Comments on: How to Get Our Democracy Back (Lessig is Wrong)

By: mike

mike — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:47:00 +0000

Adrian – agree – I doubt any one solution solves everything. But I stand by my claim – when the gov’t is doling out the money (and under Obama, discretionary spending has more than doubled), you get more special interests lining up to collect.

If you do look at the OpenSecrets.org, you’ll see that far-and-away the worst offenders of buying influence are Unions, not corporations. And these guys usually want new legislation to give them free stuff.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:21:58 +0000

But moneyed interests don’t influence government just to get distributions of cash. There are favors, too. For example, there’s a strong correlation between campaign contributions from telcos and the recipients of those contributions voting for the telco immunity provision of the latest FISA bill.

The real solution is the make campaign contributions unnecessary. If politician’s didn’t need to raise tremendous amounts of money to run a successful campaign, then it would be a lot harder to “buy access” (and influence).

Lessig is for the Fair Elections Now Act, but I never got the impression from his Change Congress organization that that kind of legislation is the end-goal. The end-goal has been to eliminate the need for politicians to raise funds.

By: RJ

RJ — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:52:35 +0000

Mike,

You are absolutely spot on. I wish more American’s realize that the problem is not the corporations but the fact that Government has too much power. As Milton Friedman famously said, corporations are acting in their best interest by lobbying, but if government didn’t have power, no one would lobby politicians.

I don’t understand why my fellow citizens don’t realize that politicians are not angels they are people like you and me, selfish, greedy and power hungry (even more than an average person). And to give them all this power and expect them not to misuse is like putting a horny man in a room with a naked chic and expect him not to have sex.

By: mike

mike — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:30:26 +0000

Van – thanks for your reply. Openness is great, I agree. But, data about where money flows has been widely known for 10 years.

As for our ability to make central gov’t efficient – I think you’re just wrong. There are so many examples where our central gov’t has been comically inefficient, that I don’t believe it is possible to fix.

The right answer is to distribute money locally rather than nationally. Why do we pay so many tax dollars just to have the federal government re-distribute it back to states and local schools? Why didn’t that money just go to the state to begin with?

By: Van

Van — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:53:30 +0000

I agree with you in principle. That the gov’t distributes money leads necessarily to people/companies lining up and making investments to be on the receiving end. But it’s hard to argue that many aspects of a centralized gov’t aren’t necessary or beneficial. We Americans are famous for pragmatic solutions – making the best of (ie, minimizing) the unavoidable inefficiencies of the system we have and need, while keeping a strong, innovative (albeit sluggish) central gov’t and policies. And I sincerely doubt that we would ever succeed in limiting Washington’s ability to spend by so much, that it would make a significant dent in campaign finance.

The opening up of national datasets by the Open Government Initiative, allowing more people to see what projects need money where (and what doesn’t) seems to me like a good recent step in the right direction, and will hopefully help direct our resources in the right directions (instead of just to campaign contributors).