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Comment by bnolsen | Hacker News Reader

The US congress was supposed to be made up of ordinary citizens who part of the time lived at home in their districts. ran their businesses and affairs and occasionally went to vote on federal government issues.

What we have is a political class that only does law and politics. Most of them look down on those of us who have to actually work and produce to make a living. Small business individually have almost no revenue or clout compared to these larger entities even though collectively we are the ones who represent most of the economy (or should be representing almost all of the economy if it's healthy).

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There's actually a strong argument that the current congressional gridlock is due to representatives / senators flying into Washington Monday morning and flying back home thursday night, leaving very little time for casual conversations or backroom negotiations (which are vital to actually getting anything passed, as dirty as it sounds)

The original pattern setup might have been better, where congressmen moved to Washington for 4-6 months a year along with their families, because there was no other option. But it's harder now to do that with working spouses, and also because they would be eviscerated by challengers locally as being permanent Washington elitists.

Every member of congress fund raise every day, sometimes going to multiple fundraising events in a single day.

Congress is bought and paid, believing otherwise is to ignore the obvious.

How is this relevant?

Because your explanation is nonsense.

Congress has enough time to fundraise, they have plenty of time to legislate and they do legislate extensively and almost exclusively in the interest of those who give them money.

It has nothing to do with partisan gridlock, that's a complete sideshow circus, notice how large companies routinely get their special interest laws passed no matter what side of the aisle is in charge.

The US congress was supposed to be made up of ordinary citizens

And indeed they are, and this is the heart of the problem. They're just regular people like us, subject to the same prejudices, temptations, motivations, etc. We shouldn't be surprised when the motivations that are built into the system actually do something.

More concretely, we've vested incredible power with our politicians. That makes them huge targets for those with vested interests (whether those be corporation, special interests, foreign governments, what-have-you). The potential reward to them for getting influence is so great that they'll invest tremendously in trying to do so.

The idea that "public servants" don't magically become saints, but respond to the same incentives as do the rest of us, is the core of public choice economics [1]. There is, in fact, a fair amount of research and literature on the topic from an academic perspective.

From where I sit, if you recognize the problem as one where we're giving the corporations and special interests, etc., a huge potential payoff by finding ways to co-opt governmental power, then increasing that power to try to combat it doesn't make sense: it's just increasing the size of their potential payoff. It sounds like silly pop-Zen, but the way to get such corruption out of government is to limit the power of government.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

the way to get such corruption out of government is to limit the power of government

Where's the power going to go? If you have a weak legislature that's clean-handed because it does little of consequence, that doesn't mean society is magically going to operate better. I'm also a fan of public-choice theory, but I think there are two aspects of the situation it fails to address:

1. Public administration is relatively transparent. Not as much as we'd like, of course regular people simply don't have the time, energy, or expertise to fully exploit this transparency (and so rely on lobbying organizations that do represent their interests, eg the ACLU or EFF), but the public sector is more transparent than the private sector. I don't have much faith in market mechanisms to correct excessive behavior in the private sector because bad actors can buy a lot of good PR.

2. A non-negligible degree of the power invested in government is the results of demands from the public, eg things like the clean water and the EPA exist because private entities exploited the commons sufficiently that there was eventually an outcry eg repeated fires on the Cuyahoga river. There are many similar demands for governmental action on climate change today, it's not hard to imagine a tipping point in the near future with carbon becoming much more heavily regulated than today. The fact that granting more power to government may well result in future abuses doesn't negate the existence of problems absent regulation.

In cases where it may not be appropriate to just drop all legislation, it may instead work well to devolve the power to more local levels. This would go a long way toward making the potential prize of influencing legislators and regulators damaging to us at a much more local scope. It would also allow the many local stages to be where we play out experiments to find what approaches work best - something that seems to be pretty much anathema in today's political scene.

Your example of the Cuyahoga River is pretty apt, actually. Consider:

"By the time Congress got around to passing the CWA in 1972, river fires were no longer a threat. Whatever else the CWA did — and it certainly helped improve many of the nation’s waters — it did little if anything to prevent rivers from catching flame. It’s also not clear how much the CWA accelerated improvements in water quality that were already underway at the time. While most states largely ignored water quality concerns in the first half of the twentieth century, state governments became far more active throughout the 1960s, such that by 1966 every state had enacted water pollution control legislation of its own. Progress was slow, but for those pollutants of greatest concern at the time, progress was being made well before the 1972 CWA was enacted, let alone before it was implemented and enforced." -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...

