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by HardlyCurious 1069 days ago
Greedy CEO, greedy business owner, rich Nazis, foreign govt, there is no reason to focus the message on the variable in the room. The problem is greedy lawmakers who accept brides, full stop.

Fix the lawmakers and you stop all the bad faith influence.
2 comments
_Algernon_ 1069 days ago
>Fix the lawmakers and you stop all the bad faith influence.

One-sentence simple solutions to one of the most complicated problems humanity faces. How do you propose to do that? Lawmakers are in charge of their own rules. There is no incentive to change their own incentive structure from within.

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HardlyCurious 1069 days ago
Well, it's a more limited scope then attempting to address every greedy person on earth with enough money to lobby.

Potential solutions could include direct democracy, line item veto, or maybe both?

I don't claim to have a solution, and that should be no reason to not address the topic of what problem society needs to solve.

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bumby 1069 days ago
>The problem is greedy lawmakers who accept brides, full stop.

Perhaps the problem is the system that makes such "bribes" legal.

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HardlyCurious 1069 days ago
Well, the brides aren't actually legal, they are just very difficult to prove.

Unless we want to make political donations illegal, how do you prove a donation to a politician as a bride instead of support for the politician whose politics you agree with?

One could make a claim that stuff like student loan forgiveness is unethical if it benefits those who voted for the party. Is it not illegal to use tax payer money to pay for votes? I think if any politician said, "anybody who votes for me will get a bonus in your tax refund this year" we would have no issue seeing how that is unethical.

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bumby 1069 days ago
I used quotations around the term bribe for a reason. By definition, if it's legal, it's not a bribe although it may walk like a duck and quack like a duck. One of the issues is an incentive problem: those who have the power to make it illegal are also those who benefit the most from it being legal.

>Unless we want to make political donations illegal

I think this is displaying dichotomous thinking. There's a lot of room between a political donation free-for-all and making political donations illegal. In between there are many proposals for a more mitigated approach. One being Lessig's idea of "Democracy Vouchers"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic%2C_Lost#Democracy_vou...

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HardlyCurious 1069 days ago
I think any reform to the process such as democracy vouchers are just a shell game. Ok, that money can only go to candidates or issue campaigns. Meanwhile other money will be spent in multitude of ways to shape public opinion. Where do the DNC and RNC get money from? What can they spend on? Just to name one of many entities with skin in the game that can't be funded by the democracy vouchers.

These reforms are going to end up just changing to rules to help one side or the other. Whether or not the ideas were formulated originally with that intent, by the time they get implemented they will be bent for that intent.

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bumby 1069 days ago
>other money will be spent in multitude of ways

Sure, and other systems would be needed to provide the necessary guardrails. At no point did I allude to the idea that one simple approach would be a panacea.

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