[codyrobbins]

You’re joking, right? Who would you propose is more qualified to draft the word of the actual laws than lawyers? What lawyers are at their essence are experts in law—the word ‘lawyer’ even has the word ‘law’ in it.

It's like asking a team of developers to get together and vote on whether a problem is best solved by writing more code or doing nothing.

Who would you ask whether code needs to be written, then? The lawyers who aren’t dealing in law? Housewives? Veterinarians?

It’s the same thing with lobbyists—they end up getting hired by government because they are experts in what they are talking about. You’re going to be very hard-pressed to find an expert that doesn’t have some vested interest somewhere in what they’re talking about.

Consider the conflict of interest that exists…

A common tactic I see when people argue about politics is that because someone could be doing something corrupt then it means that they then therefore are doing it. I could certainly go walk outside and push someone in front of a bus right now, but assuming I’m a murderer just because I could is not a good assumption. Conflicts of interest certainly raise the possibility of wrongdoing and should be scrutinized, but the simple existence of a conflict of interest is not proof of wrongdoing; for that you need not aspersions but, well, proof.

I am staunchly against SOPA being enacted without industry input, and I think it’s misguided to try to prop up dying content businesses that aren’t innovating, but spouting conspiracy theories about the politicians passing it for their own benefit isn’t going to help.

[mmaunder]

Actually this is an established theory. Here's Dr Clifford Winston, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution chatting to Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason University about the conflict of interest when lawyers make our laws. They also cover the bar system maintaining artificial scarcity among lawyers, thereby inflating legal fees.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/09/winston_on_lawy.htm...

[anigbrowl]

You could just as easily ask why the bar has been certifying to many law schools when there are so many unemployed lawyers and less than half of JD graduates are able to get jobs practicing law. I'm kind of supportive of Winston's proposals for deregulating the legal services market, but there is definitely not an artificial scarcity.

Of course, you might be wondering why decent legal services still cost upwards of $300/hour, and my answer to that would be that a lawyer who charges $50 an hour has a hard time getting taken seriously. I've seen people come into internet forums asking the most asinine questions before going on to explain that they didn't trust the answers they received from their public defender, because he works for free and therefore he must not be any good.

[te_chris]

Certainly the argument abot the bar system is true. The supreme irony I find is how right wing and anti union some lawyers are.

[mongol]

I don't think he is joking. "The word of the law" can be kept separate from the intent of the law. I would prefer to see them as copywriters rather than as policy makers.

[ptbello]

Your "pushing someone in front of a bus just because you can" metaphore is flawed: there's no gain in committing murder in public; conversely the whole point of corruption is financial gain.

[noduerme]

I'm anti-conspiracy-theory too, but it's hard to argue that levying an enormous unfunded mandate on the most productive, most creative, most vigorously first-amendment-oriented corporate members of our society, which would force them to monitor the speech of each and every anonymous member they serve, is something that a Congress stupid enough to make the statements heard tonight would have concocted of their own accord.

edit: I think the above might be the longest grammatically correct run-on sentence I've ever written.

[apotheon]

It's grammatically correct, which means it's not a run-on sentence.

[noduerme]

I thought anything with more than one clause and sans conjunctions was a run-on; but a beast like that could still be fair or foul =)

[shadowfiend]

More than one independent clause, specifically. I believe your sentence still only has one of those, no matter how embellished the various parts of that independent clause may be :)