9 ms·

American Democracy Is Drowning in Money

97 points by iamjeff 9y ago

cwkoss 9y ago
If it costs millions of dollars to be a viable candidate, is it still accurate to call it "democracy"?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  It is some consolation that campaign money does not directly correlate with success. The Jeb Bush campaign spent roughly 130 megadollars on the primaries alone. The Donald Trump campaign spent less than 280 megadollars from primary to president; where the Hillary Clinton campaign spent about 1.2 gigadollars (along with huge amounts of spending outside the direct purview of the campaign) and lost fair and square.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    > lost fair and square. Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course. In any case, its clear that Mr. Trump won with less money spent. Bernie Sanders is similarly a candidate who famously spent less money that Ms. Clinton but also had a chance. The main issue is that these candidates (Trump and Sanders) were far more willing to participate in reality-distortion-field politiking, which is something that the mainstream candidates did not do as much. But that's a different debate... I would definitely argue that money has a role in politics, but it isn't as strong as most people think it is.
    - cderwin 9y ago
      I don't think it's reasonable to call winning via the only electoral system we've ever had not "fair and square."
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        But the design of the electoral college was to deadlock the states and provide Representatives in the US Congress the final say in the matter. In effect, our country's founders were AGAINST the founding of political parties, in part because they knew it'd break the system that they worked so hard to set up. Alas, not all plans work out. Our current system is an accident, created in the ignorance / naivete of political parties with little thought or design put into the real operational use. The only thing that DOES work is that our constitution can (and regularly does) change when everyone is convinced that our rules and regulations are in need of an update. And more and more people are beginning to think that this whole "Electoral College" crap is stupid.
        grotsnot 9y ago
        Sounds like the problem is with having political parties, not the EC.
        dragontamer 9y ago
        It seems far more likely that we design our system to actually work with Political Parties (instead of being corrupted by Political parties), rather than trying to ban political parties. Tribalism, Cheerleading, Echo-chambers, "Fake News", Yellow Journalism, Propaganda... these are facts-of-life in America and no amount of legal writing will prevent humans from being humans. We will always separate ourselves into camps during political decisions. Its a bad thing for our democracy because our system wasn't designed for it. But alternative voting mechanisms or improved systems can allow us to make progress in spite of the corrupting influence of human nature. What have we learned in the past 250ish years of this country? And what can we do with that knowledge to improve our country? In general, this country learns to harness human nature, instead of trying to defeat it. When you try and defeat human nature (say: Amendment 18), you are only met with failure.
        AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
        >can allow us to make progress As long as there is healthy debate on what is progress, I am all for it. No suppression of free speech.
    - throwaway30yo 9y ago
      No. Not of course. If the Electoral College did not exist, the campaign strategy would have been completely different for Trump. If it was by popular vote, Trump would have campaigned primarily in California even though he had no chance of winning the state (so spent very little resources there). I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. However Trump won fair and square.
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        > completely different for Trump I agree things would have been different. That's not the real issue. > I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. I think this is where you and I can agree, and is the more important issue at hand.
        mi100hael 9y ago
        Just to play Devil's advocate, one could argue that the EC is a necessary evil. More than 25% of the population of the US lives in just CA + NY + TX. Without the EC, there would be absolutely no incentive for the President to even acknowledge the existence of a majority of the states.
        dragontamer 9y ago
        With the EC, there's no incentive for the candidates to acknowledge the existence of any "safe" state, and instead they focus on "Battleground" states. As a result, safe-states get safer over time and partisanship might be on the rise. Maybe if Trump did focus on California, and maybe if Clinton did focus on Texas... then our country would better understand each other's viewpoints.
        craftyguy 9y ago
        Well stated. The EC doesn't eliminate the problem that is often cited as justification for the EC, it merely moves the problem and arguably makes it worse by creating these unchangeable silos of states unwilling to listen to viewpoints from candidates of a different color than the one they prefer.
    - MrZongle2 9y ago
      "Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course." I think Wikipedia succinctly provides a factual assessment in this case: "The United States Electoral College is the mechanism established by the United States Constitution for the indirect election of the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States. Citizens of the United States vote in each state and the District of Columbia at a general election to choose a slate of "electors" pledged to vote for a particular party's candidate." One can argue about the merits of the popular vote, but as per the Constitution, elections are won according to Electoral College vote. That's the rules. That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change. Mrs. Clinton also had a chance to win a round of Yahtzee, if Rock-Scissors-Paper were used to determine the winner.
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        And the writers of the Constitution didn't believe in Political Parties. Things didn't work out as they expected however. The expectation was that each state would deadlock upon "local favorites" and then the House of Representatives would choose the winner. Clearly, the Electoral College system is not working as designed, and I really do think its time that we start thinking about changing the constitution to make things more fair.
      - throwawayknecht 9y ago
        > That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change. How in the world do you consider the 12th and 13th Amendments and the Apportionment Act of 1911 "little change"?
        MrZongle2 9y ago
        Would Mrs. Clinton have won in an alternative universe where the aforementioned alternations did not take place?
        dragontamer 9y ago
        Yes. She would have won the Vice Presidency, as Trump became President. Which only demonstrates the supreme idiocy of the original system our founding fathers envisioned. Its a good thing they gave us a mechanism to change the Constitution and the rules. The founding fathers never tried to design a perfect system. They only hoped to make a "more perfect" system, that over time would improve upon itself. And improve itself it has. Vice Presidents and Presidents now run together, instead of being #1 and #2 in the Electoral College. Black people can vote (and be more than 3/5ths a person), slaves have been outlawed, Women can vote. This country is one of continuous self-improvment (or at least, ATTEMPTED self-improvement)
  - swivelmaster 9y ago
    Given the unknowns around Russia's influence including the DNC and Podesta hacks and coordinated release via Wikileaks, buying campaign ads on Facebook, and other potential money-related shenanigans, "fair and square" might be up for debate.
    - diggernet 9y ago
      How many people do you know who changed their votes due to those things?
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        A non-trivial number -- perhaps a few percent of my friends seem to have changed their behavior in response to what, in retrospect, look like Russian PSYOPs. Why, do you think none of your friends were impacted?
        diggernet 9y ago
        I was curious what the experience of others was on this. In my own experience, everyone I know who makes their politics known (obviously, selection bias) has been immovably in one camp or another.
        SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        I didn't watch anyone switch camps, but I watched a lot of people get motivated or demotivated to vote, which has the same effect on the election -- so I saw a lot of people go from "party candidate" to "none" or "none" to "party-candidate". Considering how close the election was, those kinds of changes seem non-trivial on a national stage, particularly if they're all in a direction that benefits one candidate over another (and likely were the intended ones from PSYOPs campaigns).
    - sremani 9y ago
      Outside of hacking the voting machines (which does not seem to be the centerpiece of investigations), anything that would make up for 1.1 billion worth of expenditure of "influence", I would love to know it.
  - delecti 9y ago
