[loup-vaillant]

tl;dw. Yet I'm confident campaign financing is not the problem. It's just a symptom of something much deeper: the constitution itself.

It's very simple: in nearly all developed countries (the "West"), the rules of power (the constitutions) were written by men in power. There is a huge conflict of interest, so the constitutions suck. Or maybe they don't, but the people sure don't rule. We don't live in a democracy by any reasonable meaning of the word. (My current best guess is that our countries are plutocracies: money and businesses rule. Anecdotal evidence: Fractional Reserve Banking, which means private bank makes profit from printing money —they don't actually print money, but the effects are the same.)

Want to solve campaign financing? Don't support elections in the first place. Elections aren't democratic anyway: 2 candidates you can vote for? What a farce: that's 1 bit of decision thrown as a bone to the people. The pool of potentially worthy presidents is way bigger than 2. So many bits of decision power stripped from the people.

Want an _actually_ representative assembly? Do what any rational poll company does: select the citizens by random trial. That may not be enough though, so you may want to use the first assembly to bootstrap something better (typically by having them write a constitution, then leave politics forever).

[pdkl95]

What Mr. Lessig is doing, I believe, isn't about "campaign financing".

This is about waking people up to the idea that they can change things. There's a deep apathy an general defeatist attitude in most of the country because people have watched things spiral out of their control far too often.

It doesn't mater what the cause is; campaign finance is just one of problems that, at least in some areas. It'll help, but the goal is to remind people that you can fight back.

This is about giving the a victor, for moral sake, and we need a LOT more people pulling a Howard Beale on corruption in general.

/me walks over to window

(clears thought)

/me sticks head outside, and yells

I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I AM NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANY MORE!!

[izendejas]

Yes and no. I've certainly reduced what Lessig states to what I found the most fitting way to summarize the problem he describes, but the corruption in the system really comes down to that as he so clearly explains towards the end of the video by marching in New Hampshire for campaign finance reform.

Many people don't participate because they don't feel represented until the issue affects them directly (NIMBY politics), yet there are countless issues in which we are affected as citizens because we let lobbyists and those that fund campaigns dictate legislation.

Many people here are always raging about patent law, copyright law, etc. Those were all Lessig's causes until Aaron Swartz made him realize that all the powerful interests have the legislators by the balls, so until that gets fixed, progress on any other front will be difficult.

[izendejas]

I think you should reconsider watching the video.

Don't support elections in the first place? So continue business as usual? I am not sure I understood correctly, but your solution IS the non-solution we're practicing today.

It's really difficult to summarize this video, just watch the first 5-10 minutes (that's what I tried) and you'll be hooked.

For added value: I'll buy you a beer for each filler/non-lexical sound (eg, "uhm", "eh", etc) you catch Lessig making whenever you're in the south bay.

[loup-vaillant]

> Don't support elections in the first place? So continue business as usual?

Not quite.

Basically, I do not condone elections for anything bigger than a small city, and neither should you. They don't work. They don't empower the people. They're an illusion.

That was the problem. Now my solutions:

(1) Don't vote for elections that don't make any difference. This means most elections bigger than small cities. Or do vote, but put a blank entry.

(2) Spread the word.

(3) Think of alternatives, such as random trials. Some of those have already been tried. Look for instance at ancient Athens.

If we can get the majority of citizens to acknowledge the problem and know about the possible solutions, there will be a revolution. Hopefully this one won't be too violent.

[dragonwriter]

> Basically, I do not condone elections for anything bigger than a small city, and neither should you. They don't work. They don't empower the people.

Since there are empirically measurable difference in how well different electoral systems work in empowering the people in nation-scale polities (see, e.g., Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy), I don't think it is at all the case that they don't work or are an illusion in general.

Its true that the electoral systems in certain large polities (the US among them, but not the only of them) work exceptionally poorly, which might lead to the faulty generalization that elections in large polities are fundamentally broken for those for whom the ones with exceptionally bad systems are the only referents, but that's a flawed generalization from limited information.

[loup-vaillant]

Okay, then, how effective is the high end? I expect not very.

And more importantly, are elections the best we can do? Handing over nearly unlimited power to a group of people we hope will not use it unwisely in the next few years?

No way. There's got to be a better system.

[dragonwriter]

> And more importantly, are elections the best we can do?

I would say elections are almost certainly an essential element of the best we can do; elections alone aren't a complete system of government.

> Handing over nearly unlimited power to a group of people we hope will not use it unwisely in the next few years?

Elections don't imply that. It sounds to me like your problem isn't actually with elections at all, but with the details of the powers given to officials who are elected.

[loup-vaillant]

> It sounds to me like your problem isn't actually with elections at all, but with the details of the powers given to officials who are elected.

A bit of both. Elected officials have way too much power, and not enough ways to control them. Look for instance what it takes to revoke someone. But the way election themselves work suck too: by nature, elections will mostly select a narrow elite, which right now is mostly hereditary. And when we vote, we can hardly judge the wannabe official on his discourse: many are lying to gain the favour of the people.

If you get only one thing, get this: policy making shouldn't be in the hands of a few policy makers. The people should vote their own laws directly. The people should even write their laws directly, though I don't know how to do that technically (with computers networked together, we should find a way).