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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

The amount of influence money has on the state is directly proportional to the amount of control the state has on the economy and justice system. Money in politics wouldn't nearly matter as much if the government didn't apply heavy-handed control to every market and courtroom around the country.

As long as power is centralized into a few politicians hands, there will always be a massive concerted effort to buy that power.

Everyone who champions for more state-intervention, this is the natural side-effect you'll have to live with. Welcome to your unintended creation. Transparency is the only possibly counter-balance I could see helping the situation, but I don't see any level of transparency being added to gov operations. The trend has been in quite the opposite direction.

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You hit the nail on the head. Power corrupts and more power just leads to more corruption. In theory transparancy should help but is resisted in many ways and rarely effective in practice (e.g. FEC).

In my opinion the only real solution to government corruption is limits on government power.

Very good points. In fact, transparency legislation in California failed by one vote just this week. Check out California Clean Money Campaign (who are also working with us on the hackathon event).

My point here is that the system is locked down as long as money controls it. We cannot release state control over the economy until we get money out of politics.

The corruption goes both ways: politicians depend on donor money, but to get the donor money they have to create complex legislation to extort with.

There is a great story in Republic: Lost about Al Gore and early internet regulation where the senators essentially say: "If we leave this unregulated, how will we make money off these guys?"

From where we are now, we have to work to reduce the influence of money on politics before any other reform can be approached sensibly.

What do you mean by applying heavy handed control to courtrooms? You seem to be making a wholly circular argument here.

What justice system do you envision outside the state?

It doesn't have to exist outside of the state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-watchman_state

Whereas currently 86% of people in federal jail are there for victimless crimes:

http://www.policymic.com/articles/8558/why-we-need-prison-re...

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