    Trump is a big outlier though, in both the primaries and the general. More spending usually does correlate with success. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-more-campaign-money-actually-buy-more-votes-investigation/355154/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-mo...
    - alexanderstears 9y ago
      Why should we care about the correlation? It's apparent that an election isn't an auction.
      - microcolonel 9y ago
        For what it's worth, I did say "correlate", I think delecti is responding to that.
      - bllguo 9y ago
        what an odd response. We care because it suggests very strongly that money is important in winning elections. What is your point here? That it doesn't guarantee success?
        alexanderstears 9y ago
        My point is 'how much can money matter when a 3x-10x spending advantage doesn't translate into victory'? One part of me wonders if we see the correlation because candidates who are more likely to win get more money as sort of an 'advance' for favors? If I knew that my grocer was about to become a sheriff, I'd volunteer to pay $6 for a banana just to be sure we were on good terms. I think speeches work broadly the same way - banks pay politicians 400k to recite a 15 minute stump speech they've already delivered and both parties get to act like it was a legitimate transaction without any additional elements. the only way I could test that hypothesis is by comparing the money a candidate raises verses their expected chance of victory. But I think I'm somewhat vindicated, candidates in races that are perceived as close seem to haul less than candidates in safe races. Pelosi raises a ton of money and I'm not sure all of it is given to beat the helpless Republican who runs against her. Now there are other factors at play but it's not coincidental that candidates who are the most appealing to the establishment seem to out-raise people who threaten the establishment. I think the deeper problem is that the political class thinks they can compensate for an unappealing candidate with money.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    I think the overwhelming evidence points to the contrary, at least so far. We only have a few very recent examples that may very well be exceptions to the rule, or perhaps the very beginning of a very long term trend. It also depends how you measure the money invested. By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      > By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that. In this way, it seems not to matter what specific opinion the media takes at this point. The vast majority of those three gigadollars were spent on media taking a position against the candidate who prevailed, and the candidate who spent the least doing it.
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    Are megadollars and gigadollars common units of measurement of money in some field?
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      No, but I wish they were! I prefer to use SI magnitude prefixes when speaking analytically, so I thought I'd try them out for money.
    - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
      I sincerely doubt it.
  - lazyant 9y ago
    "lost fair and square" let's just say "lost" and leave it at that (just in case: she won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes and a case can be made that a foreign country ran adversarial campaign and the empty allegations by the director of the FBI days before voting day may have tipped the scale)
    - cwkoss 9y ago
      She had every advantage: more money, more favorable media coverage, more experience, more endorsements, more support from big money. Still fucked it up, few million in Russian spending would not have been able to destabilize a strong campaign. It's not "lost fair and square", its "lied and cheated like hell and still lost". In the words of Colin Powell: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”
- t8ge55geu8ygt 9y ago
  Can you explain what you mean more? I'm not sure how to interpret the relationship between those concepts.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  Depends if there are enough candidates for the people to choose somebody they want, and if extra money buys more votes or if it is just a fixed entry cost. It creates a huge potential for democracy being taken over by a kleptocracy, but it is not something automatic.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  I prefer the term "corporate oligarchy." When there exist corporations capable of mass cultural shaping and branches of government that intercept that data, it is inevitable that power will be used to control the masses. Astroturfing is already becoming the norm, even on sites like this.
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  Yes. The democratic ideal is self-rule of the people. The candidate who wins is identified as the most legitimate because we identify the will of the majority with the will of the people. Ultimately, the people affirm the power of the political class. I don't know of anyone who has a concrete way to associate the idea of democracy with a particular method of public will-formation. However, this does violate the norm of political equality. The choices available reflect natural differences in status among candidates - there isn't an equal or nominally equal path to candidacy for all people. And I think the status quo challenges the claim that America is a liberal democracy. Rather than creating a democracy that promotes and respects Liberal-Humanitarian freedoms (speech, right to property, religion, safety and security), the elite political community has made American non-elites their enemy (or at least their opposition). Political taste makers are not committed to a State that has the power to protect those freedoms. The GOP fights unions and the DNC-Google fight Damore and both are victories that affirm the right of consolidated power to make decisions for other people.
  - guelo 9y ago
    > DNC-Google fight Damore WTF!
- unabridged 9y ago
  With the internet the cost is coming down. A candidate could be on youtube giving speeches and on reddit answering questions (or on twitter spouting nonsense), reaching millions of people without spending a dime. The question is more whether the average voter would respect someone only on the internet as much as someone making 1000s of campaign stops and printing millions of littering flyers and signs. I think by 2030 there will be a respectable primary candidate that campaigns 99% from the internet spending almost nothing.
  - Chathamization 9y ago
    Good point. Let's consider an electorate that looks at who is running, goes to their website in order to view their history and positions, and looks at how they have answered questionnaires from various organizations. They then use this information and vote accordingly, ignoring television ads and flyers. For an electorate like this, a candidate needs vary little money. And extra million or two spent on ad buys isn't going to be useful, because people aren't voting based on television ads. The desire to get more money to buy advertisements and flyers is a symptom of a larger issue - an electorate that votes based on ads and flyers, not positions (the situation is of course much more complicated than just this, but it at least highlights a major issue).
  - user5994461 9y ago
    They are complementary. Going on TV will instantly get you millions of viewers. Going on youtube can also get you millions of viewers. The thing is, there is a lot of viewership on these two that do not overlap. A candidate should be available on all medias, it's not reasonable for anyone to miss millions of people.
sharemywin 9y ago
From the article: "Of course, it takes more than money to win elections. In both the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, the candidates who spent the most money lost."
- dnautics 9y ago
  It's generally true for all legislative seats, except ones where the incumbent is running. (For seats where the incumbent is running, the win is strongly biased due to name recognition and the perception of job experience and, and thus that in and of itself attracts money). Perhaps if we were serious about ending political corruption, we would institute term limits.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Is the article counting money spent on behalf of the candidate but not in their name? But there is truth to the law of diminishing returns on political spending. The most effective spending tends to be in downballot races where it's relatively cheap to completely swamp the existing spending in the race.
SamReidHughes 9y ago
"Our democracy is drowning in money" can also be branded, "Our democracy is drowning in speech."
- wmeredith 9y ago
  The money is speech legal argument never made sense to me. The thing about speech is that no one has more of it than anyone else.
  - SamReidHughes 9y ago
    Then let's shut down CNN and all the newspapers.
    - zanny 9y ago
      While it is true pretty much every major TV network and newspaper exists solely based on state bias and special privilege to get them where they are now, you aren't mandated to consume any of them. At least with the Internet speech is as restricted as you want to let it be - at least until Ajit Pai gets his way. The millions who like being misled by mainstream big money media are doing it wilfully at least. They believe what they want to believe. The only problem I see is how many of them have never been presented with an objective choice between being rational and skeptical versus blind trust of major brands that were pressed upon them from youth.