I'm not so hot on local solutions. With 3000 counties in the US that leads to an awful lot of reinvented wheels and administrative waste, and local corruption is arguably harder to deal with because it's hard to get a big enough constituency together to force the issue in many jurisdictions.

River fires may have been an impetus for the clean water act, but observing that they were no longer a primary issue, while true, is beside the point. An emblematic issue (or instance of a general issue)is not necessarily representative of any statistical truth.

For example, I don't think most fracking activities trigger earthquakes, but it's not surprising that anti-fracking activists make a point of citing the incidents where it apparently has as a proxy for a larger number of environmental problems they worry about. Or consider how the protests over police brutality in Ferguson last year were not so much because Michael Brown best exemplified innocent victimhood, but because leaving his dead body lying in the street for hours on end was perceived as exemplary of callous indifference to local people's sensibilities (at best) or calculated intimidation of that community (at worst). One could think the shooting itself to have been justified but still be outraged about the aftermath of the event. Much of the sound and fury of the debate focused on the shooting incident but if you go back and look at contemporary news reports the initial reaction was to the way the body was left lying there in the open.

>And indeed they are,

Their demographics compared to the population at large does not seem to agree with this view.

Yes, I believe every congress member is now a millionaire and most are multi millionaires.

No, actually: http://media.cq.com/50Richest/

(And "millionaire" (net worth >$1M) isn't really a terribly high bar for mid- to late-career professionals.) That's not to say they're representative of their average constituents' income levels but I wouldn't reasonably expect them to be.

You're correct, only the vast majority are millionaires.

Also you don't get a million in debt by being poor.

Right. Because "vast majority" = "way less than half". Words actually do have meanings.

Read your own link dude, its over half and many have absurd levels of debt.

I shouldn't waste my energy but 189 out of 538 have a Net Worth of more than $1M. 189/538 < .5. They have assets and they have liabilities. That's what net worth means. Some have absurd levels of debt. I assume some of that debt is related to campaigns but I don't actually know. However you made a statement that is factually untrue.

Again, you are correct, your link suggests just what you are writing, unfortunately it is somewhat absurd the way it conflates assets and liabilities.

http://ballotpedia.org/Net_worth_of_United_States_Senators_a... lists median net worth over a million\

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/01/millionaires-club-fo... also puts median net worth over 1 million

http://time.com/373/congress-is-now-mostly-a-millionaires-cl... also lists median net worth over a million

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/12/news/economy/congress-wealth... also puts median net worth above 1 million

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/01/13/Congress-worth-43B... also puts median net worth over a million

Is there a way to come up with a better system than the exsting one. I am not asking for the ideal system.

I read the wiki page on public choice theory and eventually found a wiki page for The Myth of the Rational Voter [1] where they talk about rational irrationality [2].

The idea is that people are more likely to make irrational decisions when the cost of that decision is low, like in voting. An irrational vote only harms you as an individual in a very small way since the cost is distributed across the entire population.

So, it seems to me that we should look for ways to increase the cost of irrational decisions. I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this, but one way would be to reduce the power that government has, thereby reducing the impact of irrational decisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_irrationality

Wouldn't that make the decisions people make even less valuable? Wouldn't that promote irrationality on a larger scale, if they're coupled as you say? Are you arguing that there is an inflection point or are you arguing for a useless government?

"Come up with"? Absolute monarchies actually worked pretty well overall, we don't need to "come up with" anything when we can just restore the Stuarts[0] and their system, for instance. Okay, the current elites (who have the most chance of making such a change nonviolently for a large number of people) might want to make some alterations for modern technology and to transition away from the incredibly egotistical viewpoint of the People thinking they know anything about governance, and they might want to make sure the guy they put in charge has a philosophy and will at least approaching that of the late Lee Kuan Yew.

But really we just need anything that gets power, perceived or real, away from the People.[1][2]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Stuart

[1] http://www.constitution.org/eng/patriarcha.htm

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Critique-Democracy-Guide-Neoreactionar...

