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.
If we define lobbying as using your financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy, then of course it’s corruption. It’s a non-level playing field. Disclosure or transparency do not change this fundamental fact. And it’s an embarrassment to any real idea of egalitarian democracy.
But others don't lack those means. Others always have financial resources and political connections, even if you banned lobbying. Of all the ways people can influence policy, this is the legal one. The other methods are not nearly as civilized.
Also, just to be clear, is the Teachers Union an embarrassment to democracy? Auto workers? Environmental groups? Or are there some forms of lobbying you're okay with as long as your ox isn't gored?
That doesn't always work though, since citizens aren't given a vote on every policy issue[0]. Also, in the UK at the moment we have had a long stream of unelected governments, which make policy that isn't in the last manifesto that had a vote.
[0]: I'm not saying they should be, since that's what political representatives are for.
This is why we have freedom of speech and association in the US. If you have the will, but not the resources, you can rally people to your cause. You can try to find like-minded individuals with shared goals and with your collective resources, you can build influence.
Success is hard of course, but you have the freedom to try.
And in the states, I think people would be very surprised by the kind of impact they can have on local politics - which also happen to be the politics that have the most direct impact on their lives.
> If you have the will, but not the resources, you can rally people to your cause. You can try to find like-minded individuals with shared goals and with your collective resources, you can build influence.
No offense but this is such a naive, childlike view of how the world works that you might pick up in 5th grade social studies, but which should not survive contact with reality if you have an ounce of thinking ability. If you work two jobs and spend the remainder of your time trying to recover your broken mind and spirit then no, you cannot try to rally people to your cause and embark on a successful public relations campaign with no money and be on a similar playing field to ExxonMobile.
Frankly we both know you don’t even believe what you’re saying.
All of this is missing the ultimate underlying truth that capitalism (at least as it is implemented here and now) is the problem here. Capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality over time while nominally providing "equal opportunity" to all.
So it may be more accurate to say that "a capitalist system that creates an increasing gap of wealth inequality and defines money as speech is a system that inherently tends toward corruption" but that's a bit wordy for a headline
>Capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality over time while nominally providing "equal opportunity" to all.
I think a better summary is that capitalism creates more opportunities for all. Not equal, just more.
It creates more food, more clothes, more libraries, symphony orchestras, skateboard parks, cars, ships, planes, particle accelerators and space telescopes than any other system we have come up with, which means more opportunities for people wanting to be pilots, captains, skateboarders, scientists or violinists.
Whenever someone has tried to remove the inequality aspect of this, it has resulted in a loss in opportunities for all. Including the opportunity to have food every day.
Humanity is beyond a political system. This phase is technofeodalism or tech fascism.
The situation is the same on the other side of the pond. Money, power and algorithmic manipulation power have concentrated enough, that the premise of democracy can be ditched.
Read Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich for an update on the current situation, where tech has replaced democracy.
Or search THN for The Nerd Reich or tech fascism topics and see that most of the topics are flagged here for no reason.
This is not an inherent truth to capitalism. It might somewhat be the case in America right now, but that’s because we have chosen certain tax brackets and other choices that allows for it.
One reason I'm fully in support of capitalism is that you're 100% free to create subsystems within it. Go get some people together, buy some cheap land in the middle of nowhere, and start your new socialist, communists, or whatever other system you might fancy utopia.
You even get an instant all-inclusive free-trade agreement with the entire United States! All you need to be able to do is produce enough within your society to pay your land tax. By contrast try to start a little capitalist society within a 'social' economic system, and it'd be off to the gulags with you.
This freedom makes it quite difficult to take the hyperbolic claims against capitalism seriously. Obviously it has lots of problems, especially in the current crony capitalist system we have, but if the solutions were as simple as e.g. 'go be socialist instead' then people could prove it even within the system itself.
The concentration of power and the crossed planetary boundaries...
Money or economy is a social construct. The laws of physics and nature are, ehm kinda constant.
Eternal growth on a finite planet isn't exactly feasible and the planet is getting a mild fever as we speak. It'll recover, but it'll remove the symbiotic beings once they've turned into parasites.
And freedom in America is kinda joke these days at least anywhere else in the world : - )
Before you answer, consider all the castles, pyramids and other relics of past dynasties and aristocracies ruled by divine kings living in opulence while peasants subsisted on scraps.
Those groups are representing people, and yes, in an ideal world, in which politicians simply represent their constituents, they would be unnecessary. In a democracy, public policy is supposed to reflect public opinion. Yet, there is endless political science research showing that public policy usually has very little to do with public opinion. That is because under capitalism, capital concentrates, and it then uses that concentrated capital to influence public policy through legalized corruption (lobbying). If whatever some megacorp is lobbying for were actually in the public interest, and public policy reflected public opinion, there would be no need for their lobbying. They lobby because their interests are not aligned with the public’s interest.
There’s also no union for “the public” which is a little unfortunate since that should basically just be the government.
So yes, TLDR, first restore democracy and then we can talk about whether we need unions anymore. Until that time however, they are the only mechanism the public has to try to wield some degree of influence comparable to that of capital.
In other words, yes, big oil lobbying bad and auto workers union good.
Yes, absolutely. Simply check. They’ve spent far over a billion over the past decade directly to politicians, PACs, etc. The teachers union is the largest union in the US, and I think even the world.
> If we define lobbying as using your financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy
This definition is sloppy. If I buy a tacky "In this house..." sign and place it in my yard, I am using my financial resources to influence policy. Restricting that by law would be a disaster.
I think a better point could be made about the relationship BETWEEN financial resources and political connections. We should seek policies that limit the extent to which financial resources can easily buy political connections. This can be done by placing restrictions on public servants instead of restrictions on the public.
Of course, you're never going to totally remove the connection without totally destroying freedom of association.
you crossed a really big gap moving from 'communicate' to 'creating policy'. I certainly do not trust Google in particular to write any policies, given that their whole business model is to attempt to sit at the boundaries between consumers and companies, or email senders or recipients, or job seekers and hirers. not a fan of Schumer, but Schumer should be soliciting input from Google, who is free to submit a public white paper, and NIST, and DJB, and citizens groups, and everyone else that might have a stake in the outcome.
Government tried to ban encryption when it was first developed. Private organizations had to fight hard to make encryption standard. Still do in places like Europe
If Google communicates to Schumer, then do you think Schumer would then sit down and write the policy, knowing very little about it?
In reality, many companies would get Schumer attention on crypto, and other regulators, the companies would use their expertise to craft sensible policy, politicians would work with that, run it by lots of other groups and politicians, and if it passed enough tests along the way, it might come up as a bill.
It’s not like Google, or any company, likely can just put in ludicrous things, and use wizard powers to make laws. If a company breaks trust, they will lose the ability to get ears. If politicians, or parties lose trust, they get unelected. So, in order to have sane laws regarding any complex topic requires huge specialist inputs, and those specialists became expert by working in that field.
There’s simply not a pool of such people sitting around unassociated waiting to write laws to specifications of random internet people.
if we define anything in a way we want to define it to get the meaning we want then it ends up meaning what we want it to, however corruption in most definitions that I am aware of includes some sort of benefit to those making a political decision for the results of that political decision.
If we accepted your definition then it should follow that if you have political connections then you cannot influence policy without being corrupt, which seems weird because having political connections probably indicates political interest or knowledge of the issues.
Now you may feel that is an unfair description, that one can influence policy to the same extent as those without political connections and thus not be corrupt, but the problem with that is if you have political connections they will probably hear about your attempts and they will be influenced through that connection no matter what you try, not to mention that often your political connections are exactly the people that should be talked to, and in this way we see that people with political connections must be locked out of the process by your definition if we want to fight corruption.
Locking people out of the process seems as problematic as being corrupt, but luckily I follow the model of there has to be some personal benefit involved with the corruption so I don't need to argue for locking anyone out.
I'm not sure what you mean by financial, for example financial resources to affect a decision often includes advertising on the issue. I agree this can make things unfair, because someone with a lot of money can buy more ads than someone without.
In that case one could put funding limits on political ads, but so many issues are not directly political but still you can move the emotions of the public on them via advertising that it does not seem possible to really control. Maybe it should be attempted.
That said, although I believe it will invariably be unfair, unfair and corrupt are not synonymous.
The world is turning to crap right now because of affinity fraud.
"He goes to my church/eats my traditional food/wears the jersey of my favorite sportsball team. I trust him!"
People decide someone is their friend due to some superficial similarity which a charlatan has dressed himself up in (and conversely that others are their enemy due to some superficial dissimilarity), and then their "friend" steals their political power to do bad things.
And people are too committed to their self-conception as savvy judges of character to admit their error. The error becomes a religion, a folkway, and is persisted across generations. You have to keep committing the error in order to honor your ancestors who were first fooled.
So... the Red Cross using their financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy is committing to corruption?
Not a great example. After the Haiti Earthquake donations poured into the Red Cross, helping them raise half a billion dollars. Those half a billion dollars were ultimately used to construct 6 permanent homes. [1] These are the exact sort of people I expect to be involved in lobbying politicians, and the last sort of people I want anywhere near anything relevant to me.
No no no, you don't understand. It's corruption when groups I don't like do it, when groups I like do it it's fine. Just like when my side wins elections it's democracy and when the opposition wins elections its fascism.
Democracy is supposed to have something to do with majority rule or at least having policies that benefit the greatest number. When corporations that answer to no one use their disproportionate financial resources to hijack the political system and push policies that hurt the common people, that is fascism, yes.
> Democracy is supposed to have something to do with majority rule or at least having policies that benefit the greatest number
No. Modern democracy is supposed to protect the minority and allow regular peaceful transitions of power. That's why we need individual liberties and constitutional rules that protect the individual and prevent the majority to take away their liberties.
Which corporations "that answer to no one" (no publicly traded companies) have hijacked the political system and which policies have come about as a result that have hurt the majority of people actually represented by that system in ways that aren't:
A) Vagaries that most people don't actually care much about.
B) Tradeoffs that didn't go the way you personally want.
Maybe a better word would be "corrupting". Lobbying causes people to act in a way that is contrary to what people expect at face value, since it changes the incentives: if we assume that politicians choose what is best for them personally, their actions change from "what makes me popular with the most voters" to "what gives me the most money and power". This is often (not always) to the detriment of the voters themselves.
Lobbying is the right to petition the government. What you need is a countervailing powers to limit regulatory failure of institutional capture.
Just like the original post, make a definition that mistakes a pathology of the system for its core function (also: structural inequality is not corruption).
If you are a purist and eliminate all resource-backed influence by banning pooling money, hiring researchers, and organizing campaigns to influence lawmakers because "others lack those resources," you effectively ban organized labour unions, consumer watchdogs, civil liberties organizations.
A well-organized national labor union has more leverage than a non-unionized gig worker in the EU. Asymmetry an inequity issue, not corruption. Well organized will trump over those who are not.
Corporations should be able to lobby, but they their lobbying should be limited more heavily.
The real big problem with corporate lobbying is that corporations do not work in the self interests of the people they employ, but the political power they wield is a function of the number of people they employ.
I think that it's very common for people to work for corporations that are actively working to undermine their workers rights, and using the political clout that their workers grant to do i
Edit: Unions do this too of course. That's probably the number one accusation that people level against unions to discredit the whole idea of unionizing labour. The union management will eventually work for their own self interest instead of for the union members
>> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
Why do lawmakers need to talk some interest groups? If they don't have enough information to make laws, they should appoint expert groups to collect information. Talking to money bags is going to help only one thing.
We have groups of experts that advise lawmakers. For example, institutions that advise lawmakers on public health - currently headed by world class health expert RFK Jr.
