alt Hacker NewsLobbying Is Corruption
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I can totally sympathize with the author and admittedly I sometimes put myself in the same camp out of frustration, given the current events and news. I will however say that I have also come to realize and accept that human greed can turn any good idea into an awful mess. We are not programmed to understand when something is good enough. We don't know what is enough money, enough resources, enough power, enough speed, enough attention etc. No matter how much technology we develop we won't be able to solve for human greed. Look at OpenAI - they can allegedly solve navier stokes but can't report honest revenue numbers?
When Oregon had only biannual legislative sessions there was a small, and by modern standards ineffective, lobbying system. Also very few “professional” politicians.
Then we went to our current system and both proliferated. In balance it seems to have been quite a mistake.
It would make a great documentary.
Citizens United is probably one of the greatest national blunders I've been alive to witness. I have a sense that if we are indeed watching the beginning of the decline of the American empire, it will be pointed to as a precipitating factor in the future's textbooks.
Lobbying is indeed corruption with a suit on.
Not sure where in Europe the author lives, but in Germany we absolutely have lobbying, "donations", "connections" and politicians meandering between corporations and public offices that are meant to regulate the same corporations, all without any consequences
Conflating two things. Actually lobbying is the act of trying to persuade by meeting with a representative. Campaign contributions are also a way of persuading but are separate.
I say this because you could make monetary contributions illegal and lobbying would still be legal and ethical. We talk about campaign contributions as a separate issue and they have been treated in the courts separately.
I agree that putting strict limits on campaign finance is an important battle that is still ahead of us.
Campaign finance is [currently] corrupt. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
We changed the laws that enabled lobbying back in ~1970.
There's a fairly simple solution to this:
The man on the street may not understand the problems of companies that manufacture components for e.g. airliners. Those industries probably do need to be able to communicate what's affecting them and the government probably does need to at least consider such things in the overall plan. The question might be: how much do we need to consider it. e.g. Big tobacco - should we care if they die out completely?
Us little guys probably want to hear the contents of those meetings so we can check that they do make sense. Private influencing is dangerous.
We also don't want people going from the Ministry of Defence or the Army straight into working for a defence company - that should be illegal and yet it happens a lot here in the UK.
Civil servants and politicians should get a comfortable pension and be unemployable for 3 years after their term.
This article doesn’t make sense. There’s tons of lobbying in the EU. For example in the Netherlands the culture is very focused on consensus with the public including engaging with industry.
Anyone who is an expert in their field knows that the government is completely clueless and ineffective when it comes to regulating what you do. That’s normal and fine, nobody can be an expert in every situation of every field, including regulators
When experts give feedback to the government, that’s lobbying.
It's crazy that we need this article. It's just bribery with a single extra step. I never understood how everyone thought this was normal while growing up.
Gerrymandering!
I would take public lobbying anyday over outlawing it like where I live and it being restricted to people who have enough money to do it behind closed doors.
If I had an opinion on an issue but no dog in the fight; and if I were to explain my opinion to politicians in the hope they might learn from or even share it -- I may well be "lobbying", but I don't believe I'd be corrupt.
> Have you ever tried to explain lobbying to a European?
Huh? What Europe are they talking about?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparen...
Americans on average are too stupid and too easily manipulated for this to ever be a matter of concern for them though.
The ability for a constituent to talk to their elected official about an issue important to them is lobbying. It is the foundation of democracy. It is not corruption.
The German left party has the stand that billionaires shouldn't exist. At first I thought this is a bit far fetched. But nowadays I think the sentence should go billionaires shouldn't exist in a democracy. Because obviously money is power, for example through lobbying. And these people accumulated a lot of power, which is completely undemocratic.
Contributing to campaigns seems fine. In the end the choice remains in the hands of voters. Politicians with no ties to anything will just go the populist path anyway, which is often worse.
I'm surprised by all the lobbying-apologists in the comments!
One nuance I don’t see expressed in TFP is that lobbyists are also knowledge experts, and their input can guide legislation positively. Sometimes, this expertise is too expensive for the government to otherwise obtain.
Glad that this pops up again because someone flagged a similar discussion:
> Corporations and rich people give money to politicians. Not directly, of course: to their campaigns.
It is illegal under U.S. federal law for corporations to give money to campaigns.
Lobbying is teriboe and the explanation cited is good for those unfamiliar.
Also, political ads in the U.S. have become so obnoxious. I don’t know how it is elsewhere.
Ads in the U.S. are personal attacks at the opponents character or lies about them. There is currently an ad about how an opposing politician supports sex change surgery without parent consent. Nothing is believable about the ad - yet somehow it’s not slander or libel.