  - whiddershins 9y ago
    Think about making a movie. Is it speech? I would say so. Does it tend to happen at a quality level for free? Empirically no. Once I've made my movie, would trying to tell people about it be considered speech? I would say yes. Does that typically happen for free? I would say empirically no. This is a simple example of the argument, and in fact the one that went before the supreme court.
- mrow84 9y ago
  I think you'd be unlikely to do that if you cling tightly to the idea of "one person one vote", and, by extension, have a negative reaction to "one dollar one vote".
EGreg 9y ago
Tell me again, why do we use voting instead of polling? http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling Voting is susceptible to many things, including voter turnout and gerrymandering. Polling can be strictly better, and in fact it is what statisticians use who actually figure out what the population as a whole thinks.
- nosuchthing 9y ago
  Polling is essentially what the electoral collage does. More important is the method of how each citizen chooses, and how the choices are counted. https://onelections.net/2017/09/06/electoral-reform-movement-spreading-across-united-states/ https://onelections.net/2017/09/06/electoral-reform-movement...
- unabridged 9y ago
  Sortition takes this even farther. Imagine if the entire congress was drawn at random. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  Democracy is really about changing government without the cost of a civil war. People that don't show up to vote wouldn't show up to fight, so their opinion doesn't need to be counted.
bkohlmann 9y ago
In 2016, US GDP was over 16 trillion dollars. Spending approx 0.033% of GDP every 4 years (~6bn per the article) in a Presidential election doesnt seem all that unreasonable to govern such a large economy. [edited since i had my original order of magnitude too low!]
- djschnei 9y ago
  The president doesn't govern the economy...
  - bkohlmann 9y ago
    He or she, along with Congress (whose elections are included in these numbers), are directly responsible for the policies that impact trade, deficits, employeer/employee relations, etc. All of which are instrumental in how our economy functions. They may not "govern," but they have immense influence.
    - djschnei 9y ago
      I apologize. Should have said "the president shouldn't govern the economy." You are right, the president does have immense control and influence over the economy. "what is your vision for the economy?" is an easy to imagine debate question. When the president or politicians in general have so much power over the economy, can we be surprised when people value influencing that process as much as they do?
- switch007 9y ago
  I think what it is spent on is more important than the amount.
rayiner 9y ago
> “The corruption in the U.S. does not stem from officeholders putting money in their pocket,” he said. “This is systemic corruption of the process itself. When you are dealing with billions and billions of dollars, much of that focused on buying influence, it overwhelms the system, and it is much harder to defend against and maintain representation for ordinary Americans.” In other words, if you accuse someone of taking a bribe, you had better be able to back it up. If you hand-wave about "systemic corruption," no proof is necessary.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > If you hand-wave about "systemic corruption," no proof is necessary. This has been looked at. It looks like government lobbying has a 400x return on investment. If these corporations weren't benefiting from all they spend, they wouldn't spend it. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-donius/goldmans-great-return-on_b_549900.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-donius/goldmans-great-ret...
  - SamReidHughes 9y ago
    Should politicians pass legislation negatively impacting the ability to do business and be completely insulated from feedback?
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      Should politicians maintain legislation that prioritizes corporate profits over quality of life for its citizens?
      - jandrese 9y ago
        In the end, who are the Politicians representing? When the interests of the multinational corporation come in conflict with the interests of the general public, who wins? In a market economy the one with the money wins, should the same be true of the government representation too? Ultimately, markets have a built in bias towards the top. In a theoretical perfectly functioning market the money will accumulate at the top until one person controls all of the money, at which point the economy completely collapses. Despite this flaw, markets are still the most efficient way to allocate resources and grow the economy. So the best solution we've found so far is to have the Government act as a backstop, draining money from the top and feeding it back into the bottom so the market doesn't collapse itself. Unfortunately, governments sometimes forget that and their economies suffer. Plus, despite what many economists may think, money isn't everything. Money is only a means to and end, where efficient distribution of resources provides the greatest overall happiness in the population. A system where half of the population is abjectly poor and 0.01% are so rich they have no idea what to do with their money except to use it to make more money has failed.
legulere 9y ago
> In fact, the United States performed well on Transparency International’s 176-country Corruption Perceptions Index from last year, ranking 18th, behind Denmark (1st) and Germany (10th), but ahead of France (23rd) and Russia (131st). This is no wonder, the index is only about perception. In richer countries like Germany corruption in high politics and big companies is rarely seen by the population as corruption.
djschnei 9y ago
solution: Make the political system have less influence in our lives. Make politicians less valuable to purchase
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  That sounds great in theory but is pretty unrealistic in today's societies.
  - djschnei 9y ago
    Uhhhhh, making our lives less political is now considered entirely unrealistic? Fun times...
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      How will you be running a 400 million people country?
      - djschnei 9y ago
        I'd write some document, call it the law-of-the-land, make everyone that wanted to stay agree with it, everyone else could leave. It would set up some very precise and strict rules about what I (the government) was allowed to do. I would let individuals cooperate as they see best. I would protect people's rights and punish those who infringe their neighbors. I'd probably follow these rules for a couple hundred years, then say "screw it" and do whatever I wanted.
- CraigJPerry 9y ago
  What would the replacement look like, where would the displaced power go?
  - jandrese 9y ago
    I'm sure benevolent corporations will step in to fill that power vacuum. It could usher in a glorious new guilded age.
nickysielicki 9y ago
Seriously? No mention of how Barack Obama rejected public funding in 2008 and singlehandedly opened the floodgates on campaign spending? [1] The fact that this isn't directly mentioned anywhere in the article speaks to how far the credibility of the NYT has fallen. [2] [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95957148 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9595714... [2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/politics/20obamacnd.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/politics/20obamacnd.htm... ---- edit: for a visual on how unprecedented his 2008 spending was, see charts here: http://metrocosm.com/2016-election-spending/ http://metrocosm.com/2016-election-spending/ Note the stability in spending starting in 1976 when public funding was introduced.
- kevin_b_er 9y ago
  Because he wasn't the first: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/16/us/bush-forgoes-federal-funds-and-has-no-spending-limit.html http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/16/us/bush-forgoes-federal-fu...
  - nickysielicki 9y ago
    That's just talking about funding for primaries, and Bush wasn't the first in that regard. Barack Obama was the first candidate to reject public funding for the general election, and the spending limits that come with it, since the program was introduced in 1976. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United_States#Public_financing_of_presidential_campaigns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
- rconti 9y ago
  It's certainly relevant, but Citizens United was the only specific causal event mentioned here; I don't see how you leap from "This would have been very useful information" to "definitive proof that the NYT's credibility has fallen".
narrator 9y ago
Pay politicians multi-million dollar salaries like they do in Singapore and you'll get top talent that doesn't need to be bribed and can focus on their actual jobs instead of pleasing lobbyists.
- Cursuviam 9y ago
  Seconded. It infuriates me when people get enraged about lobbyists, but also whine about representatives being payed too much. The only thing that seems to make those folks happy is if the person is independently wealthy (see Trump).
  - diggernet 9y ago
    Considering the tendency for politicians to be drawn to money and become millionaires while in office through various means, I'm not at all convinced that large salaries would cause them to turn away people handing them more money.
    - narrator 9y ago