Point being, it's impossible to build incorruptible institutions, groups of experts, etc, but we need them nonetheless.
Lobbying in it's most basic form is simply the act of petitioning politicians that represent you, which is pretty essential in a democracy.
If you've ever called your Senator or representative to tell them you oppose a law that will negatively impact you - you've just done a little lobbying
So... you'll have the representatives make their own lobbying groups? Also, each "expert" will have their own bias, so in doing so you'll inadvertently (or intentionally) block hearing from the wider community.
> So... you'll have the representatives make their own lobbying groups?
A lobbying group is dead-set on their preferred policy or solution to a problem, an expert group would be much more open-minded and exploratory. I don't see how these are comparable.
> Also, each "expert" will have their own bias, so in doing so you'll inadvertently (or intentionally) block hearing from the wider community.
Everyone has a bias, you can't reasonably remove that. Besides, hearing from the wider community will not make you less biased if the majority of the community is also strongly biased. However, a lobbying group has a pile of cash backing up their opinion (even if it is false), while a group of experts would be both more knowledgeable and likely have a more diverse set of views. It would be so much better.
"Lobbying is a form of advocacy that legally attempts to influence policy decisions"
I think there's a problem with definitions here. How the general public, especially here in the U.S., tends to think of lobbying is essentially always in the form of monetary value or gifts. In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.
In theory any exchanges of monetary value or gifts should be well documented and must be disclosed. In actuality, it's much harder to document than meets the eye. There are so many ways around it that it's almost worth saying it doesn't exist (admittedly it seems especially egregious in the US but I'm no expert on how its done elsewhere).
But then, at the same time if we conclude that it's hard to document then it's hard to ban it. Its just a slippery slope all around. Institutions must be allowed to petition their government, but making sure that doesn't go too far and lend itself to corruption is difficult to enforce.
So that is likely where the author and the rest of us lead to the conclusion that the eventual result of lobbying as its implemented in essentially everywhere in the world is corruption.
The alternative is that paid government officials and government/EU research institutions supply their research results to lawmakers and refuse to read gray papers from corporations or big civil influence groups. That's all well and good as part of the mix, but on its own, a very narrow viewpoint in a complex society. (The fight over who is nominated to these research jobs becomes even more political.)
Removing possibilities of corruption from MEPs means removing their power and moving it into deeper government bureaucracy where it is harder to spot. Now you have non-elected people who work whole their life in government using more power.
The things about unelected career bureaucrats is that they usually have no legal mechanism for directly benefiting from the outcome of their policy suggestions. They can't even accept lunch from outside groups without facing disciplinary action. I would prefer those people have the power of opinion rather than someone who benefits directly or has a perverse incentive to accept "campaign money" in order to further a change in law.
That depends. I know first hand a local bureaucrat who bought a piece of land designated as forest and a year later that forest got designated as construction area (or whatever the English term is) making that land worth at least 10x as much. And who was the person who changed that designation? A colleague of theirs in the office next doors. Quite a nice retirement gift. And those people are small fishes in a very small local community. One can only imagine how things are done on a larger scale.
They don't need to lobby, because they're already on the inside. 95% of the government is run by the bureaucracy, so they can directly implement their ideological preferences. That's how you get situations like in Europe where the policies don't change regardless of which party is elected.
What many people dislike about government in the US and in the EU is that the unelected bureaucrats tend make hiring and promotion decisions based on ideology with the result that each generation of career bureaucrats is more ideologically homogeneous and more extreme in its commitment to whichever ideology is best at spreading, which in the US and EU over the last 95 years has been Leftism.
Elections are a powerful check on this process because there isn't a similar mechanism at work in the general population of voters (or at least the mechanism is much weaker in its effects).
Also we can start to see why actors who oppose Leftism or who oppose ideological hegemonies in general sometimes want decisions to be made out of self-interest: even most zealous ideologues are more motivated by self-interest than they are by advancing ideologies. I.e., allowing decision makers to act out of self-interest is one tool in the toolbox for opposing ideological hegemony.
Yes exactly academics and researchers not dealing with the real world should not decide policy.
Academics and researchers are prone to groupthink and monocultures. To quote a form of Sayre’s law “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”.
Researcher’s policies might be disastrous for society or industry yet they’ll often be insulated from any consequences, even just to their reputations.
> In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.
This is prohibited, not in an ideal world, but in essentially every Western democracy except the United States. I appreciate the political difficulty of implimenting this (or indeed any useful structural) change in the contemporary American political climate / level of dysfunction. But outlawing corruption is not some utopian dream.
> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints
If the only way to have that ability is money and access, then it's corruption for all intends and purpose with other name. Just because it's accepted doesn't make it not corruption. And I think that's what people mean when they say they want to take lobbying away, they don't want private meetings between interest groups and lawmakers, without public input
Right, the corrupt thing is when lobbyists are listened to in a way that is proportional to some parameter besides the number of people they represent and when groups of people without the means to hire a lobbyist go unheard.
I think we need better infrastructure for tracking who is operating on who's behalf so we can build systems that fix these problems.
We absolutely want politicians to listen to lobbyists in a way that is proportional to some parameter besides the number of people they represent. The should listen to who is right, not which lobby represents the most members. Self-interested groups lobby for bad legislation all the time. When the harm to society is diffuse, they don't always have a large lobby opposing them.
Certainly somebody needs to identify cases when a minority voice needs disproportional consideration because they happen to be onto something special. But it's the job of an elected official to make that determination only after they have considered their options in a proportional-to-population way.
If you try to handle nuances like that up front, and somehow select for who gets the politician's attention on the basis of some parameter besides population, you're going to end up with a government that only works for the rich, because they are disproportionally able to game such things.
As others have already stated, lobbying solves a problem that doesn’t need to exist. It’s absolutely corrupt when you fix a problem with more problems.
If I call my local representative on the phone, or email them, that's lobbying. Am I not allowed to contact those I've elected to represent me?
Now, if you mean I shouldn't be allowed to take my representative on a Caribbean vacation, then we're agreed, because bribery is (or should be) illegal. And yes, I'm including many forms of campaign donation as "bribery".
Apologies in advance if English isn’t your native language, but expecting or suggesting that others should use AI to resolve your sloppy syntax/grammar seems like a rather poor practice in general. I think you have a good point to make here, and a little more diligence could make an appreciable difference to your level of discourse.
No English isn't my native language, it's the third actually.
I think degrading and dismissing someone's point because of a stupid grammatical mistake is much worse in practice. If you can only engage in conversations where everyone uses perfect grammar, then maybe you should just use an LLM to rewrite people's comments. It seemed like a good suggestion to me.
If you mean they donated 50 million in dark money to a PAC, then we're agreed - that's bribery and should be included in anti-bribery laws. SCOTUS fucked up egregiously when they allowed unlimited dark money to flow into campaigns.
Depending on what you mean by local, you're never going to be able to directly contact your representative. Your phone call, if answered by a human will be an intern or other sort of assistant who will basically end up marking you as a tally on whatever side of an issue. You will have near zero influence. Emails are even worse. I'm sure now a days you'll get LLM slop but 'back in the day' you'd get a response that always came down to "Thanks for your message. Representative Joe Blow likes good things, and dislikes bad things. And he even thinks important things are important! Thanks for your message, and remember to vote for Joe Blow! Bye!" Even better, you get subbed to a bunch of donation begging mailing lists.
By contrast go buy a top dollar lobbyist, and he'll go endlessly push your issue to all his old buddies. He'll even compose legislation that can be rubber stamped by the reps that your lobbyist will know are most inclined to agree with. You'll get better than direct contact and over a sustained period of time if necessary. I don't think the two are in any way comparable.
And yes, phone is sort of a black hole. If they note your satisfaction/lack thereof, you’ll be lucky. But you can schedule a live meeting (as I said I a sibling, for congress that’s going to be with a staffer unless you’re bringing a group and can convince them it’ll be worth their time).
Anyways, my point in all my posts in this discussion is we need to agree on definitions, because lobbying literally is making your case to the representative. The whole campaign fundraiser/PAC thing we have in the US is just legalized bribery. IMO.
What do you mean "a problem that doesn't need to exist"? What's the specific problem you are thinking of?
Trade and especially the shared European market required industry input which you might call lobbying. Regulations had to be homogenized to create a level playing field. To attack what matters European law makers needed lobby input. This happens all the time on a smaller scale with trade agreements. Think of the famous chlorine-washed chicken in the US situation. If a country prohibits this their chicken industry might want a for-export exemption when a trade deal with the US is made.
You also have lobbying that could be seen as genuinely good. Insurance companies lobbied for a lot of car safety standards and fire safety standards. (That said I'm libertarian enough that I don't actually see enforcement of standards that protect the occupant by law as positive but most people do)
I'll go a little further and say "corporations are bad". Maybe we don't need to expand beyond liability. It's often quoted: "a computer can never be held accountable. therefore a computer must never make a management decision", but why is it OK for corporations?
I would usually agree with this kind of reasoning. Yes there is good things too... But also too much abuse that clearly don't go in the interest of the people... So to me yes... It is corruption
I would add to limit lobbying money. Information and transparency are fundamental. But knowing that you are being screwed is not the same that avoiding corruption.
> long cooling-off periods before MEPs can become lobbyists
They already earn a public pension. They should be banned for life. Corporations know too well the internal workings of the government what allow them to corrupt it. But cooling-off periods could be a good first step towards that.
> Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
no, the default internet response is to try and be a contrarian arguing minor points while missing the whole societal context and leaning into weird word games etc while pretending like that makes you the adult in the room and your opponents are "emotional", "don't know what they're talking about", etc. Which is basically half this thread (or this whole forum for one).
> Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
The idea that lobbying is corruption is ironically helps corporate lobbyists the most. Lobbying is what gave us Civil Rights. The only thing calling lobbying evil has accomplished is reduce grass roots lobbying, which means corporate lobbyists get more bandwidth from politicians.
Are you sure it was internet opinions that made grassroots lobbying ineffective, or is it the incomprehensible amounts of money backing up the lobbyists of corporations and the wealthy?
It's not just an Internet opinion. It's a cultural change that has been occuring for decades. Less than a third of nonprofits even know how to lobby if they want to.
Lobbying spending isn't really "incomprehensible." The small group HN readers can easily fund lobbyists if they really want to.
I don’t disagree with the proposals you suggest, but all that proves is the central point you’re trying to disprove: lobbying, in its current guise, is legalised corruption.
> Current problems with EU lobbying: Corporate lobbying is over 60% of registered lobby spending.
Ah yes, Europe, famously friendly to business interests. Hence so many large multinational influential corporations domiciled in Europe and being started every day
Without the US Federal government, most states would be bankrupt (all the time).
California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania being the few exceptions that are net positive contributors that largely subsidize every other state (the other 43).
In principle that statement is not incorrect in that
lobbying means that one is able to represent a view.
However had, if money flows, then this skews all bias
towards that money addiction flow, at the expense of
everyone else. And most lobbying is due to money,
that's also a fact.
And you are also free to visit your representative's at their offices.
For example, Congress is open to visit - you can request a pass for specific sessions, you can schedule meetings with congressional staffers (face to face with the actual congressman is harder, but theoretically possible), etc. Local and state reps are typically easier to visit.
Theoretically possible. Is it practically possible? Because if these groups are meeting with my members of Congress and I practically can’t, then that’s not the same.
Yes, it's practically possible. But, there's a lot of gotchas there... probably need to schedule at home during a recess, not during sessions. Probably need to declare a specific topic, not just a chit-chat. Likelihood goes up if you bring a group of constituents with you so the Congressman can get more input in that block of time (which is now looking suspiciously like the "lobbyists" you decry).
