lack of trustworthiness among government officials. And make no mistake, you have to trust a politician that promises in his campaign to limit his own power.

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Perhaps structural changes in the way politicians are elected and retain office would have some positive long term effects. I imagine if it was possible to hold a direct-vote referendum on the current sitting president mid-term would hold their feet to the fire at least a little bit. Also, prohibiting advertising by political campaigns (TV, print, all of it) coupled with state-sponsored, mandetory debates between presidential candidates might force a real debate about real issues.

And assuming we agreed that those changes would be beneficial to the political system, how might we go about achieving those reforms?

Well, that's the big question isn't it? Perhaps Larry Lessig will make end roads on the campaign finance issue, though I'm not holding my breath. The thing is that basically these sort of structural reforms will be difficult to institute without a broad movement that replaces scads of incumbents with independents unified on these issues. The current campaign finance rules heavily favor incumbents (aka current legislators), and so narrow, lukewarm political sentiment will yield nothing but lip service. I mean, it's hard to get incumbents to put that ladder back down after they've intentionally pulled it up behind them. It's a difficult problem, and I'm pessimistic on the prospect of it being solved when so few people seem to have the attention span to even see the problem. It's much easier to get outraged at narrow concrete issues than weightier abstract issues like campaign finance.

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