      You'd get different people drawn to politics if it looked like a move up the career ladder. With the salaries beinf pathetically low, only those who have low enough morals to make it work via corruption are the only ones who will participate in it long term. Singapore has one of the least corrupt governments on earth according to Transparency International.
shmerl 9y ago
TL;DR: democracy is being replaced with plutocracy and legalized corruption.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  "Legalized corruption" suggests that our system merely allows corruption. Given the power of money in elections, that's not really the case. I think a phrase like "mandatory bribery" or "bribe quota" is probably closer to the truth :/
- mirimir 9y ago
  Yes, more or less, but ... > Today, commentators in Europe often describe the American way as “legalized corruption.” ... and ... > But is it corruption? Well, maybe not, except that people get elected who further the interests of the affluent: > This perception is borne out by research from Martin Gilens, a politics professor at Princeton University, which shows that American economic policies over the last 40 years “strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent, but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-income Americans.” So yes, plutocracy comes close. Or kleptocracy. But democracy? Not really. Just the illusion of democracy. Wait, you may say, Trump got elected, as an outsider. Well, outsider or not, he threw a ton of money at the sucker. And his people brought in Cambridge Analytics, and manipulated the disaffected. But he's really favoring interests of the affluent. It's the standard Republican thing.
simonsarris 9y ago
Democracy is a very silly way to do anything. How many people in your town or city do you think could give you seriously valuable political advice? Think of the most effective companies in the world: Are they democracies internally? (No. They have a board of directors who appoint a CEO-person with wide latitude and therefore real political will to implement improvements. Shareholders watch or they can revolt, but not much else. Thankfully.) If you want to do democracy, the best way to do it would be as bottom-up. The more distributed things are, the harder it is for money to make a mark. The best democracy would be one where people care fiercely who their local politicians are, and are more or less disinterested in who the president might be.
- unabridged 9y ago
  I do think bottom up is a good idea, but the democracy has to be fiercely protected at all levels. The fear is that eventually a party/leader emerges at the top and never lets go of control. Then they have enough power to control all the local elections, pushing out candidates/voters they don't like (eg China).
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  The thing about democracy is that most people don't care all that much - until they do. If you mess up in a way that steps on too many toes, too many people are going to do what they can to get you out of office. If you don't, most people won't care all that much about the election.
- vzcx 9y ago
  I would take it a step further... Why should it be hard for money to make a mark? Why should the voice of someone who sacrifices little or who has no or next to no "skin in the game" be considered equivalent to the voice of someone who is willing to sacrifice real, tangible resources? In modern corporations, there is a distinction between those who have stake in the future of the firm (shareholders), those who are trusted to act on their behalf (board, executives, and employees to a lesser extent), and those who receive services from the firm in exchange for revenues (clients and customers). Customers do not make managerial and strategic decisions for the firm, and for good reasons. Indeed, does anyone really care exactly who is running walmart or amazon or apple so long as their products and services provide value? Why do people tend to see governments, essentially massive corporations, as inhabiting such a different realm, expecting them to follow entirely different laws of human behavior?
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
I am actually amazed at how little money is needed to influence politicians. Lobbying exists because the return on investment is ridiculously high in favor of person asking for favorable treatment from politicians in policy making. It is peanuts invested and Boeing 747s harvested. If anything the cost of buying a politician should increase multiple orders of magnitude. Currently hundred, two hundred thousands to a senator's re-election campaign can buy really serious attention to your concerns. It needs to be hundreds of millions to buy a senator. Politicians should start Patreon campaigns to get livable wages from supporters and then just execute on what they stand for. Bernie and Trump was essentially that, self/people funded efforts.
- ssambros 9y ago
  > If anything the cost of buying a politician should increase multiple orders of magnitude. How about lowering the possible returns from buying politicians, say, by lowering their influence on how the republic is actually being run?
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    I guess ssambros is being downvoted because it seems tautological that politicians run the Republic. But we really should stop to ask whether legislatures should be doing the kind of micromanagement where they routinely divert billions towards one private interest or another. And we should adjust our political rhetoric, voting behaviour and expectations about propriety and the law accordingly.
  - vec 9y ago
    Because then the money just moves to whoever does have influence on how the republic is actually being run. Or, worse yet, the money just buys the power it was previously trying to influence and simply wields it directly. Weakening the formal power of government officials doesn't make that power dissolve, it just displaces it to somewhere even less visible and answerable to the public.
- NTDF9 9y ago
  >> Politicians should start Patreon campaigns to get livable wages from supporters and then just execute on what they stand for. They'll just seek more and more funds to become richer and richer. This is how corrupt democracies work. The only people who should be politicians are the ones who'd do it with no campaign funds and median wage. They need to be in touch with realities of their electoral base and have the desire to change it for everyone.
erikb 9y ago
The thinking is wrong I believe. Our current world system and world view has long overcome it's peak. There is not much to gain, and the whole system slowly breaks and falls apart. That means there are not many true opportunities to grow value anymore. And the old profit and safety providers are getting rarer and rarer. For instance putting your money on the bank or buying index funds is no guarantee for safety anymore. In that time of decline of course people pay more and more to get the same level of safety, which really becomes more valuable by becoming rare, and also becoming more pricey by the money having less internal value. What is money worth if the amount of islands to stay on gets smaller and nobody being willing to trade his island for a few slices of paper?
- olegkikin 9y ago
  What are you even talking about? > there are not many true opportunities to grow value anymore There are more opportunities than ever in human history. The knowledge and data are extremely accessible. The amount of spare money people have is near all-time-high. You can literally become a multimillionare without leaving your basement, simply by pressing keys on your keyboard. > buying index funds is no guarantee for safety anymore It never was. There's never a guarantee, your bank can go bankrupt, so can FDIC. But it's still one of the safest ways to invest. Your investment options are extremely diverse as well. Only 50 years ago you had to call your broker to buy a stock. Now you can do that with a few mouseclicks. You can invest into foreign markets, cryptocurrencies, ICOs, you name it.
  - erikb 9y ago
    You think that because you read it in blogs and don't have the experience yet to see which of these articles are bullshit. It's not true though. The reason it seems that way is because the human species is so rich, that you can make a good living for 2-3 more generations by screwing other humans over. And if you're not one of the screwers the blog article you read is certainly tailored to screw you. Maybe if space flight becomes more available, but here on this planet all of value is already controlled by someone. And they don't intend to share it with you. Without growth there is no stability in society, exactly because people need to screw each other to stay floating. So the system is on a downturn. And you can be sure that no matter what we find next to exploit, it will require another system to stabilize on.
lxmorj 9y ago
Singapore model. Market wages for the best talent (millions+). Huge penalties for corruption.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yuhong 9y ago
Right now I think things like the current debt based economy is a bigger problem than campaign donations at this point.
RickJWagner 9y ago
Bernie almost ran a good grass roots campaign in 2016. (Funded by $27 donations). But of course Big-Bucks Clinton controlled the DNC and cheated that race. Trump actually spent less than his competitors and managed to win both the primary and the election. It wasn't a budget campaign, but he did seem to get good bang for his spent dollars.