That said, for single-person "I want to tell you about thing X", a staffer probably works just fine. That's why they're there.
For a local politician, who likely has much more impact on your day to day, this is all far easier. They're generally less busy, less travel, and more approachable. And, they're the ones setting real estate taxes, school policy, and other things that make places truly livable (or not).
In other words, you, too can put together a well-funded lobbying organization and lobby. And if you can’t catch the attention of high-level politicians, don’t worry your pretty little head, local policy is all you should care about. National policy is for big important people, not nobodies like you.
No, that's not called lobbying. It's lobbying when it involves paying for access. If you're just making calls and writing letters it's just advocacy not lobbying
The problem is our (USA) definition of bribery is too permissive. We allow lobbyists to bribe politicians through massive fundraising dinners and donations to preferred causes (see Trump's current relationship with TechBro billionaires and Russian oligarchs).
> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
"All" is carrying a lot ow weight here. Should we publicly fund interest groups so they can go to Washington? How big or small does the group need to be? Are not I, alone, an interest group?
No. No more lobbying. What we need is a more direct democracy.
or we ban lobbying _and_ we force transparency on meetings, finances and all these problems solve themselves when we investigate them and they're found guilty of corruption.
> Lobbying is not corruption.
Cool story, lobbying is corruption.
>All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
Me accidentally paying for a 3 star restaurant for an MEP isn't "talking" to lawmakers. It's buying them off. Total can do it 20 times every day. You can't.
I think that you're arguing against something different. Visiting your MP at their surgery or lobbying them at their office in the house of commons is not the same thing as buying them two and a half grands worth of spectacle frames.
No, this is when the no-nuance answer is sensible. Wanting to reform lobbying is the answer that normalizes the status quo and doesn't address the disbalance of power that it always inherently introduces.
Any mechanism that has a pathway of converting money into political influence is inherently rotten and will eventually have its flaws discovered. I don't even really see how your proposed policies are going to stop this - all the declarations, disclosures and oversights only work if there are hard lines drawn with someone watching them. We don't live in a rules-based world, so every point in the system has to be perfect.
Or we could just ban lobbying. It's never going to be equal anyway, because the interest groups of the wealthy can spend all their time and endless money to secure the best everything for themselves, even if that money doesn't literally go to the politician. Grassroots groups are composed of regular people who don't get paid to do this, have their own lives and don't have that much money to put down. It's always going to be unequal.
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.
When you look at the actual dollar amounts for these campaign contributions, they are often fairly small. They are in the ballpark where any well paid individual (doctors, engineers) would be able to afford a 1:1 coffee meeting with their representative.
This either means that a) buying our elected officials is cheap or b) we’re not looking in the right place to see the actual transactions.
A much more likely (and hard to regulate) form of corruption is “back-door lobbying” where there isn’t a clear payment now but a promise of bigger payment in the future. Such as “you helped our industry do X, so once you retire from congress we’ll reward you with a high layer do—nothing consultant’ role”.
apples and oranges. (i know that this is totally "trust me, bro") but as of a few years ago a colleague with knowledge of these things told me that the "going rate" for a private coffee meeting with a member of the house was a donation of ~$5k.
that's not a crazy amount if you think about the potential ROI of a few of these meetings vs. blowing money on an ad campaign.
there's no way that its this cheap to buy our representatives, which is why im convinced that looking at on-the-books campaign donations is a red herring.
100%. Experts need to talk to politicians who don't understand the issue in order to make them understand and make better laws. If we banned anyone from trying to talk to a politician ("lobbying") we would get enormously stupid laws all the time.
Experts need to talk to politicians, but it should be done so through a proper institutional structure (for example a public hearing). Not in private meetings.
What influence groups say to policy makers has to be able to be challenged by opposing interest.
Not only that, but it's important for these advocacy groups to disclose their financing for all to see.
Its always going to be a cat and mouse game because ultimately corporations want to have undue influence over politics, it helps them greatly.
The first stepping stone needs to be to acknowledged that the interests of corporations can and in many cases will be against the interests of the majority of constituents and so we can't allow for our laws and practices to just waver this fact and institutionalise corruption through lobbying.
It's very naive to think consumers and the general population can organise to the effectiveness and level of a corporation. But that doesn't mean people don't care, or don't deserve to have their interests protected.
It’s too simplistic to think that the only form of political signaling that should happen is ... one person one vote as a basis for a mandate to represent peoples interests. It’s easy to see how that can lead to a tyranny of the majority situation. There does need to be a path for influence for those with special interests in an area to influence decisions also. I think the arguments usually come down to which types of special interests give which types of standing on an issue.. if we want to say a business working in an industry shouldn't lobby then do we also say that a local environmental group should(nt) have a say about some area they are experts on also?.. Some things are also put up for general referendum even when they outweightedly affect only a small group.. I think a lot of places had made progress towords finding this balance of steakholder representation.. but now were just slipping back to creptocracy and tyranny eveywhere and forgetting it all.
Complete disagreement with tyranny of the majority. That is simply democracy.
On the other hand, the idea of one person one vote should also be applied to lobbying. It is possible to legislate into law that all lobbying attempts must publicize a list of signatories behind it. This empowers non-corporate lobbying, since they have the backing of the people, not solely money.
By enforcing lists of signatories, and mandate publication of signatories from all lobbying attempts, we provide transparency in the influence of government, which is a vital component in a well governed democracy.
I think the fix is to make representative democracy recursive.
I can indicate other citizens that I trust on the basis of their expertise, and they can further indicate others in the same way.
The roots of those trees are my representatives for whatever domain, they have unequal standing proportional to the size of their constituency, and I can reconfigure my pointers towards different representatives at different times, or I can point them all at myself and show up in person for some direct democracy.
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 future textbooks (will those even be a thing anymore?).
I think the Powell Memorandum (as response to nascent consumersm ala Nader) and Powell’s rise to Supreme Court Justice from US chamber of commerce points to deep roots of corporate takeover of USA.
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
He was talking about the European parliament. The lobbying is organized and transparent there. But still some recent cases have demonstrated there remains some corruption.
yes and bribing politicians was kind of legal in germany till 2024, yes two years ago!
They even bragged till the 90s with how much money the got from industry because it meant they had a better reputation industriewise
edit:: honestly germany is maybe one of the most corrupt countrys in the world because it was not only legal but best practice to work with the professional advise of the industry.
Fine, let's take another dataset. There's also https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-corruption-inde...
Germany is 8th best there, not the worst.
I'm not arguing that there's no corruption, the country was a role model, or anything like that. That kind of post-fact accusation is not helpful, it's leading society in a dangerously wrong direction.
This just means that number 1 is also corrupt. OP is talking about the scale of none to complete corruption, not the relative rankings of all countries.
I must confess, I do not understand the point the author to make. Are they saying that there is no lobbying in Europe, that it is a uniquely American pasttime? That is not my understanding given a cursory internet examination.
So then, are they stating that all lobbying is corruption, including European lobbying, and Americans refuse to understand this while Europeans understand they are corrupt?
Is the author suggesting that only in the US is lobbying corruption while in Europe lobbying is just and moral activity?
Lobbying purely via transparent talks is ok. Lobbying that has any kind of quid pro quo that pays money or some alternative arrangement now or in future in exchange for the representatives backing a position is corruption.
Transparent talks is the key part. Without transparent talk how do you know if your representative is doing corruption behind your back? Representatives are elected in democracy to represent the interests of people of their constituency. Technically, since now technology has grown enough for each person to represent themselves, we really don't need representatives anymore in order to do democracy. We would still need some people to form government, which is different from representative in legislature.
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.
It is normal, at least it's how pretty much all human societies and governments have worked in practice forever. Public education and propaganda have left most of us with the impression that the system is/should be much better and cleaner than it is in practice, because government-issued schoolbooks usually don't spend a lot of time criticizing current government practice.
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.
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.
I think this is wrong. The fact that elon musk or israel was able to fund a public PAC in US transparently is a good thing rather than behind closed door, unlike how walmart did in developing countries like India and got caught.
You seem to be stuck in "either or" thinking instead of "and". In other words, the closed door meetings will happen either way. Transparency is performative.
I would take the complete removal of meat-based politicians replaced with open-source AI with transparent training, weights, and a window into its decision/reasoning process open to the public at all times.
Voting for amendments will be implemented as pull requests :)
(aww downvotes.. can't believe people still willingly suck up for politicians)
Since we are using completely fictional scenarios to prescribe reality, there is at least one very popular TV/movie francise that depicts the end of scarcity occurs only after nuclear war.
I would rather have the ability to do it rather than not on pure ideological grounds,furthermore not banning it incentivises transparency, you can see more of where the money is coming from for example in US democrats are funded by more aggregate donors.
Ah, yes, transparency. "I received 250000€ from Renault-Nissan. No particular reason no. They just really like me. We talked. Also please don't pay attention to my upcoming votes and law proposals".
Lobbying is corruption, and it's also pay to play. Noone gets anything good out of it.
Calling it corruption and outlawing it doesn't stop the power of money and elite circles, it rather prevents small aggregate firms from doing it and yes I would rather know if they received such donation from renault for same reason I would want to know if a climate study is funded by oil corp.
This doesn't make logical sense. Making something officially transparent doesn't do anything to prevent the closed door meetings that will inevitably always happen.
No, they're an advocacy group, and people like you are useful idiots giving lobbyists an excuse every single time. "Oh but look, if you ban us, you also ban the 'don't kill puppies' group! Wouldn't that be terrible?"
MADD does not pay politicians. MADD does not bring politicians gifts. MADD does not invite them to an expensive restaurant for three hours of one on one. MADD does not do any of the things a lobbyist does that is, for all intents and purposes, corruption.
So you know what ? Yeah, let's silence the don't kill puppies group, if it means that the leeches at the european commission also don't get their ways. "oh but then it will be done secretly" good that means it's officially corruption and we can jail everyone involved.
Lobbying is not corruption. Lobbying is a necessary part of a healthy functioning democracy.
Here are some organizations that lobby:
- Cancer Society
- ASPCA
- Associations of students
- Local cities and counties
- Trade unions
- Regular every-day people (you can literally just go schedule a meeting with your representation. That is lobbying.)
Of course, if everyone gets to lobby, corporate interests can too.
Without this function, legislators would largely be blind during policymaking.
Lobbying does not, on its own, imply corruption or involvement of money. In California and federally, money spent for lobbying is tightly tracked and publicly released.
Reading this as sarcasm, it indeed reflects a portion of the faerie tale descriptions of government taught in American schools. It is state propaganda of the most traditional (and effective) sort— that which is directed at children.
It’s not sarcasm, you just aren’t using words correctly. Lobbying is just an attempt at persuasion. In a democracy, it is a built in feature, not a bug, to have broad participation and many points of view.
“Lobbying” is not corruption technically or in practice. You are just simply wrong. Sometimes, things are a matter of opinion (this is a “values debate”); sometimes they are not.
Lobbying and corruption are different things. Sometimes one involves the other, just like commercial enterprise also sometimes involves or creates corruption.
I wasn’t taught this in school, by the way. I was the youngest registered lobbyist in California state history, at age 16, because I lived nearby and decided to go lobby my state senator about vocational education law.
Hardly the spitting image of corruption, or the bleak fantasy in your head about American life.
Let me guess - the cancer society lobbies to keep high fructose corn syrup in the food supply? a patient cured is a customer lost. Oreos are "not harmful". Nothing wrong with a bucket of paint on your M&Ms. (for those not in the know: M&Ms is allegedly "food".)
