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Comment by throwaway344 | Hacker News Reader

I'm instinctually skeptical of anonymous articles. I always worry the publications are just making it up. It just seems unverifiable. I wonder if my conspiracy voice talking.

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Regardless of verifiability of the author, this seems like an excellent list of problems with congress. I've seen ~ all of these elsewhere from more clearly authoritative sources.

It seems much interesting and useful to focus on the message over the messenger. Unfortunately, many of these problems seem relatively intractable given the incentive structure.

This was basically why I posted it. I too worried about the lack of verifiability, or whether it might be someone writing 'poetic truth' or somesuch. On the other hand, the issues described are all real and all chronic problems in US democracy. As someone said, our polity is 'less of a democracy than an auction', and I feel that this is partly responsible for the high incidence of gestural politics and legislative corruption that have displaced a good deal of pragmatic lawmaking.

If it seems like an excellent list of problems to people, doesn't that mean that it is just appealing to the thoughts that we already have? After all, if the problems seem obvious to us then how can it contain anything new? In other words, anyone could have written it. We have learnt nothing.

I was thinking the same thing. Besides, I imagine the actual inner workings of politics are far more disgusting than the descriptions we see here.

I do politics in the UK (and I'm deep enough in to know what's going on). I don't know if it's quite the same in the US, but as a broad description of how things work, this article rings true to me. There's no great corruption, but there's widespread apathy, getting things done is unreasonably difficult, and decisions tend to be made by whoever could be bothered to show up and sit through hours of tedious nonsense. The personal costs of getting things done are grossly disproportionate in comparison to the things you can get done, the pay is awful, and after you struggle for years to make things a bit better all you will get is bitching about how you didn't achieve more. That's why I won't take a job in politics, I just help/work with/fund people that do.

It's not a battle against people who are trying to abuse the system, it's a battle against people who don't care and don't see why they should bother, but whose assistance is needed for you to achieve your goals. The most common form of this is two groups of people who don't agree with each other, don't see why they should bother to reach an agreement, and don't care that the things you want can't happen until they do agree on what should be done.

Well he spared the details, but he makes some sweeping statements (nothing new). When he says that congressmen and women pander to large corporations rather than voters and that it's a stepping stone to more lucrative lobbying, you don't have to describe any disgusting details. You can already assume what kind of corrupt consequences that has in and of itself.

Yeah. Good point. As a high level description, it's probably accurate.

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