97 points by iamjeff 9y ago

cwkoss 9y ago

If it costs millions of dollars to be a viable candidate, is it still accurate to call it "democracy"?

microcolonel 9y ago
It is some consolation that campaign money does not directly correlate with success. The Jeb Bush campaign spent roughly 130 megadollars on the primaries alone. The Donald Trump campaign spent less than 280 megadollars from primary to president; where the Hillary Clinton campaign spent about 1.2 gigadollars (along with huge amounts of spending outside the direct purview of the campaign) and lost fair and square.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  > lost fair and square. Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course. In any case, its clear that Mr. Trump won with less money spent. Bernie Sanders is similarly a candidate who famously spent less money that Ms. Clinton but also had a chance. The main issue is that these candidates (Trump and Sanders) were far more willing to participate in reality-distortion-field politiking, which is something that the mainstream candidates did not do as much. But that's a different debate... I would definitely argue that money has a role in politics, but it isn't as strong as most people think it is.
  - cderwin 9y ago
    I don't think it's reasonable to call winning via the only electoral system we've ever had not "fair and square."
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      But the design of the electoral college was to deadlock the states and provide Representatives in the US Congress the final say in the matter. In effect, our country's founders were AGAINST the founding of political parties, in part because they knew it'd break the system that they worked so hard to set up. Alas, not all plans work out. Our current system is an accident, created in the ignorance / naivete of political parties with little thought or design put into the real operational use. The only thing that DOES work is that our constitution can (and regularly does) change when everyone is convinced that our rules and regulations are in need of an update. And more and more people are beginning to think that this whole "Electoral College" crap is stupid.
      - grotsnot 9y ago
        Sounds like the problem is with having political parties, not the EC.
        dragontamer 9y ago
        It seems far more likely that we design our system to actually work with Political Parties (instead of being corrupted by Political parties), rather than trying to ban political parties. Tribalism, Cheerleading, Echo-chambers, "Fake News", Yellow Journalism, Propaganda... these are facts-of-life in America and no amount of legal writing will prevent humans from being humans. We will always separate ourselves into camps during political decisions. Its a bad thing for our democracy because our system wasn't designed for it. But alternative voting mechanisms or improved systems can allow us to make progress in spite of the corrupting influence of human nature. What have we learned in the past 250ish years of this country? And what can we do with that knowledge to improve our country? In general, this country learns to harness human nature, instead of trying to defeat it. When you try and defeat human nature (say: Amendment 18), you are only met with failure.
        AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
        >can allow us to make progress As long as there is healthy debate on what is progress, I am all for it. No suppression of free speech.
  - throwaway30yo 9y ago
    No. Not of course. If the Electoral College did not exist, the campaign strategy would have been completely different for Trump. If it was by popular vote, Trump would have campaigned primarily in California even though he had no chance of winning the state (so spent very little resources there). I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. However Trump won fair and square.
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      > completely different for Trump I agree things would have been different. That's not the real issue. > I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. I think this is where you and I can agree, and is the more important issue at hand.
      - mi100hael 9y ago
        Just to play Devil's advocate, one could argue that the EC is a necessary evil. More than 25% of the population of the US lives in just CA + NY + TX. Without the EC, there would be absolutely no incentive for the President to even acknowledge the existence of a majority of the states.
        dragontamer 9y ago
        With the EC, there's no incentive for the candidates to acknowledge the existence of any "safe" state, and instead they focus on "Battleground" states. As a result, safe-states get safer over time and partisanship might be on the rise. Maybe if Trump did focus on California, and maybe if Clinton did focus on Texas... then our country would better understand each other's viewpoints.
        craftyguy 9y ago
        Well stated. The EC doesn't eliminate the problem that is often cited as justification for the EC, it merely moves the problem and arguably makes it worse by creating these unchangeable silos of states unwilling to listen to viewpoints from candidates of a different color than the one they prefer.
  - MrZongle2 9y ago
    "Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course." I think Wikipedia succinctly provides a factual assessment in this case: "The United States Electoral College is the mechanism established by the United States Constitution for the indirect election of the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States. Citizens of the United States vote in each state and the District of Columbia at a general election to choose a slate of "electors" pledged to vote for a particular party's candidate." One can argue about the merits of the popular vote, but as per the Constitution, elections are won according to Electoral College vote. That's the rules. That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change. Mrs. Clinton also had a chance to win a round of Yahtzee, if Rock-Scissors-Paper were used to determine the winner.
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      And the writers of the Constitution didn't believe in Political Parties. Things didn't work out as they expected however. The expectation was that each state would deadlock upon "local favorites" and then the House of Representatives would choose the winner. Clearly, the Electoral College system is not working as designed, and I really do think its time that we start thinking about changing the constitution to make things more fair.
    - throwawayknecht 9y ago
      > That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change. How in the world do you consider the 12th and 13th Amendments and the Apportionment Act of 1911 "little change"?
      - MrZongle2 9y ago
        Would Mrs. Clinton have won in an alternative universe where the aforementioned alternations did not take place?
        dragontamer 9y ago
        Yes. She would have won the Vice Presidency, as Trump became President. Which only demonstrates the supreme idiocy of the original system our founding fathers envisioned. Its a good thing they gave us a mechanism to change the Constitution and the rules. The founding fathers never tried to design a perfect system. They only hoped to make a "more perfect" system, that over time would improve upon itself. And improve itself it has. Vice Presidents and Presidents now run together, instead of being #1 and #2 in the Electoral College. Black people can vote (and be more than 3/5ths a person), slaves have been outlawed, Women can vote. This country is one of continuous self-improvment (or at least, ATTEMPTED self-improvement)
- swivelmaster 9y ago
  Given the unknowns around Russia's influence including the DNC and Podesta hacks and coordinated release via Wikileaks, buying campaign ads on Facebook, and other potential money-related shenanigans, "fair and square" might be up for debate.
  - diggernet 9y ago
    How many people do you know who changed their votes due to those things?
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      A non-trivial number -- perhaps a few percent of my friends seem to have changed their behavior in response to what, in retrospect, look like Russian PSYOPs. Why, do you think none of your friends were impacted?
      - diggernet 9y ago
        I was curious what the experience of others was on this. In my own experience, everyone I know who makes their politics known (obviously, selection bias) has been immovably in one camp or another.
        SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        I didn't watch anyone switch camps, but I watched a lot of people get motivated or demotivated to vote, which has the same effect on the election -- so I saw a lot of people go from "party candidate" to "none" or "none" to "party-candidate". Considering how close the election was, those kinds of changes seem non-trivial on a national stage, particularly if they're all in a direction that benefits one candidate over another (and likely were the intended ones from PSYOPs campaigns).
  - sremani 9y ago
    Outside of hacking the voting machines (which does not seem to be the centerpiece of investigations), anything that would make up for 1.1 billion worth of expenditure of "influence", I would love to know it.
- delecti 9y ago
  Trump is a big outlier though, in both the primaries and the general. More spending usually does correlate with success. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-more-campaign-money-actually-buy-more-votes-investigation/355154/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-mo...
  - alexanderstears 9y ago
    Why should we care about the correlation? It's apparent that an election isn't an auction.
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      For what it's worth, I did say "correlate", I think delecti is responding to that.
    - bllguo 9y ago
      what an odd response. We care because it suggests very strongly that money is important in winning elections. What is your point here? That it doesn't guarantee success?
      - alexanderstears 9y ago
        My point is 'how much can money matter when a 3x-10x spending advantage doesn't translate into victory'? One part of me wonders if we see the correlation because candidates who are more likely to win get more money as sort of an 'advance' for favors? If I knew that my grocer was about to become a sheriff, I'd volunteer to pay $6 for a banana just to be sure we were on good terms. I think speeches work broadly the same way - banks pay politicians 400k to recite a 15 minute stump speech they've already delivered and both parties get to act like it was a legitimate transaction without any additional elements. the only way I could test that hypothesis is by comparing the money a candidate raises verses their expected chance of victory. But I think I'm somewhat vindicated, candidates in races that are perceived as close seem to haul less than candidates in safe races. Pelosi raises a ton of money and I'm not sure all of it is given to beat the helpless Republican who runs against her. Now there are other factors at play but it's not coincidental that candidates who are the most appealing to the establishment seem to out-raise people who threaten the establishment. I think the deeper problem is that the political class thinks they can compensate for an unappealing candidate with money.
- mtgx 9y ago
  I think the overwhelming evidence points to the contrary, at least so far. We only have a few very recent examples that may very well be exceptions to the rule, or perhaps the very beginning of a very long term trend. It also depends how you measure the money invested. By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    > By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that. In this way, it seems not to matter what specific opinion the media takes at this point. The vast majority of those three gigadollars were spent on media taking a position against the candidate who prevailed, and the candidate who spent the least doing it.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  Are megadollars and gigadollars common units of measurement of money in some field?
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    No, but I wish they were! I prefer to use SI magnitude prefixes when speaking analytically, so I thought I'd try them out for money.
  - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
    I sincerely doubt it.
- lazyant 9y ago
  "lost fair and square" let's just say "lost" and leave it at that (just in case: she won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes and a case can be made that a foreign country ran adversarial campaign and the empty allegations by the director of the FBI days before voting day may have tipped the scale)
  - cwkoss 9y ago
    She had every advantage: more money, more favorable media coverage, more experience, more endorsements, more support from big money. Still fucked it up, few million in Russian spending would not have been able to destabilize a strong campaign. It's not "lost fair and square", its "lied and cheated like hell and still lost". In the words of Colin Powell: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”
t8ge55geu8ygt 9y ago
Can you explain what you mean more? I'm not sure how to interpret the relationship between those concepts.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 9y ago
Depends if there are enough candidates for the people to choose somebody they want, and if extra money buys more votes or if it is just a fixed entry cost. It creates a huge potential for democracy being taken over by a kleptocracy, but it is not something automatic.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
I prefer the term "corporate oligarchy." When there exist corporations capable of mass cultural shaping and branches of government that intercept that data, it is inevitable that power will be used to control the masses. Astroturfing is already becoming the norm, even on sites like this.
alexanderstears 9y ago
Yes. The democratic ideal is self-rule of the people. The candidate who wins is identified as the most legitimate because we identify the will of the majority with the will of the people. Ultimately, the people affirm the power of the political class. I don't know of anyone who has a concrete way to associate the idea of democracy with a particular method of public will-formation. However, this does violate the norm of political equality. The choices available reflect natural differences in status among candidates - there isn't an equal or nominally equal path to candidacy for all people. And I think the status quo challenges the claim that America is a liberal democracy. Rather than creating a democracy that promotes and respects Liberal-Humanitarian freedoms (speech, right to property, religion, safety and security), the elite political community has made American non-elites their enemy (or at least their opposition). Political taste makers are not committed to a State that has the power to protect those freedoms. The GOP fights unions and the DNC-Google fight Damore and both are victories that affirm the right of consolidated power to make decisions for other people.
- guelo 9y ago
  > DNC-Google fight Damore WTF!
unabridged 9y ago
With the internet the cost is coming down. A candidate could be on youtube giving speeches and on reddit answering questions (or on twitter spouting nonsense), reaching millions of people without spending a dime. The question is more whether the average voter would respect someone only on the internet as much as someone making 1000s of campaign stops and printing millions of littering flyers and signs. I think by 2030 there will be a respectable primary candidate that campaigns 99% from the internet spending almost nothing.
- Chathamization 9y ago
  Good point. Let's consider an electorate that looks at who is running, goes to their website in order to view their history and positions, and looks at how they have answered questionnaires from various organizations. They then use this information and vote accordingly, ignoring television ads and flyers. For an electorate like this, a candidate needs vary little money. And extra million or two spent on ad buys isn't going to be useful, because people aren't voting based on television ads. The desire to get more money to buy advertisements and flyers is a symptom of a larger issue - an electorate that votes based on ads and flyers, not positions (the situation is of course much more complicated than just this, but it at least highlights a major issue).
- user5994461 9y ago
  They are complementary. Going on TV will instantly get you millions of viewers. Going on youtube can also get you millions of viewers. The thing is, there is a lot of viewership on these two that do not overlap. A candidate should be available on all medias, it's not reasonable for anyone to miss millions of people.