Or do they lobby around a $200,000 chemotherapy treatment that increases (or decreases) the patient's life expectancy by 0.2%, or about two weeks?
associations of students - yep, american tuition, backed by the government, is highest in the world and the education is worse and worse. Or is it 18 year-olds with barely any life skills actively participating in federal government, with daddy's money? Or it is lobbying without money?
local cities - that's part of a government. A city is a government.
regular people - yep, I have certainly lobbied!
I'm skipping ASPCA until the acronym is expanded, you don't make meaning by appending random letters one after another.
and trade unions... are a kind of a forced monopoly, and don't forget to pay your $500 monthly due. they are a kind of corruption themselves. For example, what on earth is a police union?! So the government (police) is arguing with the government, to protect the government (police) from the "bad" government? Riiiiiiiiight.
Every single one of these is corruption. If you think a city lobbying itself is not corruption, you should wipe your glasses to see more clearly. And don't get me started on city councils.
- The American Cancer Society lobbies against big tobacco. Warnings exist on cigarettes because of their lobbying work.
- Associations of students are distinct from associations of administrators or institutions. All of them lobby government. There are associations of this kind at every level, including for public city colleges, some of which don’t charge tuition at all.
- The simple practice of lobbying your legislators does not imply or require money. Donations to campaigns are a totally separate thing and are regulated tightly as well. For example: hosting a dinner for legislators to learn about some topic is lobbying; donating to a campaign so they can buy ads is campaign finance. Both are tracked and regulated and the data is public.
- Local cities/counties: yes, those are governments, obviously. They are still stakeholders in the process of making policy just like anyone else.
- In the US, a state government is distinct from a local government. So a local city informing the state of impacts on policy, and the state factoring that in to new or changed policy, is totally normal and reasonable and also a feature, not a bug, of a healthy democracy.
- ASPCA = American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
- Trade unions are affected by policy and law, and therefore deserve a voice at the table just like everyone else. Whether unions are a good or bad thing is entirely outside the scope of lobbying as a concept.
Every single one of these is normal and not necessarily corruption. Corruption is errant in a system; lobbying is the system working as intended.
Policy should be made by people who are aware of what their policies will do to other people. Simply put, lobbying is American democracy’s solution to that problem.
If you live in America, work in America, or have interests in America, you can lobby, too. You don’t need to register or obtain permission or a license. Just call your representative and set up a meeting.
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.
Well the problem is that access to politicians (who are supposed to represent you) is almost entirely through lobbyism. If you want anything, you can't afford it - and you definitely can't afford to go against existing lobbyists. It becomes corruption when only certain people have access to a democratic mechanism. It doesn't help that in the US, corporations are people and cash is their speech and you can't do or say anything about it because that would be treasonous.
That’s not what lobbying is, though. If have “no dog in the fight”, you are unlikely to try to influence a politician any which way. Lobbyists appear because someone with money is willing to pay for the lobbyist to apply their talents, and why would they if they had no “dog in the fight”?
Its interesting to see this comment about a blog article that conflates lobbying with campaign donations and super PACS. Lobbyists certainly make donations - as do many entities - but that isn't what makes them lobbyists.
The percentage of people who can vote isn't a linear measure of "democracy." It's the classic case of "getting from 0 to 1 is the hard part." Extending the franchise to a large fraction of the population and having stable transition of power and fair elections is the hard part.
And women have been able to vote in the U.S. for decades longer than the governments of the E.U.'s largest countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) have existed in their current democratic forms. When women got the right to vote in Wyoming, kicking off the movement towards national women's suffrage, the French were on Napoleon III, Spain had a king, Germany wasn't even a country yet, and Italy was a recently unified Kingdom.
Who are "they", you mean one commenter you assume is European?
You are right that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was still a lack of democratic structures, in Europe, as well as in the United States of America, where the 19th amendment was introduced in 1920 and the Voting Right Act in 1965.
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.
Beyond a certain scale, humans cannot organize themselves in a completely altruistic manner, even in Europe. The best we can hope for is for gatekeepers to mostly wield their power for the good of most people - we have to accept some error rate. Making all such practices illegal would only serve to make things less visible with little actually changing. It might even lead to more corruption.
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.
Any discussion that is at least slightly explicitly political (as opposed to everything, which is at least implicitly political) is liable to be removed by the mods. It's up to whether they see it and whether it offends their sensibilities in the moment.
How easy is it to recall a politician in Europe? In my country, it is nearly impossible. If the public cannot influence politicians' decisions, then politicians are free to lobby for whatever they want.
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?
It is. For millenia those in power have tried to change the meaning of words, the narratives, so instead of plundering by force now they plunder by agreement, which is easier, and now it is written in the fabric of education, morals and law. They need everybody to be indoctrinated from the womb so they don't question anything. Sheep clothes are so perfect nowadays that nobody ever thinks there is a wolf beneath them
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.
Lobbying itself is not. When people exploit that for personal benefit, then it becomes. Any idea that push too far/extreme would be a problem. But these days, people like to blame/complain something/someone instead of looking for a solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, "gross wealth" ala billionaires needs instead to have a definition of bell curve based (statistical) analysis, and outliers above X standard deviations need to have economic sanction tools used against them. Doing this means that no matter how inflationary or deflationairy the currency is, we're measuring gross wealth by standard deviations of the mean, rather than some number that can and will be gamed.
And how the billionaires got their money is never by their work, but instead the mass extraction of millions of people and scraping over the top. Of course, when 'scraping over the top' involves piss bottles, injuries and deaths 3x higher than industry average, and more abhorrent things, yeah you need to fall. Hard.
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.
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
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.
It is important that you never look beyond your own borders. Solving every issue from scratch instead of replicating systems that already work elsewhere is great. Is that what you are saying in the context of the article?
Gerrymandering is blatantly unethical. Its cherry picking their own votes for next election by including certain areas while excluding certain other areas to obtain maximum votes for themselves by redrawing constituency map.
Dear fluffy Europeans , please explain , how you built Nord Stream 2 against all the rules ?
Did anyone go to jail for that or that was lobby ?
How former chancellor of Germany suddenly got a big title in Russian oil company , went on Putin birthday to celebrate and no one asked questions?
Or maybe Iran expert initiate ?
Or entire Austria chancellor fiasco ?
Caviar diplomacy maybe ?
At least lobby is transparent.
America half way out of their shame moment , Europe … not sure there’s ever way our due to how they distributed are . France and Germany entering the room in the next election cycle . Hungary before , Slovakia , Bulgaria , Czech Republic now
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.
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.
At no point in history have a diversity of citizenry had impactful input on its governance.
It is ALWAYS a coterie of specifically placed individuals, who have navigated complex social arrangements such that they are maintaining social dominance of the coterie, which itself “controls” previously seized materiel and personnel from some group of conquered people
There is no mechanical or mathematical way to actually give singular direction to more than about 1000 people at a time that has any type of explicit consensus.
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.
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.
If we define lobbying as using your financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy, then of course it’s corruption. It’s a non-level playing field. Disclosure or transparency do not change this fundamental fact. And it’s an embarrassment to any real idea of egalitarian democracy.
But others don't lack those means. Others always have financial resources and political connections, even if you banned lobbying. Of all the ways people can influence policy, this is the legal one. The other methods are not nearly as civilized.
Also, just to be clear, is the Teachers Union an embarrassment to democracy? Auto workers? Environmental groups? Or are there some forms of lobbying you're okay with as long as your ox isn't gored?
> Of all the ways people can influence policy, this is the legal one. The other methods are not nearly as civilized.
False. An excellent example is the vTaiwan / pol.is platform. It incorporates the interests of all stakeholders:
government, business, AND citizens
The most civilized method to influence policy has always been the act of voting.
That doesn't always work though, since citizens aren't given a vote on every policy issue[0]. Also, in the UK at the moment we have had a long stream of unelected governments, which make policy that isn't in the last manifesto that had a vote.
[0]: I'm not saying they should be, since that's what political representatives are for.
This is why we have freedom of speech and association in the US. If you have the will, but not the resources, you can rally people to your cause. You can try to find like-minded individuals with shared goals and with your collective resources, you can build influence.
Success is hard of course, but you have the freedom to try.
And in the states, I think people would be very surprised by the kind of impact they can have on local politics - which also happen to be the politics that have the most direct impact on their lives.
> If you have the will, but not the resources, you can rally people to your cause. You can try to find like-minded individuals with shared goals and with your collective resources, you can build influence.
No offense but this is such a naive, childlike view of how the world works that you might pick up in 5th grade social studies, but which should not survive contact with reality if you have an ounce of thinking ability. If you work two jobs and spend the remainder of your time trying to recover your broken mind and spirit then no, you cannot try to rally people to your cause and embark on a successful public relations campaign with no money and be on a similar playing field to ExxonMobile.
Frankly we both know you don’t even believe what you’re saying.
> trying to recover your broken mind and spirit
You have a very strange view of how most people approach jobs. And politics.
All of this is missing the ultimate underlying truth that capitalism (at least as it is implemented here and now) is the problem here. Capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality over time while nominally providing "equal opportunity" to all.
So it may be more accurate to say that "a capitalist system that creates an increasing gap of wealth inequality and defines money as speech is a system that inherently tends toward corruption" but that's a bit wordy for a headline
>Capitalism creates increasing levels of inequality over time while nominally providing "equal opportunity" to all.
I think a better summary is that capitalism creates more opportunities for all. Not equal, just more.
It creates more food, more clothes, more libraries, symphony orchestras, skateboard parks, cars, ships, planes, particle accelerators and space telescopes than any other system we have come up with, which means more opportunities for people wanting to be pilots, captains, skateboarders, scientists or violinists.
Whenever someone has tried to remove the inequality aspect of this, it has resulted in a loss in opportunities for all. Including the opportunity to have food every day.
Which why taxes where created to prevent destructive buildup in the system
Humanity is beyond a political system. This phase is technofeodalism or tech fascism.
The situation is the same on the other side of the pond. Money, power and algorithmic manipulation power have concentrated enough, that the premise of democracy can be ditched.
Read Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich for an update on the current situation, where tech has replaced democracy.
Or search THN for The Nerd Reich or tech fascism topics and see that most of the topics are flagged here for no reason.
This is not an inherent truth to capitalism. It might somewhat be the case in America right now, but that’s because we have chosen certain tax brackets and other choices that allows for it.
Concentration of capital is absolutely an inherent truth to capitalism. This is not even a debate it’s a (social) scientific fact.
The ones on the top of the chain have chosen. The rest have been manipulated to passivity and the banality of evil.
One reason I'm fully in support of capitalism is that you're 100% free to create subsystems within it. Go get some people together, buy some cheap land in the middle of nowhere, and start your new socialist, communists, or whatever other system you might fancy utopia.
You even get an instant all-inclusive free-trade agreement with the entire United States! All you need to be able to do is produce enough within your society to pay your land tax. By contrast try to start a little capitalist society within a 'social' economic system, and it'd be off to the gulags with you.
This freedom makes it quite difficult to take the hyperbolic claims against capitalism seriously. Obviously it has lots of problems, especially in the current crony capitalist system we have, but if the solutions were as simple as e.g. 'go be socialist instead' then people could prove it even within the system itself.
The concentration of power and the crossed planetary boundaries...
Money or economy is a social construct. The laws of physics and nature are, ehm kinda constant.
Eternal growth on a finite planet isn't exactly feasible and the planet is getting a mild fever as we speak. It'll recover, but it'll remove the symbiotic beings once they've turned into parasites.
And freedom in America is kinda joke these days at least anywhere else in the world : - )
Compared to what?
