[hilbert42]

"The corporation is the legal embodiment of our joint interests."

You've just admitted the reason why you shouldn't be allowed to lobby as such—as I said earlier, your joint effort represents an unfair power advantage over other individual citizens.

Proof is in the pudding, take a good look at our fucked democracies.

[notquitetrue]

So should all joint influence efforts be banned or just ones that have economically productive elements? Forming groups and trying to influence politicians is the only way to get things done. They can’t listen to 300 million atomized individuals. Are you suggesting the NAACP should be illegal?

The solution isn’t limits on people’s rights to debate and to advocate for their interests, it’s limits on the power of the thousands of elected rats running around DC and state capitals and city councils. We need less politics which means more centralization in the federal government and more power for the President.

[mrkeen]

"Groups" can have alignment among their members. Members can join/withdraw as they please.

Corporations are not a diffusion of their workers' voices, they're a diffusion of whoever owns 51% of stock - maybe even just one person.

[jcranmer]

When there was a Congressional hearing on Youtube's Content ID stuff, one of the people present was some millionaire country singer complaining loudly about how much money he was losing because of Youtube. And my thought was "what this needs is a poor Youtuber scraping by on near-minimum wage to talk about how Content ID fucks them over." Except those people can't individually afford to show up to Congress to complain at a hearing.

There is a fundamental asymmetry between rich and poor people that is a real problem and that we don't really have a comprehensive solution for. But banning poor people from pooling resources together to get someone to talk on their behalf is not a step up; it's moving in the opposite direction.

[ensignavenger]

Poor youtubers can support the EFF, they can call/write or even visit the local offices of their congress critters. Most congressional hearings are nothing more than dog and pony shows anyway.

[jcranmer]

But that would be a joint lobbying effort that is unfair per GP's contention!