sharemywin 9y ago

From the article: "Of course, it takes more than money to win elections. In both the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, the candidates who spent the most money lost."

dnautics 9y ago
It's generally true for all legislative seats, except ones where the incumbent is running. (For seats where the incumbent is running, the win is strongly biased due to name recognition and the perception of job experience and, and thus that in and of itself attracts money). Perhaps if we were serious about ending political corruption, we would institute term limits.
jandrese 9y ago
Is the article counting money spent on behalf of the candidate but not in their name? But there is truth to the law of diminishing returns on political spending. The most effective spending tends to be in downballot races where it's relatively cheap to completely swamp the existing spending in the race.

SamReidHughes 9y ago

"Our democracy is drowning in money" can also be branded, "Our democracy is drowning in speech."

wmeredith 9y ago
The money is speech legal argument never made sense to me. The thing about speech is that no one has more of it than anyone else.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  Then let's shut down CNN and all the newspapers.
  - zanny 9y ago
    While it is true pretty much every major TV network and newspaper exists solely based on state bias and special privilege to get them where they are now, you aren't mandated to consume any of them. At least with the Internet speech is as restricted as you want to let it be - at least until Ajit Pai gets his way. The millions who like being misled by mainstream big money media are doing it wilfully at least. They believe what they want to believe. The only problem I see is how many of them have never been presented with an objective choice between being rational and skeptical versus blind trust of major brands that were pressed upon them from youth.
- whiddershins 9y ago
  Think about making a movie. Is it speech? I would say so. Does it tend to happen at a quality level for free? Empirically no. Once I've made my movie, would trying to tell people about it be considered speech? I would say yes. Does that typically happen for free? I would say empirically no. This is a simple example of the argument, and in fact the one that went before the supreme court.
mrow84 9y ago
I think you'd be unlikely to do that if you cling tightly to the idea of "one person one vote", and, by extension, have a negative reaction to "one dollar one vote".

EGreg 9y ago

Tell me again, why do we use voting instead of polling? http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling http://magarshak.com/blog/?tag=polling Voting is susceptible to many things, including voter turnout and gerrymandering. Polling can be strictly better, and in fact it is what statisticians use who actually figure out what the population as a whole thinks.

nosuchthing 9y ago
Polling is essentially what the electoral collage does. More important is the method of how each citizen chooses, and how the choices are counted. https://onelections.net/2017/09/06/electoral-reform-movement-spreading-across-united-states/ https://onelections.net/2017/09/06/electoral-reform-movement...
unabridged 9y ago
Sortition takes this even farther. Imagine if the entire congress was drawn at random. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
SamReidHughes 9y ago
Democracy is really about changing government without the cost of a civil war. People that don't show up to vote wouldn't show up to fight, so their opinion doesn't need to be counted.

bkohlmann 9y ago

In 2016, US GDP was over 16 trillion dollars. Spending approx 0.033% of GDP every 4 years (~6bn per the article) in a Presidential election doesnt seem all that unreasonable to govern such a large economy. [edited since i had my original order of magnitude too low!]

djschnei 9y ago
The president doesn't govern the economy...
- bkohlmann 9y ago
  He or she, along with Congress (whose elections are included in these numbers), are directly responsible for the policies that impact trade, deficits, employeer/employee relations, etc. All of which are instrumental in how our economy functions. They may not "govern," but they have immense influence.
  - djschnei 9y ago
    I apologize. Should have said "the president shouldn't govern the economy." You are right, the president does have immense control and influence over the economy. "what is your vision for the economy?" is an easy to imagine debate question. When the president or politicians in general have so much power over the economy, can we be surprised when people value influencing that process as much as they do?
switch007 9y ago
I think what it is spent on is more important than the amount.

rayiner 9y ago

> “The corruption in the U.S. does not stem from officeholders putting money in their pocket,” he said. “This is systemic corruption of the process itself. When you are dealing with billions and billions of dollars, much of that focused on buying influence, it overwhelms the system, and it is much harder to defend against and maintain representation for ordinary Americans.” In other words, if you accuse someone of taking a bribe, you had better be able to back it up. If you hand-wave about "systemic corruption," no proof is necessary.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> If you hand-wave about "systemic corruption," no proof is necessary. This has been looked at. It looks like government lobbying has a 400x return on investment. If these corporations weren't benefiting from all they spend, they wouldn't spend it. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-donius/goldmans-great-return-on_b_549900.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-donius/goldmans-great-ret...
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  Should politicians pass legislation negatively impacting the ability to do business and be completely insulated from feedback?
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Should politicians maintain legislation that prioritizes corporate profits over quality of life for its citizens?
    - jandrese 9y ago
      In the end, who are the Politicians representing? When the interests of the multinational corporation come in conflict with the interests of the general public, who wins? In a market economy the one with the money wins, should the same be true of the government representation too? Ultimately, markets have a built in bias towards the top. In a theoretical perfectly functioning market the money will accumulate at the top until one person controls all of the money, at which point the economy completely collapses. Despite this flaw, markets are still the most efficient way to allocate resources and grow the economy. So the best solution we've found so far is to have the Government act as a backstop, draining money from the top and feeding it back into the bottom so the market doesn't collapse itself. Unfortunately, governments sometimes forget that and their economies suffer. Plus, despite what many economists may think, money isn't everything. Money is only a means to and end, where efficient distribution of resources provides the greatest overall happiness in the population. A system where half of the population is abjectly poor and 0.01% are so rich they have no idea what to do with their money except to use it to make more money has failed.

