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?
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
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.
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.
> 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.
So... the Red Cross using their financial resources and/or political connections (which others lack) to successfully influence policy is committing to corruption?
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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 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 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.
> Basic internet response to everything is that when something essential involves something bad, we should forget the nuance and use slogans "X is BAD".
> 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
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).
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its 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. Its 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 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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 an essential part of the EU. It’s a regulated activity, with its whole processes. I have no idea why the author believes it’s something Europeans aren’t familiar with
Lobbying is corruption.
That is a fair statement.
Of course, the dictionary definition of lobbying is by no means corruption. But it is the thing most easily grafted onto corruption.
Drugs can also function as “medicine.” In the same way, lobbying can “function.” But drugs, like corruption, make things prone to decay.
The beginning of lobbying was very good. Cocaine, too, was very good at the beginning.
The fact that a means can perform a legitimate function does not mean that the possibility of its abuse and its harmful consequences disappear.
Lobbying is, in particular, centered on the asymmetry by which groups with money and organizational power can gain access to policymakers.
So what is the problem? Decisions that are “legal” but morally bad have been produced. Through legal lobbying, a minority group can exert excessive influence over policymaking and cause harm to the majority.
Policymaking does not reflect the interests of various citizens fairly at all.
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?
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.
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.
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’s a situation ripe for corruption.
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
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 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.
In other words who would you trust to create a sensible encryption policy, Google executives or Chuck Schumer?
I know who I would pick
I might just trust a random redditor more...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think we need better infrastructure for tracking who is operating on who's behalf so we can build systems that fix these problems.
> 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.
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".
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
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.
"wHaT dOes ThE wAtEr iS wEt eVeN mEan"
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)
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.
No politician or party is willing to listen to me since I'm not a 'paying customer'.
"GOTO considered harmful" :)
Ah yes, Europe, famously friendly to business interests. Hence so many large multinational influential corporations domiciled in Europe and being started every day
Why can’t they pick up the phone or write a letter like the rest of us?
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.
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).
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" 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.
> 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.
Buying the house that a Supreme Court Justice's mother lives in, that's 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.
Lobbying is indeed corruption with a suit on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a fairly simple solution to this:
https://youtu.be/CgqhywW9Cto?si=uZBJB0-SbEzij7_S
Voting for amendments will be implemented as pull requests :)
(aww downvotes.. can't believe people still willingly suck up for politicians)
Come now, do you seriously, deep in your heart of hearts, believe that it'll be WORSE than what we have had so far?
How many years can you recall from all of humankind's entire history when there wasn't a war going on?
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?
Lobbying is corruption, and it's also pay to play. Noone gets anything good out of it.
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.
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
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50029630
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
It is illegal under U.S. federal law for corporations to give money to campaigns.
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.
Huh? What Europe are they talking about?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparen...
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!
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.
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.
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.
Policymaking does not reflect the interests of various citizens fairly at all.
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.