Before you answer, consider all the castles, pyramids and other relics of past dynasties and aristocracies ruled by divine kings living in opulence while peasants subsisted on scraps.
Those groups are representing people, and yes, in an ideal world, in which politicians simply represent their constituents, they would be unnecessary. In a democracy, public policy is supposed to reflect public opinion. Yet, there is endless political science research showing that public policy usually has very little to do with public opinion. That is because under capitalism, capital concentrates, and it then uses that concentrated capital to influence public policy through legalized corruption (lobbying). If whatever some megacorp is lobbying for were actually in the public interest, and public policy reflected public opinion, there would be no need for their lobbying. They lobby because their interests are not aligned with the public’s interest.
There’s also no union for “the public” which is a little unfortunate since that should basically just be the government.
So yes, TLDR, first restore democracy and then we can talk about whether we need unions anymore. Until that time however, they are the only mechanism the public has to try to wield some degree of influence comparable to that of capital.
In other words, yes, big oil lobbying bad and auto workers union good.
Are teachers unions, or environmental groups also "donating" to politician coffers?
Yes, absolutely. Simply check. They’ve spent far over a billion over the past decade directly to politicians, PACs, etc. The teachers union is the largest union in the US, and I think even the world.
Simply google the question, plenty of sources.
Yes, they are politically active, and that includes donations of money and in kind.
Yes. In my state’s last cycle, the state teachers’ union was the largest direct donor to state-level candidates of the winning party.
Much of that money is also derived from government spending itself, e.g. union dues.
That’s a situation ripe for corruption.
Indeed - that is even an example of circular corruption.
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=L1300
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=Q11
Yes. And the use of money and undue influence of money are the problem-- not the idea of lobbying per se.
> If we define lobbying as using your financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy
This definition is sloppy. If I buy a tacky "In this house..." sign and place it in my yard, I am using my financial resources to influence policy. Restricting that by law would be a disaster.
I think a better point could be made about the relationship BETWEEN financial resources and political connections. We should seek policies that limit the extent to which financial resources can easily buy political connections. This can be done by placing restrictions on public servants instead of restrictions on the public.
Of course, you're never going to totally remove the connection without totally destroying freedom of association.
Businesses should be able to communicate with policy makers especially when it impacts their industry.
In other words who would you trust to create a sensible encryption policy, Google executives or Chuck Schumer?
I know who I would pick
you crossed a really big gap moving from 'communicate' to 'creating policy'. I certainly do not trust Google in particular to write any policies, given that their whole business model is to attempt to sit at the boundaries between consumers and companies, or email senders or recipients, or job seekers and hirers. not a fan of Schumer, but Schumer should be soliciting input from Google, who is free to submit a public white paper, and NIST, and DJB, and citizens groups, and everyone else that might have a stake in the outcome.
Government tried to ban encryption when it was first developed. Private organizations had to fight hard to make encryption standard. Still do in places like Europe
If Google communicates to Schumer, then do you think Schumer would then sit down and write the policy, knowing very little about it?
In reality, many companies would get Schumer attention on crypto, and other regulators, the companies would use their expertise to craft sensible policy, politicians would work with that, run it by lots of other groups and politicians, and if it passed enough tests along the way, it might come up as a bill.
It’s not like Google, or any company, likely can just put in ludicrous things, and use wizard powers to make laws. If a company breaks trust, they will lose the ability to get ears. If politicians, or parties lose trust, they get unelected. So, in order to have sane laws regarding any complex topic requires huge specialist inputs, and those specialists became expert by working in that field.
There’s simply not a pool of such people sitting around unassociated waiting to write laws to specifications of random internet people.
if we define anything in a way we want to define it to get the meaning we want then it ends up meaning what we want it to, however corruption in most definitions that I am aware of includes some sort of benefit to those making a political decision for the results of that political decision.
If we accepted your definition then it should follow that if you have political connections then you cannot influence policy without being corrupt, which seems weird because having political connections probably indicates political interest or knowledge of the issues.
Now you may feel that is an unfair description, that one can influence policy to the same extent as those without political connections and thus not be corrupt, but the problem with that is if you have political connections they will probably hear about your attempts and they will be influenced through that connection no matter what you try, not to mention that often your political connections are exactly the people that should be talked to, and in this way we see that people with political connections must be locked out of the process by your definition if we want to fight corruption.
Locking people out of the process seems as problematic as being corrupt, but luckily I follow the model of there has to be some personal benefit involved with the corruption so I don't need to argue for locking anyone out.
I'm not sure what you mean by financial, for example financial resources to affect a decision often includes advertising on the issue. I agree this can make things unfair, because someone with a lot of money can buy more ads than someone without.
In that case one could put funding limits on political ads, but so many issues are not directly political but still you can move the emotions of the public on them via advertising that it does not seem possible to really control. Maybe it should be attempted.
That said, although I believe it will invariably be unfair, unfair and corrupt are not synonymous.
Would you rather take advice from a friend or from a random person?
Depends, is my friend getting paid a lot of money to give me this advice, by a 3rd party that will massively benefit if I take it?
I might just trust a random redditor more...
Would you consider a person doing that to be friend?
The world is turning to crap right now because of affinity fraud.
"He goes to my church/eats my traditional food/wears the jersey of my favorite sportsball team. I trust him!"
People decide someone is their friend due to some superficial similarity which a charlatan has dressed himself up in (and conversely that others are their enemy due to some superficial dissimilarity), and then their "friend" steals their political power to do bad things.
And people are too committed to their self-conception as savvy judges of character to admit their error. The error becomes a religion, a folkway, and is persisted across generations. You have to keep committing the error in order to honor your ancestors who were first fooled.
So... the Red Cross using their financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy is committing to corruption?
Not a great example. After the Haiti Earthquake donations poured into the Red Cross, helping them raise half a billion dollars. Those half a billion dollars were ultimately used to construct 6 permanent homes. [1] These are the exact sort of people I expect to be involved in lobbying politicians, and the last sort of people I want anywhere near anything relevant to me.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
No no no, you don't understand. It's corruption when groups I don't like do it, when groups I like do it it's fine. Just like when my side wins elections it's democracy and when the opposition wins elections its fascism.
Democracy is supposed to have something to do with majority rule or at least having policies that benefit the greatest number. When corporations that answer to no one use their disproportionate financial resources to hijack the political system and push policies that hurt the common people, that is fascism, yes.
> Democracy is supposed to have something to do with majority rule or at least having policies that benefit the greatest number
No. Modern democracy is supposed to protect the minority and allow regular peaceful transitions of power. That's why we need individual liberties and constitutional rules that protect the individual and prevent the majority to take away their liberties.
Which corporations "that answer to no one" (no publicly traded companies) have hijacked the political system and which policies have come about as a result that have hurt the majority of people actually represented by that system in ways that aren't:
A) Vagaries that most people don't actually care much about.
B) Tradeoffs that didn't go the way you personally want.
It's not "corruption" if it's the way it should be done. Corruption would imply some sort of nefarious means.
Maybe a better word would be "corrupting". Lobbying causes people to act in a way that is contrary to what people expect at face value, since it changes the incentives: if we assume that politicians choose what is best for them personally, their actions change from "what makes me popular with the most voters" to "what gives me the most money and power". This is often (not always) to the detriment of the voters themselves.
lol it’s this and can only be this
Lobbying is the right to petition the government. What you need is a countervailing powers to limit regulatory failure of institutional capture.
Just like the original post, make a definition that mistakes a pathology of the system for its core function (also: structural inequality is not corruption).
If you are a purist and eliminate all resource-backed influence by banning pooling money, hiring researchers, and organizing campaigns to influence lawmakers because "others lack those resources," you effectively ban organized labour unions, consumer watchdogs, civil liberties organizations. A well-organized national labor union has more leverage than a non-unionized gig worker in the EU. Asymmetry an inequity issue, not corruption. Well organized will trump over those who are not.
Corporations should be able to lobby, but they their lobbying should be limited more heavily.
The real big problem with corporate lobbying is that corporations do not work in the self interests of the people they employ, but the political power they wield is a function of the number of people they employ.
I think that it's very common for people to work for corporations that are actively working to undermine their workers rights, and using the political clout that their workers grant to do i
Edit: Unions do this too of course. That's probably the number one accusation that people level against unions to discredit the whole idea of unionizing labour. The union management will eventually work for their own self interest instead of for the union members
Turtles all the way down
>> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
Why do lawmakers need to talk some interest groups? If they don't have enough information to make laws, they should appoint expert groups to collect information. Talking to money bags is going to help only one thing.
Precisely. Information you don't pay for isn't news, it is propaganda. If you didn't pay for the product, you are the product.
You hear this language used by lobbyists and influencers, talking about which politicians they have “access” to.
In other words, they’re selling a product to their buyers, and the product is politicians.
We have groups of experts that advise lawmakers. For example, institutions that advise lawmakers on public health - currently headed by world class health expert RFK Jr.
Point being, it's impossible to build incorruptible institutions, groups of experts, etc, but we need them nonetheless.
Lobbying in it's most basic form is simply the act of petitioning politicians that represent you, which is pretty essential in a democracy.
If you've ever called your Senator or representative to tell them you oppose a law that will negatively impact you - you've just done a little lobbying
> appoint expert groups to collect information
So... you'll have the representatives make their own lobbying groups? Also, each "expert" will have their own bias, so in doing so you'll inadvertently (or intentionally) block hearing from the wider community.
> So... you'll have the representatives make their own lobbying groups?
A lobbying group is dead-set on their preferred policy or solution to a problem, an expert group would be much more open-minded and exploratory. I don't see how these are comparable.
> Also, each "expert" will have their own bias, so in doing so you'll inadvertently (or intentionally) block hearing from the wider community.
Everyone has a bias, you can't reasonably remove that. Besides, hearing from the wider community will not make you less biased if the majority of the community is also strongly biased. However, a lobbying group has a pile of cash backing up their opinion (even if it is false), while a group of experts would be both more knowledgeable and likely have a more diverse set of views. It would be so much better.
"Lobbying is a form of advocacy that legally attempts to influence policy decisions"
I think there's a problem with definitions here. How the general public, especially here in the U.S., tends to think of lobbying is essentially always in the form of monetary value or gifts. In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.
In theory any exchanges of monetary value or gifts should be well documented and must be disclosed. In actuality, it's much harder to document than meets the eye. There are so many ways around it that it's almost worth saying it doesn't exist (admittedly it seems especially egregious in the US but I'm no expert on how its done elsewhere).
But then, at the same time if we conclude that it's hard to document then it's hard to ban it. Its just a slippery slope all around. Institutions must be allowed to petition their government, but making sure that doesn't go too far and lend itself to corruption is difficult to enforce.
So that is likely where the author and the rest of us lead to the conclusion that the eventual result of lobbying as its implemented in essentially everywhere in the world is corruption.
The alternative is that paid government officials and government/EU research institutions supply their research results to lawmakers and refuse to read gray papers from corporations or big civil influence groups. That's all well and good as part of the mix, but on its own, a very narrow viewpoint in a complex society. (The fight over who is nominated to these research jobs becomes even more political.)
Removing possibilities of corruption from MEPs means removing their power and moving it into deeper government bureaucracy where it is harder to spot. Now you have non-elected people who work whole their life in government using more power.
The things about unelected career bureaucrats is that they usually have no legal mechanism for directly benefiting from the outcome of their policy suggestions. They can't even accept lunch from outside groups without facing disciplinary action. I would prefer those people have the power of opinion rather than someone who benefits directly or has a perverse incentive to accept "campaign money" in order to further a change in law.