This is the ad. https://youtu.be/WFISHnLCmms
Here’s my cynical take on the matter:
There has never been a time when human power structures have been incorruptible nor will there ever be. The very existence of government implies corruption, and so the wise move is to find a way to exert as much influence as possible so the corruption benefits you.
May the best bastard win!
Strong agree -- lobbying spend is a huge signal of corporations associated with preventable harms. We use it extensively at ethical capital.
Lobbying is the man-made canal we dug to channel what would otherwise be unfettered corruption.
How far up the corruption chain do you want to go? Government itself is corruption.
Corporations are essentially considered individuals under the law in the United States for two good reasons:
1 - Companies employ taxpayers.
2 - Companies are taxpayers.
Remove companies' right to advocate for their interests gives disproportionate influence to employees and the unemployed, resulting in economic policy that discourages investment and hiring.
Transparency -> yes, emphatically, and that's good enough.
There are typically two words for every act in English - the positive and negative spin (bribery, lobbying). Lobbying is lobbying because the elites consider it to be within the bounds of fair play. In some sense it isn't bribery because bribery is the act but when it is illegal.
And although lobbying is generally bad public lobbying is a much healthier equilibrium than what a lot of countries do - everyone playing pretend that the government officials are acting out of some sense of noblesse oblige and there aren't powerful interest groups. Humans don't work that way, they've never worked that way and the whole idea that they might is quite likely a propaganda campaign by some very ugly people who would never be allowed to hold power if there was any level of public debate on what they were doing.
There is a huge issue here that alternative approaches must address - if wealthy, powerful people can't get what they want within the system then they'll destabilise the system until they can. The poor and powerless have, over the millennia, proven far too disorganised and unprincipled to stop the wealthy and powerful. It is almost always factional conflicts between wealthy, powerful people that move the status quo around.
Americans please stop sanctifying Europe/Europeans. It's annoying.
Lobbying happens in Europe too, it sucks
> It is not a bribe, because a bribe would be illegal.
But it is a bribe. It is not the fault of the people if legislation has been undermined in democracies to suit the rich.
This is a problem pretty much all democracies have, to varying extent.
Lobbying is an essential part of the EU. It’s a regulated activity, with its whole processes. I have no idea why the author believes it’s something Europeans aren’t familiar with
Lobbying is corruption. That is a fair statement. Of course, the dictionary definition of lobbying is by no means corruption. But it is the thing most easily grafted onto corruption. Drugs can also function as “medicine.” In the same way, lobbying can “function.” But drugs, like corruption, make things prone to decay. The beginning of lobbying was very good. Cocaine, too, was very good at the beginning. The fact that a means can perform a legitimate function does not mean that the possibility of its abuse and its harmful consequences disappear. Lobbying is, in particular, centered on the asymmetry by which groups with money and organizational power can gain access to policymakers. So what is the problem? Decisions that are “legal” but morally bad have been produced. Through legal lobbying, a minority group can exert excessive influence over policymaking and cause harm to the majority.
Policymaking does not reflect the interests of various citizens fairly at all.
I find this a weird, kind of elitist, response to what George Hotz wrote from his own perspective. Since the response argues using a grand generalisation I'll use one too: no in fact we absolutely do _not_ call lobbying and lobbyists "corruption" in europe, making such a statement could not be further from the truth and borders on being delusional. If anything this says a lot about how much the post author knows about european politics.
Here is a web page from the European Parliament using the same terms; https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparen... including a whole paragraph on why lobby groups are important for europe. "This is a legitimate and necessary part of the decision-making process to make sure that EU policies reflect people’s real needs."
But let's be real the blog post author only wrote this to dunk on americans. It's just embarrassing they did it from such a clearly ignorant perspective.
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Sure, and scientific articles which often require payment to publish are a form of paid advertisement. /s
Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
I want to push back against that. Lobbying is not corruption. All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints. That is essential for good lawmaking. It should be open (and is in the EU) with lobby registers (author uses lobbying as a synonym for corporate lobbying, confusing the issues).
Lobbying easily involves corruption, and that has to be constantly worked against (Qatargate, Cash for Amendments in 2011) for example. Hiring EU lawmakers after they leave the office should have long cooldown limits.
Current problems with EU lobbying: Corporate lobbying is over 60% of registered lobby spending. Civil society interest groups, consumer groups, and labor unions have less money. Revolving doors, astroturfing from foreigin states and corporations, and too much reliance on self-declaration in transparency register.
These can be all solved: mandatory meeting disclosures, declaration of private interests and assets, MEPs should be banned on paid lobbying activities, and long cooling-off periods before MEPs can become lobbyists, independent refinforcement, public annex for all directives and regulation listing interest groups involved.
People should care and make these political issues.