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So questions to your proposal: 1) You make corporate political donations illegal, but that's pretty specific to a single class of interest group. What about t

So questions to your proposal: 1) You make corporate political donations illegal, but that's pretty specific to a single class of interest group. What about those that regularly act in opposition to corporate interests, such as unions, environment groups, consumer groups? Your point 2 seems to imply they would be included, but why are you specific here as to the prohibition? Or do you propose to treat different association of people preferentially and on what basis? 2) Again you're specific to certain kinds of interest groups but this time leave out corporations when granting permissions. Again, do you have favored classes of associations of people? 3) How do you police such a thing? How do police communication through surrogates or the thousand other ways creative individuals seeking rent or hoping for regulatory capture will bypass "communications with the outside"? Isn't this the sort of creative thinking that caused problems with McCain/Feingold and the like? If you accept greater regulatory involvement from the state, the greater the rewards to those that can gain the ear of the regulator. Risk/reward continues to skew to creative evasion. 4) What makes a neutral group neutral, and, in some way, can there ever be such a thing? Don't get me wrong, I don't know of any instances of the CBO outright gaming information, or releases, etc. for clearly political purposes (nor have I studied the question). However, CBO Director is still appointed by the politicians. What if one political interest group captures congress and decides to politicize the CBO since they can't get sufficient outside support for their position under your proposal? Do you politicians like Trump would do such a thing? Even if we put those sort of hand-wavy humans-are-humans arguments aside, elected politicians are ultimately beholden to their constituents regardless of the CBO position; CBO says we spend recklessly on the military (or if then that sort of thing) a big military district politician will very much ignore that advice. I expect your funds for increased staffers results simply in increased "independent" research supporting whatever position a given politician wants to hold for whatever reason. Unfortunately, I still think I'm on the right track and that just about any solution that doesn't somehow require the political class, their staff, and families to be quarantined into some forced monasterial existence cutoff from the outside world, seems corruptible.

gech 10y ago
If we thought up all the bad things that would happen we wouldn't act at all
- sbuttgereit 10y ago
  Uh, ok... so what's your point caller? Both sides of this thread have suggested actions, albeit competing actions. Rational discussion of competing ideas involves discussing the positives, negatives, motivating ideals, and the validity of the ideas on the table. Not discussing or raising issues evades reality and doesn't do anything to diffuse or give answer to that reality. Simply put, if we're going to do something I rather do it with eyes wide open, understanding the downsides, rather than mimic one of those "hold my beer..." memes. And... notwithstanding the debate at hand, perhaps we shouldn't act if acting actually makes matters worse or drives bad behavior further underground. Significant thought in the climate change debate and the environmental movements is spent on thinking up all the bad things that will happen if we continue to act as an industrial society. Is your admonishment for them, or do you pick and choose who can argue as is convenient? One might say... that's my problem with the person whose proposal I was responding to... they seemed to want to pick and chose who could say what and when.
wpietri 10y ago
Thanks for the detailed questions. 1: I'm flexible. Corporate donations are the most problematic, in that they create a feedback loop. If I can lobby for a thing that gets me money, I can use some of the profits to buy more favorable legislation. But I'd be happy with pure public funding of elections, no donations allowed. Or an individuals-only model, where each person has a strong limit, like $250. 2: I left out for-profit corporations on purpose, but I'm sure there's a reasonable case for including them. 3: The same way we police campaign finance, lobbying, public records, and elected official ethics. That is, a variety of groups with investigative power who do their best to root out offenders. You couldn't eliminate everything, but as long as we got the bulk of it and reduced the financial incentives for elected officials to favor donors, I expect we'd do pretty well. 4: In this case by neutral I mean "paid by the government to serve the legislators". Sure, there are risks. But giving legislators their own well-funded research groups means they'll have to lean less on industry-created "facts". Everything is of course corruptible, but perfection isn't my goal. We're already much less corrupt than most other countries [1], and I'm suggesting that we could do better by limiting or strictly controlling channels of information and money. Those old channels made more sense when we didn't all carry around all the world's opinions and information in our pockets. [1] http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016#table http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percepti...

gech 10y ago

If we thought up all the bad things that would happen we wouldn't act at all

sbuttgereit 10y ago
Uh, ok... so what's your point caller? Both sides of this thread have suggested actions, albeit competing actions. Rational discussion of competing ideas involves discussing the positives, negatives, motivating ideals, and the validity of the ideas on the table. Not discussing or raising issues evades reality and doesn't do anything to diffuse or give answer to that reality. Simply put, if we're going to do something I rather do it with eyes wide open, understanding the downsides, rather than mimic one of those "hold my beer..." memes. And... notwithstanding the debate at hand, perhaps we shouldn't act if acting actually makes matters worse or drives bad behavior further underground. Significant thought in the climate change debate and the environmental movements is spent on thinking up all the bad things that will happen if we continue to act as an industrial society. Is your admonishment for them, or do you pick and choose who can argue as is convenient? One might say... that's my problem with the person whose proposal I was responding to... they seemed to want to pick and chose who could say what and when.

wpietri 10y ago

Thanks for the detailed questions. 1: I'm flexible. Corporate donations are the most problematic, in that they create a feedback loop. If I can lobby for a thing that gets me money, I can use some of the profits to buy more favorable legislation. But I'd be happy with pure public funding of elections, no donations allowed. Or an individuals-only model, where each person has a strong limit, like $250. 2: I left out for-profit corporations on purpose, but I'm sure there's a reasonable case for including them. 3: The same way we police campaign finance, lobbying, public records, and elected official ethics. That is, a variety of groups with investigative power who do their best to root out offenders. You couldn't eliminate everything, but as long as we got the bulk of it and reduced the financial incentives for elected officials to favor donors, I expect we'd do pretty well. 4: In this case by neutral I mean "paid by the government to serve the legislators". Sure, there are risks. But giving legislators their own well-funded research groups means they'll have to lean less on industry-created "facts". Everything is of course corruptible, but perfection isn't my goal. We're already much less corrupt than most other countries [1], and I'm suggesting that we could do better by limiting or strictly controlling channels of information and money. Those old channels made more sense when we didn't all carry around all the world's opinions and information in our pockets. [1] http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016#table http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percepti...