That depends. I know first hand a local bureaucrat who bought a piece of land designated as forest and a year later that forest got designated as construction area (or whatever the English term is) making that land worth at least 10x as much. And who was the person who changed that designation? A colleague of theirs in the office next doors. Quite a nice retirement gift. And those people are small fishes in a very small local community. One can only imagine how things are done on a larger scale.
You're overlooking the real benefit to people who obtain value from promoting their ideology even at a government salary.
Rank and file are legally prohibited from lobbying in that way and because they're not political operatives it's actually enforced.
They don't need to lobby, because they're already on the inside. 95% of the government is run by the bureaucracy, so they can directly implement their ideological preferences. That's how you get situations like in Europe where the policies don't change regardless of which party is elected.
You make a valid point about incentives.
What many people dislike about government in the US and in the EU is that the unelected bureaucrats tend make hiring and promotion decisions based on ideology with the result that each generation of career bureaucrats is more ideologically homogeneous and more extreme in its commitment to whichever ideology is best at spreading, which in the US and EU over the last 95 years has been Leftism.
Elections are a powerful check on this process because there isn't a similar mechanism at work in the general population of voters (or at least the mechanism is much weaker in its effects).
Also we can start to see why actors who oppose Leftism or who oppose ideological hegemonies in general sometimes want decisions to be made out of self-interest: even most zealous ideologues are more motivated by self-interest than they are by advancing ideologies. I.e., allowing decision makers to act out of self-interest is one tool in the toolbox for opposing ideological hegemony.
Yes exactly academics and researchers not dealing with the real world should not decide policy.
Academics and researchers are prone to groupthink and monocultures. To quote a form of Sayre’s law “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”.
Researcher’s policies might be disastrous for society or industry yet they’ll often be insulated from any consequences, even just to their reputations.
> In an ideal world, this probably should be banned for fairness reasons. Smaller institutions would always have necessarily less influence and power over policy.
This is prohibited, not in an ideal world, but in essentially every Western democracy except the United States. I appreciate the political difficulty of implimenting this (or indeed any useful structural) change in the contemporary American political climate / level of dysfunction. But outlawing corruption is not some utopian dream.
> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints
If the only way to have that ability is money and access, then it's corruption for all intends and purpose with other name. Just because it's accepted doesn't make it not corruption. And I think that's what people mean when they say they want to take lobbying away, they don't want private meetings between interest groups and lawmakers, without public input
Right, the corrupt thing is when lobbyists are listened to in a way that is proportional to some parameter besides the number of people they represent and when groups of people without the means to hire a lobbyist go unheard.
I think we need better infrastructure for tracking who is operating on who's behalf so we can build systems that fix these problems.
We absolutely want politicians to listen to lobbyists in a way that is proportional to some parameter besides the number of people they represent. The should listen to who is right, not which lobby represents the most members. Self-interested groups lobby for bad legislation all the time. When the harm to society is diffuse, they don't always have a large lobby opposing them.
Certainly somebody needs to identify cases when a minority voice needs disproportional consideration because they happen to be onto something special. But it's the job of an elected official to make that determination only after they have considered their options in a proportional-to-population way.
If you try to handle nuances like that up front, and somehow select for who gets the politician's attention on the basis of some parameter besides population, you're going to end up with a government that only works for the rich, because they are disproportionally able to game such things.
As others have already stated, lobbying solves a problem that doesn’t need to exist. It’s absolutely corrupt when you fix a problem with more problems.
If I call my local representative on the phone, or email them, that's lobbying. Am I not allowed to contact those I've elected to represent me?
Now, if you mean I shouldn't be allowed to take my representative on a Caribbean vacation, then we're agreed, because bribery is (or should be) illegal. And yes, I'm including many forms of campaign donation as "bribery".
I don't know why people read stuff like this and then put themselves in corporate's shoes who can lobby up to 100s of millions
when is the last time you lobbied 50 million dollars as a citizen? is this something you do frequently? maybe ask these questions before your gotchas
I'm not sure if "lobbied 50 million dollars" is even grammatically correct.
you can ask an LLM to fix my grammar for your convenience
Apologies in advance if English isn’t your native language, but expecting or suggesting that others should use AI to resolve your sloppy syntax/grammar seems like a rather poor practice in general. I think you have a good point to make here, and a little more diligence could make an appreciable difference to your level of discourse.
No English isn't my native language, it's the third actually.
I think degrading and dismissing someone's point because of a stupid grammatical mistake is much worse in practice. If you can only engage in conversations where everyone uses perfect grammar, then maybe you should just use an LLM to rewrite people's comments. It seemed like a good suggestion to me.
What does lobbied 50 million dollars even mean?
If you mean they donated 50 million in dark money to a PAC, then we're agreed - that's bribery and should be included in anti-bribery laws. SCOTUS fucked up egregiously when they allowed unlimited dark money to flow into campaigns.
"The water is wet"
"wHaT dOes ThE wAtEr iS wEt eVeN mEan"
Depending on what you mean by local, you're never going to be able to directly contact your representative. Your phone call, if answered by a human will be an intern or other sort of assistant who will basically end up marking you as a tally on whatever side of an issue. You will have near zero influence. Emails are even worse. I'm sure now a days you'll get LLM slop but 'back in the day' you'd get a response that always came down to "Thanks for your message. Representative Joe Blow likes good things, and dislikes bad things. And he even thinks important things are important! Thanks for your message, and remember to vote for Joe Blow! Bye!" Even better, you get subbed to a bunch of donation begging mailing lists.
By contrast go buy a top dollar lobbyist, and he'll go endlessly push your issue to all his old buddies. He'll even compose legislation that can be rubber stamped by the reps that your lobbyist will know are most inclined to agree with. You'll get better than direct contact and over a sustained period of time if necessary. I don't think the two are in any way comparable.
I meant truly local, so state down to town.
And yes, phone is sort of a black hole. If they note your satisfaction/lack thereof, you’ll be lucky. But you can schedule a live meeting (as I said I a sibling, for congress that’s going to be with a staffer unless you’re bringing a group and can convince them it’ll be worth their time).
Anyways, my point in all my posts in this discussion is we need to agree on definitions, because lobbying literally is making your case to the representative. The whole campaign fundraiser/PAC thing we have in the US is just legalized bribery. IMO.
What do you mean "a problem that doesn't need to exist"? What's the specific problem you are thinking of?
Trade and especially the shared European market required industry input which you might call lobbying. Regulations had to be homogenized to create a level playing field. To attack what matters European law makers needed lobby input. This happens all the time on a smaller scale with trade agreements. Think of the famous chlorine-washed chicken in the US situation. If a country prohibits this their chicken industry might want a for-export exemption when a trade deal with the US is made.
You also have lobbying that could be seen as genuinely good. Insurance companies lobbied for a lot of car safety standards and fire safety standards. (That said I'm libertarian enough that I don't actually see enforcement of standards that protect the occupant by law as positive but most people do)
Lobbying is the foundation of democracy. Technically it is everyone's civic obligation to do it.
The trouble with democracy, of course, is that most people don't have (or don't think they have, at least) the time or resources to participate.
I agree our democracy is founded on corruption.
I'll go a little further and say "corporations are bad". Maybe we don't need to expand beyond liability. It's often quoted: "a computer can never be held accountable. therefore a computer must never make a management decision", but why is it OK for corporations?
I would usually agree with this kind of reasoning. Yes there is good things too... But also too much abuse that clearly don't go in the interest of the people... So to me yes... It is corruption
I would add to limit lobbying money. Information and transparency are fundamental. But knowing that you are being screwed is not the same that avoiding corruption.
> long cooling-off periods before MEPs can become lobbyists
They already earn a public pension. They should be banned for life. Corporations know too well the internal workings of the government what allow them to corrupt it. But cooling-off periods could be a good first step towards that.
> Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
no, the default internet response is to try and be a contrarian arguing minor points while missing the whole societal context and leaning into weird word games etc while pretending like that makes you the adult in the room and your opponents are "emotional", "don't know what they're talking about", etc. Which is basically half this thread (or this whole forum for one).
twin
> Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
"GOTO considered harmful" :)
Great example, since in practise goto is essential
The idea that lobbying is corruption is ironically helps corporate lobbyists the most. Lobbying is what gave us Civil Rights. The only thing calling lobbying evil has accomplished is reduce grass roots lobbying, which means corporate lobbyists get more bandwidth from politicians.
Are you sure it was internet opinions that made grassroots lobbying ineffective, or is it the incomprehensible amounts of money backing up the lobbyists of corporations and the wealthy?
It's not just an Internet opinion. It's a cultural change that has been occuring for decades. Less than a third of nonprofits even know how to lobby if they want to.
Lobbying spending isn't really "incomprehensible." The small group HN readers can easily fund lobbyists if they really want to.
https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
Mandatory publication of position letters would also help.
> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
No politician or party is willing to listen to me since I'm not a 'paying customer'.
ability to talk should not equal ability to pay
I don’t disagree with the proposals you suggest, but all that proves is the central point you’re trying to disprove: lobbying, in its current guise, is legalised corruption.
> Lobbying is not corruption. All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
If you get to "talk to lawmakers" by giving them money, it is corruption.
Somehow it does not lead to good lawmaking. It leads to lawmaking biased towards those able to pay a lot of money for what amounts to legal bribes.
> Current problems with EU lobbying: Corporate lobbying is over 60% of registered lobby spending.
Ah yes, Europe, famously friendly to business interests. Hence so many large multinational influential corporations domiciled in Europe and being started every day
They have healthcare and workers rights and pretty strong social safety nets. I'd say they're doing ok.
I have all these things in the US and get paid a lot more even when you include social benefits
Your healthcare is very likely tied to your company. If AI were to take your job tomorrow, how secure would you be in your home and family?
Except for some members going bankrupt every once in a while.
One of the national myths rears it's ugly head as a talking point.
American Exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism is when European countries go bankrupt?
Without the US Federal government, most states would be bankrupt (all the time).
California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania being the few exceptions that are net positive contributors that largely subsidize every other state (the other 43).
Lobbying in an ideal world may not be corruption.
Can't speak for other countries, but lobbying the way it typically happens in the US is pretty much straight-up corruption.
> Lobbying is not corruption.
In principle that statement is not incorrect in that lobbying means that one is able to represent a view.
However had, if money flows, then this skews all bias towards that money addiction flow, at the expense of everyone else. And most lobbying is due to money, that's also a fact.
See here as a good example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
“All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.”
Why can’t they pick up the phone or write a letter like the rest of us?
They do.
And you are also free to visit your representative's at their offices.
For example, Congress is open to visit - you can request a pass for specific sessions, you can schedule meetings with congressional staffers (face to face with the actual congressman is harder, but theoretically possible), etc. Local and state reps are typically easier to visit.
Theoretically possible. Is it practically possible? Because if these groups are meeting with my members of Congress and I practically can’t, then that’s not the same.
Yes, it's practically possible. But, there's a lot of gotchas there... probably need to schedule at home during a recess, not during sessions. Probably need to declare a specific topic, not just a chit-chat. Likelihood goes up if you bring a group of constituents with you so the Congressman can get more input in that block of time (which is now looking suspiciously like the "lobbyists" you decry).
That said, for single-person "I want to tell you about thing X", a staffer probably works just fine. That's why they're there.
For a local politician, who likely has much more impact on your day to day, this is all far easier. They're generally less busy, less travel, and more approachable. And, they're the ones setting real estate taxes, school policy, and other things that make places truly livable (or not).
In other words, you, too can put together a well-funded lobbying organization and lobby. And if you can’t catch the attention of high-level politicians, don’t worry your pretty little head, local policy is all you should care about. National policy is for big important people, not nobodies like you.