>>The US congress was supposed to be made up of ordinary citizens who part of the time lived at home in their districts.

Consider the 1790s when it would take a few weeks to travel from DC to the Ohio valley.

In other time we called that class: Aristocracy.

Term limits should be set. I think 12 years in Congress is about the optimum number: not too long to become your life, but also long enough to get "enough experience" and pass it along to the newcomers as they come in. That would be 6 terms for House Representatives and 2 for Senators.

Of course it's not a magic bullet. Many other things need to be changed:

1) banning corporations, PACs or any organization from giving money to politicians - only individuals should be able to donate and the sum should be limited to maybe $1,000 (allowing "NGO's" and such to give money is just a loophole looking to be abused)

2) making votes in Congress anonymous [1]. Votes shouldn't have "transparency". There's a reason why anywhere else voting is anonymous: it's much harder to get influenced this way, whether it's by money or peer/leader pressure (see invasion of Iraq, passing the "Patriot" Act, etc). The lobbyists can give you money, and then you can still vote as you wish, which over the long term it will seem like a less and less viable strategy for lobbyists.

3) switching to a much more democratic voting system ("approval voting" [2] would be ideal, but even the 2-voting rounds system that's used in some European countries would be a HUGE improvement, as it would fix the "spoiler effect" somewhat - but still nowhere near enough as approval voting does)

4) proportional party representation in Congress (seems like a no-brainer to me). The idea that 2 parties can dominate Congress/Parliament for a century seems ridiculous to me. Parties should rise and fall every 10 years or so, like it happens in Europe. That would put the focus much more on the issues and much less on "being on the Red or Blue team".

5) abolishing or fixing gerrymandering

6) maybe even regulating the revolving door issue (this one is a bit tricky to do, but I think other countries have some regulation for this)

I'm sure there are many other things that can improve how Congress works. The idea is to make them listen much more to the People [3] and much less to single rich individuals and corporations.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY

[2] - http://www.electology.org/#!approval-voting/cc04

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g

To add a few more things - No more "language was inserted into the bill at the last moment by an anonymous 'staffer' " - All bills have to have an evaluation clause where they describe the criteria for deciding if they are working or not and if they fail them then revoking / fixing - Bills cover a single subject and dont attach a bunch of irrelevant stuff - I would say 6 years max should be plenty then they have to skip at least one cycle - term limits for supreme court

Then there's the really radical - All congress people and staffers + Kids go to public school ... if its good enough for my kids, its good enough for yours + use the VA for healthcare ... same reason + Get a nice 401(k) just like we have to live with (the people should get to pick the funds they get to invest in for extra credit) + Get fired if they are late 3 times like a large number of low-wage employees are ....

etc. etc. Bring them into the real world instead of living above it

Fixing 5 requires the elimination of districts and restructuring across a popular vote.

At the scale of the US Federal government, this would require some form of automation to help inform voters of which candidates are on their short list (given preferences they've expressed). Ideally this calculation could be performed on computing hardware that the end user owns and trusts (be that a cell phone, or a RISC-V system with a fully open stack from layout through firmware to OS; this BTW is the only type of hardware that I would consider to be audit-able for inclusion in an assisted /paper trail/ (for recounts and etc) instant tally at close voting system.)

I would put voting method reform (Score Voting or Approval Voting) at the top, by a km.

I'd slide in input-restricted algorithmic redistricting and uniform ballot access requirements just on top of that.

It matters less to make the voting method more fair when the choice selections are still rigged.

The problem with members of congress returning to society is that they could make deals with companies while they are in congress, in order to get great benefits at those companies when their term is over.

So better keep them from going back into society. Or... forbid them to work (later) for companies that they have dealt with while in congress (but this is difficult to check).

Then they dare to tell us we are part of the problem, as opposed to them getting their taxpayer-funded salaries, benefits and pensions !

Reminds me of a line from "Inherent Vice".

"People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent"

At the state level, legislatures are often part time. But state legislatures are worse and more corrupt.

To underline your point people should go look up median wealth by zip code and look at the top ten, they'll see pigs massed around the trough of DC.

We've somehow been suckered into supporting a massive class of very expensive bureaucrats whose main interest are themselves, power, and the rich. Who believes laws and regulations create wealth and prosperity, they are burdens and restrictions on the productive.

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