That’s not even remotely what I said, but you do you.
They do this. It's called lobbying...
No, that's not called lobbying. It's lobbying when it involves paying for access. If you're just making calls and writing letters it's just advocacy not lobbying
No, that's bribery.
The problem is our (USA) definition of bribery is too permissive. We allow lobbyists to bribe politicians through massive fundraising dinners and donations to preferred causes (see Trump's current relationship with TechBro billionaires and Russian oligarchs).
Lobbying corruption with lipstick and a law degree.
> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
"All" is carrying a lot ow weight here. Should we publicly fund interest groups so they can go to Washington? How big or small does the group need to be? Are not I, alone, an interest group?
No. No more lobbying. What we need is a more direct democracy.
or we ban lobbying _and_ we force transparency on meetings, finances and all these problems solve themselves when we investigate them and they're found guilty of corruption.
> Lobbying is not corruption.
Cool story, lobbying is corruption.
>All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
Me accidentally paying for a 3 star restaurant for an MEP isn't "talking" to lawmakers. It's buying them off. Total can do it 20 times every day. You can't.
> Cool story, lobbying is corruption
These kind of down putting responses make everyone worse.
> paying for a 3 star restaurant for an MEP
Like I said, that's corruption in lobbying, not lobbying. Lobbying is the ability to talk to government officials.
I think that you're arguing against something different. Visiting your MP at their surgery or lobbying them at their office in the house of commons is not the same thing as buying them two and a half grands worth of spectacle frames.
Pikers.
Buying the house that a Supreme Court Justice's mother lives in, that's corruption.
"Corruption is BAD"
No, this is when the no-nuance answer is sensible. Wanting to reform lobbying is the answer that normalizes the status quo and doesn't address the disbalance of power that it always inherently introduces.
Any mechanism that has a pathway of converting money into political influence is inherently rotten and will eventually have its flaws discovered. I don't even really see how your proposed policies are going to stop this - all the declarations, disclosures and oversights only work if there are hard lines drawn with someone watching them. We don't live in a rules-based world, so every point in the system has to be perfect.
Or we could just ban lobbying. It's never going to be equal anyway, because the interest groups of the wealthy can spend all their time and endless money to secure the best everything for themselves, even if that money doesn't literally go to the politician. Grassroots groups are composed of regular people who don't get paid to do this, have their own lives and don't have that much money to put down. It's always going to be unequal.
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.
When you look at the actual dollar amounts for these campaign contributions, they are often fairly small. They are in the ballpark where any well paid individual (doctors, engineers) would be able to afford a 1:1 coffee meeting with their representative.
This either means that a) buying our elected officials is cheap or b) we’re not looking in the right place to see the actual transactions.
A much more likely (and hard to regulate) form of corruption is “back-door lobbying” where there isn’t a clear payment now but a promise of bigger payment in the future. Such as “you helped our industry do X, so once you retire from congress we’ll reward you with a high layer do—nothing consultant’ role”.
> actual dollar amounts for these campaign contributions, they are often fairly small
considering that the two main candidates in the last prez election raised about a billion dollars each, I beg to differ
yes, individual contributions may be capped at $25K, but the PACs can spend unlimited amounts thanks to Citizens United
apples and oranges. (i know that this is totally "trust me, bro") but as of a few years ago a colleague with knowledge of these things told me that the "going rate" for a private coffee meeting with a member of the house was a donation of ~$5k.
that's not a crazy amount if you think about the potential ROI of a few of these meetings vs. blowing money on an ad campaign.
there's no way that its this cheap to buy our representatives, which is why im convinced that looking at on-the-books campaign donations is a red herring.
100%. Experts need to talk to politicians who don't understand the issue in order to make them understand and make better laws. If we banned anyone from trying to talk to a politician ("lobbying") we would get enormously stupid laws all the time.
Experts need to talk to politicians, but it should be done so through a proper institutional structure (for example a public hearing). Not in private meetings.
What influence groups say to policy makers has to be able to be challenged by opposing interest.
Not only that, but it's important for these advocacy groups to disclose their financing for all to see.
Its always going to be a cat and mouse game because ultimately corporations want to have undue influence over politics, it helps them greatly.
The first stepping stone needs to be to acknowledged that the interests of corporations can and in many cases will be against the interests of the majority of constituents and so we can't allow for our laws and practices to just waver this fact and institutionalise corruption through lobbying.
It's very naive to think consumers and the general population can organise to the effectiveness and level of a corporation. But that doesn't mean people don't care, or don't deserve to have their interests protected.
Why not find experts in e.g. universities? Or, like, hire people with industry experience to provide advice rather than let industry hire politicians?
It’s too simplistic to think that the only form of political signaling that should happen is ... one person one vote as a basis for a mandate to represent peoples interests. It’s easy to see how that can lead to a tyranny of the majority situation. There does need to be a path for influence for those with special interests in an area to influence decisions also. I think the arguments usually come down to which types of special interests give which types of standing on an issue.. if we want to say a business working in an industry shouldn't lobby then do we also say that a local environmental group should(nt) have a say about some area they are experts on also?.. Some things are also put up for general referendum even when they outweightedly affect only a small group.. I think a lot of places had made progress towords finding this balance of steakholder representation.. but now were just slipping back to creptocracy and tyranny eveywhere and forgetting it all.
Complete disagreement with tyranny of the majority. That is simply democracy.
On the other hand, the idea of one person one vote should also be applied to lobbying. It is possible to legislate into law that all lobbying attempts must publicize a list of signatories behind it. This empowers non-corporate lobbying, since they have the backing of the people, not solely money.
By enforcing lists of signatories, and mandate publication of signatories from all lobbying attempts, we provide transparency in the influence of government, which is a vital component in a well governed democracy.
I think the fix is to make representative democracy recursive.
I can indicate other citizens that I trust on the basis of their expertise, and they can further indicate others in the same way.
The roots of those trees are my representatives for whatever domain, they have unequal standing proportional to the size of their constituency, and I can reconfigure my pointers towards different representatives at different times, or I can point them all at myself and show up in person for some direct democracy.
I not think anyone means "talk to representative" when they say "lobbying" unless it is accompanied by contributions
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 future textbooks (will those even be a thing anymore?).
Lobbying is indeed corruption with a suit on.
I think the Powell Memorandum (as response to nascent consumersm ala Nader) and Powell’s rise to Supreme Court Justice from US chamber of commerce points to deep roots of corporate takeover of USA.
The beginning? I think we're at least towards the middle by now...
Probably because you missjudge the bottom line. We're still at the beginning because we will go down far bellow anyone's expectation.
ah so we went to the middle but we're back at the beginning. /s Time for Ready Player One's reverse scene (one step forward, two steps back)
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.
-- Winston Churchill, 10 November 1942
That’s what I thought when I was watching fast and furious 3, yet here we are.
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
He was talking about the European parliament. The lobbying is organized and transparent there. But still some recent cases have demonstrated there remains some corruption.
European parliament has very little power, I wouldn't bother lobbying there too much anyway.
yes and bribing politicians was kind of legal in germany till 2024, yes two years ago! They even bragged till the 90s with how much money the got from industry because it meant they had a better reputation industriewise
this one is new https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__108e.html
edit:: honestly germany is maybe one of the most corrupt countrys in the world because it was not only legal but best practice to work with the professional advise of the industry.
Most corrupt in the world? Easy to debunk: It ranks on 10 (10th best) as per https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025 Do they need to do better? Absolutely!
Corruption perception index measures low-level everyday corruption, but ignores political corruption
Fine, let's take another dataset. There's also https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-corruption-inde... Germany is 8th best there, not the worst. I'm not arguing that there's no corruption, the country was a role model, or anything like that. That kind of post-fact accusation is not helpful, it's leading society in a dangerously wrong direction.
This just means that number 1 is also corrupt. OP is talking about the scale of none to complete corruption, not the relative rankings of all countries.
> The CPI ranks 182 countries and territories worldwide by their perceived levels of public sector corruption.
I must confess, I do not understand the point the author to make. Are they saying that there is no lobbying in Europe, that it is a uniquely American pasttime? That is not my understanding given a cursory internet examination.
So then, are they stating that all lobbying is corruption, including European lobbying, and Americans refuse to understand this while Europeans understand they are corrupt?
Is the author suggesting that only in the US is lobbying corruption while in Europe lobbying is just and moral activity?
Lobbying purely via transparent talks is ok. Lobbying that has any kind of quid pro quo that pays money or some alternative arrangement now or in future in exchange for the representatives backing a position is corruption.
Transparent talks is the key part. Without transparent talk how do you know if your representative is doing corruption behind your back? Representatives are elected in democracy to represent the interests of people of their constituency. Technically, since now technology has grown enough for each person to represent themselves, we really don't need representatives anymore in order to do democracy. We would still need some people to form government, which is different from representative in legislature.
How does the author think Democratic Republics work? How do the representatives become knowledgeable about the numerous topics they need to vote on?
If one group puts more resources on a specific topic, they may have an outsized impact. We certainly see this with the teachers unions.
How is this different than anything else? Legal matters? Healthcare? Automobile purchases?
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.
It is normal, at least it's how pretty much all human societies and governments have worked in practice forever. Public education and propaganda have left most of us with the impression that the system is/should be much better and cleaner than it is in practice, because government-issued schoolbooks usually don't spend a lot of time criticizing current government practice.
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.
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.
It is still done behind closed door, as much as it would be without lobbying. Lobbying is on top of that.
I think this is wrong. The fact that elon musk or israel was able to fund a public PAC in US transparently is a good thing rather than behind closed door, unlike how walmart did in developing countries like India and got caught.
You seem to be stuck in "either or" thinking instead of "and". In other words, the closed door meetings will happen either way. Transparency is performative.
I would take the complete removal of meat-based politicians replaced with open-source AI with transparent training, weights, and a window into its decision/reasoning process open to the public at all times.
Voting for amendments will be implemented as pull requests :)
(aww downvotes.. can't believe people still willingly suck up for politicians)
Why not just direct democracy? We have the tech to do it all, no need to give up agency to whoever makes the model.
> Why not just direct democracy?
Do you honestly expect a handful of humans to make decisions for billions?
Or do you expect a million bureaucrats to coordinate efficiently and fairly?
If you mean literally every person should have an equal vote, how do marginal groups get to have a say?
Do marginal groups get to have a say now?
Your AI overlord has just declared war on France because of a hallucination.
Really?
Come now, do you seriously, deep in your heart of hearts, believe that it'll be WORSE than what we have had so far?
Can you recall 1 fucking year from all of humankind's entire history when there wasn't a war going on?
and the reasons for those wars?
Your AI overlord has just nuked Paris.
Since we are using completely fictional scenarios to prescribe reality, there is at least one very popular TV/movie francise that depicts the end of scarcity occurs only after nuclear war.
Is that even bad
Your meat overlords did that 81 years ago
then went on to bomb many more people
In practice, there is very little difference, no point splitting hair saying coke is better than pepsi.
I would rather have the ability to do it rather than not on pure ideological grounds,furthermore not banning it incentivises transparency, you can see more of where the money is coming from for example in US democrats are funded by more aggregate donors.
Ah, yes, transparency. "I received 250000€ from Renault-Nissan. No particular reason no. They just really like me. We talked. Also please don't pay attention to my upcoming votes and law proposals".
Lobbying is corruption, and it's also pay to play. Noone gets anything good out of it.
Calling it corruption and outlawing it doesn't stop the power of money and elite circles, it rather prevents small aggregate firms from doing it and yes I would rather know if they received such donation from renault for same reason I would want to know if a climate study is funded by oil corp.
This doesn't make logical sense. Making something officially transparent doesn't do anything to prevent the closed door meetings that will inevitably always happen.
I'm surprised by all the lobbying-apologists in the comments!
Because lobbying is a generic word and banning lobbying makes just as much sense as banning talking.
MADD [1] is a lobby group but they don’t have influence by donating billions of dollars.
Its makes much more sense to just reverse the changes in lobby rules (Citizens United) than to “ban” lobbying.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving
No, they're an advocacy group, and people like you are useful idiots giving lobbyists an excuse every single time. "Oh but look, if you ban us, you also ban the 'don't kill puppies' group! Wouldn't that be terrible?"
MADD does not pay politicians. MADD does not bring politicians gifts. MADD does not invite them to an expensive restaurant for three hours of one on one. MADD does not do any of the things a lobbyist does that is, for all intents and purposes, corruption.
So you know what ? Yeah, let's silence the don't kill puppies group, if it means that the leeches at the european commission also don't get their ways. "oh but then it will be done secretly" good that means it's officially corruption and we can jail everyone involved.
https://lobbyingdisclosure.house.gov/lookup.asp?reg_id=37776 MADD has registered themselves as a lobbying organization.
When you wrote that there were no other comments in the entire thread? Bot?
Lobbying is not corruption. Lobbying is a necessary part of a healthy functioning democracy.
Here are some organizations that lobby:
- Cancer Society
- ASPCA
- Associations of students
- Local cities and counties
- Trade unions
- Regular every-day people (you can literally just go schedule a meeting with your representation. That is lobbying.)
Of course, if everyone gets to lobby, corporate interests can too.
Without this function, legislators would largely be blind during policymaking.
Lobbying does not, on its own, imply corruption or involvement of money. In California and federally, money spent for lobbying is tightly tracked and publicly released.
Reading this as sarcasm, it indeed reflects a portion of the faerie tale descriptions of government taught in American schools. It is state propaganda of the most traditional (and effective) sort— that which is directed at children.
It’s not sarcasm, you just aren’t using words correctly. Lobbying is just an attempt at persuasion. In a democracy, it is a built in feature, not a bug, to have broad participation and many points of view.
The discussion has been lost in semantics between technical definition and practice. At issue is the latter.
“Lobbying” is not corruption technically or in practice. You are just simply wrong. Sometimes, things are a matter of opinion (this is a “values debate”); sometimes they are not.
Lobbying and corruption are different things. Sometimes one involves the other, just like commercial enterprise also sometimes involves or creates corruption.
I wasn’t taught this in school, by the way. I was the youngest registered lobbyist in California state history, at age 16, because I lived nearby and decided to go lobby my state senator about vocational education law.
Hardly the spitting image of corruption, or the bleak fantasy in your head about American life.
I still remember being told in grade school that only other countries have propaganda.
That’s a completely false comparison. Nobody is suggesting that the entire practice of lobbying is free from corruption.
Let me guess - the cancer society lobbies to keep high fructose corn syrup in the food supply? a patient cured is a customer lost. Oreos are "not harmful". Nothing wrong with a bucket of paint on your M&Ms. (for those not in the know: M&Ms is allegedly "food".)
Or do they lobby around a $200,000 chemotherapy treatment that increases (or decreases) the patient's life expectancy by 0.2%, or about two weeks?
associations of students - yep, american tuition, backed by the government, is highest in the world and the education is worse and worse. Or is it 18 year-olds with barely any life skills actively participating in federal government, with daddy's money? Or it is lobbying without money?
local cities - that's part of a government. A city is a government.
regular people - yep, I have certainly lobbied!
I'm skipping ASPCA until the acronym is expanded, you don't make meaning by appending random letters one after another.
and trade unions... are a kind of a forced monopoly, and don't forget to pay your $500 monthly due. they are a kind of corruption themselves. For example, what on earth is a police union?! So the government (police) is arguing with the government, to protect the government (police) from the "bad" government? Riiiiiiiiight.
Every single one of these is corruption. If you think a city lobbying itself is not corruption, you should wipe your glasses to see more clearly. And don't get me started on city councils.
You couldn’t be more wrong,
- The American Cancer Society lobbies against big tobacco. Warnings exist on cigarettes because of their lobbying work.
- Associations of students are distinct from associations of administrators or institutions. All of them lobby government. There are associations of this kind at every level, including for public city colleges, some of which don’t charge tuition at all.
- The simple practice of lobbying your legislators does not imply or require money. Donations to campaigns are a totally separate thing and are regulated tightly as well. For example: hosting a dinner for legislators to learn about some topic is lobbying; donating to a campaign so they can buy ads is campaign finance. Both are tracked and regulated and the data is public.
- Local cities/counties: yes, those are governments, obviously. They are still stakeholders in the process of making policy just like anyone else.
- In the US, a state government is distinct from a local government. So a local city informing the state of impacts on policy, and the state factoring that in to new or changed policy, is totally normal and reasonable and also a feature, not a bug, of a healthy democracy.
- ASPCA = American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
- Trade unions are affected by policy and law, and therefore deserve a voice at the table just like everyone else. Whether unions are a good or bad thing is entirely outside the scope of lobbying as a concept.
Every single one of these is normal and not necessarily corruption. Corruption is errant in a system; lobbying is the system working as intended.
Policy should be made by people who are aware of what their policies will do to other people. Simply put, lobbying is American democracy’s solution to that problem.
If you live in America, work in America, or have interests in America, you can lobby, too. You don’t need to register or obtain permission or a license. Just call your representative and set up a meeting.
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.
Well the problem is that access to politicians (who are supposed to represent you) is almost entirely through lobbyism. If you want anything, you can't afford it - and you definitely can't afford to go against existing lobbyists. It becomes corruption when only certain people have access to a democratic mechanism. It doesn't help that in the US, corporations are people and cash is their speech and you can't do or say anything about it because that would be treasonous.
That’s not what lobbying is, though. If have “no dog in the fight”, you are unlikely to try to influence a politician any which way. Lobbyists appear because someone with money is willing to pay for the lobbyist to apply their talents, and why would they if they had no “dog in the fight”?
Americans on average are too stupid and too easily manipulated for this to ever be a matter of concern for them though.
Its interesting to see this comment about a blog article that conflates lobbying with campaign donations and super PACS. Lobbyists certainly make donations - as do many entities - but that isn't what makes them lobbyists.
Half of Europe didn't even get democracy until the 20th century and they're calling Americans "stupid"? LOL.
Half of Americans did not have democracy until 20th Century
The percentage of people who can vote isn't a linear measure of "democracy." It's the classic case of "getting from 0 to 1 is the hard part." Extending the franchise to a large fraction of the population and having stable transition of power and fair elections is the hard part.
And women have been able to vote in the U.S. for decades longer than the governments of the E.U.'s largest countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) have existed in their current democratic forms. When women got the right to vote in Wyoming, kicking off the movement towards national women's suffrage, the French were on Napoleon III, Spain had a king, Germany wasn't even a country yet, and Italy was a recently unified Kingdom.
Who are "they", you mean one commenter you assume is European? You are right that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was still a lack of democratic structures, in Europe, as well as in the United States of America, where the 19th amendment was introduced in 1920 and the Voting Right Act in 1965.
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.
I pay my doctor for medical advice. If a doctor paid me to take their medical advice, I would be very concerned.
Beyond a certain scale, humans cannot organize themselves in a completely altruistic manner, even in Europe. The best we can hope for is for gatekeepers to mostly wield their power for the good of most people - we have to accept some error rate. Making all such practices illegal would only serve to make things less visible with little actually changing. It might even lead to more corruption.
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.
Glad that this pops up again because someone flagged a similar discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50029630
Any discussion that is at least slightly explicitly political (as opposed to everything, which is at least implicitly political) is liable to be removed by the mods. It's up to whether they see it and whether it offends their sensibilities in the moment.
They are flagged because they are off topic for HN
Anything hackers may find interesting...
Yeah but the bar for politics is extremely high because most threads turn to shit
Well, anything YCombinator as startup accelerator finds interesting, and nothing that offends their corporate goals.
How easy is it to recall a politician in Europe? In my country, it is nearly impossible. If the public cannot influence politicians' decisions, then politicians are free to lobby for whatever they want.
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?
It is. For millenia those in power have tried to change the meaning of words, the narratives, so instead of plundering by force now they plunder by agreement, which is easier, and now it is written in the fabric of education, morals and law. They need everybody to be indoctrinated from the womb so they don't question anything. Sheep clothes are so perfect nowadays that nobody ever thinks there is a wolf beneath them
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
> 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 itself is not. When people exploit that for personal benefit, then it becomes. Any idea that push too far/extreme would be a problem. But these days, people like to blame/complain something/someone instead of looking for a solution.
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.
We changed the laws that enabled lobbying back in ~1970.
There's a fairly simple solution to this:
https://youtu.be/CgqhywW9Cto?si=uZBJB0-SbEzij7_S
I suppose I should post the mandatory https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
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.
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.
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.
I get the sentiment and agree with it.
However, "gross wealth" ala billionaires needs instead to have a definition of bell curve based (statistical) analysis, and outliers above X standard deviations need to have economic sanction tools used against them. Doing this means that no matter how inflationary or deflationairy the currency is, we're measuring gross wealth by standard deviations of the mean, rather than some number that can and will be gamed.
And how the billionaires got their money is never by their work, but instead the mass extraction of millions of people and scraping over the top. Of course, when 'scraping over the top' involves piss bottles, injuries and deaths 3x higher than industry average, and more abhorrent things, yeah you need to fall. Hard.
Strong agree -- lobbying spend is a huge signal of corporations associated with preventable harms. We use it extensively at ethical capital.
> All interest groups should have the ability to talk to lawmakers and present their viewpoints.
Wages are a form of bribery: a corporation pays you in exchange for your services and compliance.
Lobbying is the man-made canal we dug to channel what would otherwise be unfettered corruption.
Bribery is corruption. Most lobbying is not bribery and is not corruption.
How far up the corruption chain do you want to go? Government itself is corruption.
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.
> 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...
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
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!
Americans please stop sanctifying Europe/Europeans. It's annoying.
It is important that you never look beyond your own borders. Solving every issue from scratch instead of replicating systems that already work elsewhere is great. Is that what you are saying in the context of the article?
Gerrymandering!
Gerrymandering is blatantly unethical. Its cherry picking their own votes for next election by including certain areas while excluding certain other areas to obtain maximum votes for themselves by redrawing constituency map.
Dear fluffy Europeans , please explain , how you built Nord Stream 2 against all the rules ?
Did anyone go to jail for that or that was lobby ?
How former chancellor of Germany suddenly got a big title in Russian oil company , went on Putin birthday to celebrate and no one asked questions?
Or maybe Iran expert initiate ?
Or entire Austria chancellor fiasco ?
Caviar diplomacy maybe ?
At least lobby is transparent.
America half way out of their shame moment , Europe … not sure there’s ever way our due to how they distributed are . France and Germany entering the room in the next election cycle . Hungary before , Slovakia , Bulgaria , Czech Republic now
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.
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.
At no point in history have a diversity of citizenry had impactful input on its governance.
It is ALWAYS a coterie of specifically placed individuals, who have navigated complex social arrangements such that they are maintaining social dominance of the coterie, which itself “controls” previously seized materiel and personnel from some group of conquered people
There is no mechanical or mathematical way to actually give singular direction to more than about 1000 people at a time that has any type of explicit consensus.
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.
Sure, and scientific articles which often require payment to publish are a form of paid advertisement. /s