legulere 9y ago

> In fact, the United States performed well on Transparency International’s 176-country Corruption Perceptions Index from last year, ranking 18th, behind Denmark (1st) and Germany (10th), but ahead of France (23rd) and Russia (131st). This is no wonder, the index is only about perception. In richer countries like Germany corruption in high politics and big companies is rarely seen by the population as corruption.

djschnei 9y ago

solution: Make the political system have less influence in our lives. Make politicians less valuable to purchase

maxxxxx 9y ago
That sounds great in theory but is pretty unrealistic in today's societies.
- djschnei 9y ago
  Uhhhhh, making our lives less political is now considered entirely unrealistic? Fun times...
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    How will you be running a 400 million people country?
    - djschnei 9y ago
      I'd write some document, call it the law-of-the-land, make everyone that wanted to stay agree with it, everyone else could leave. It would set up some very precise and strict rules about what I (the government) was allowed to do. I would let individuals cooperate as they see best. I would protect people's rights and punish those who infringe their neighbors. I'd probably follow these rules for a couple hundred years, then say "screw it" and do whatever I wanted.
CraigJPerry 9y ago
What would the replacement look like, where would the displaced power go?
- jandrese 9y ago
  I'm sure benevolent corporations will step in to fill that power vacuum. It could usher in a glorious new guilded age.

nickysielicki 9y ago

Seriously? No mention of how Barack Obama rejected public funding in 2008 and singlehandedly opened the floodgates on campaign spending? [1] The fact that this isn't directly mentioned anywhere in the article speaks to how far the credibility of the NYT has fallen. [2] [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95957148 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9595714... [2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/politics/20obamacnd.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/politics/20obamacnd.htm... ---- edit: for a visual on how unprecedented his 2008 spending was, see charts here: http://metrocosm.com/2016-election-spending/ http://metrocosm.com/2016-election-spending/ Note the stability in spending starting in 1976 when public funding was introduced.

kevin_b_er 9y ago
Because he wasn't the first: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/16/us/bush-forgoes-federal-funds-and-has-no-spending-limit.html http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/16/us/bush-forgoes-federal-fu...
- nickysielicki 9y ago
  That's just talking about funding for primaries, and Bush wasn't the first in that regard. Barack Obama was the first candidate to reject public funding for the general election, and the spending limits that come with it, since the program was introduced in 1976. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United_States#Public_financing_of_presidential_campaigns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
rconti 9y ago
It's certainly relevant, but Citizens United was the only specific causal event mentioned here; I don't see how you leap from "This would have been very useful information" to "definitive proof that the NYT's credibility has fallen".

narrator 9y ago

Pay politicians multi-million dollar salaries like they do in Singapore and you'll get top talent that doesn't need to be bribed and can focus on their actual jobs instead of pleasing lobbyists.

Cursuviam 9y ago
Seconded. It infuriates me when people get enraged about lobbyists, but also whine about representatives being payed too much. The only thing that seems to make those folks happy is if the person is independently wealthy (see Trump).
- diggernet 9y ago
  Considering the tendency for politicians to be drawn to money and become millionaires while in office through various means, I'm not at all convinced that large salaries would cause them to turn away people handing them more money.
  - narrator 9y ago
    You'd get different people drawn to politics if it looked like a move up the career ladder. With the salaries beinf pathetically low, only those who have low enough morals to make it work via corruption are the only ones who will participate in it long term. Singapore has one of the least corrupt governments on earth according to Transparency International.

shmerl 9y ago

TL;DR: democracy is being replaced with plutocracy and legalized corruption.

jjoonathan 9y ago
"Legalized corruption" suggests that our system merely allows corruption. Given the power of money in elections, that's not really the case. I think a phrase like "mandatory bribery" or "bribe quota" is probably closer to the truth :/
mirimir 9y ago
Yes, more or less, but ... > Today, commentators in Europe often describe the American way as “legalized corruption.” ... and ... > But is it corruption? Well, maybe not, except that people get elected who further the interests of the affluent: > This perception is borne out by research from Martin Gilens, a politics professor at Princeton University, which shows that American economic policies over the last 40 years “strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent, but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-income Americans.” So yes, plutocracy comes close. Or kleptocracy. But democracy? Not really. Just the illusion of democracy. Wait, you may say, Trump got elected, as an outsider. Well, outsider or not, he threw a ton of money at the sucker. And his people brought in Cambridge Analytics, and manipulated the disaffected. But he's really favoring interests of the affluent. It's the standard Republican thing.

simonsarris 9y ago

Democracy is a very silly way to do anything. How many people in your town or city do you think could give you seriously valuable political advice? Think of the most effective companies in the world: Are they democracies internally? (No. They have a board of directors who appoint a CEO-person with wide latitude and therefore real political will to implement improvements. Shareholders watch or they can revolt, but not much else. Thankfully.) If you want to do democracy, the best way to do it would be as bottom-up. The more distributed things are, the harder it is for money to make a mark. The best democracy would be one where people care fiercely who their local politicians are, and are more or less disinterested in who the president might be.

unabridged 9y ago
I do think bottom up is a good idea, but the democracy has to be fiercely protected at all levels. The fear is that eventually a party/leader emerges at the top and never lets go of control. Then they have enough power to control all the local elections, pushing out candidates/voters they don't like (eg China).
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
The thing about democracy is that most people don't care all that much - until they do. If you mess up in a way that steps on too many toes, too many people are going to do what they can to get you out of office. If you don't, most people won't care all that much about the election.
vzcx 9y ago
I would take it a step further... Why should it be hard for money to make a mark? Why should the voice of someone who sacrifices little or who has no or next to no "skin in the game" be considered equivalent to the voice of someone who is willing to sacrifice real, tangible resources? In modern corporations, there is a distinction between those who have stake in the future of the firm (shareholders), those who are trusted to act on their behalf (board, executives, and employees to a lesser extent), and those who receive services from the firm in exchange for revenues (clients and customers). Customers do not make managerial and strategic decisions for the firm, and for good reasons. Indeed, does anyone really care exactly who is running walmart or amazon or apple so long as their products and services provide value? Why do people tend to see governments, essentially massive corporations, as inhabiting such a different realm, expecting them to follow entirely different laws of human behavior?

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago

I am actually amazed at how little money is needed to influence politicians. Lobbying exists because the return on investment is ridiculously high in favor of person asking for favorable treatment from politicians in policy making. It is peanuts invested and Boeing 747s harvested. If anything the cost of buying a politician should increase multiple orders of magnitude. Currently hundred, two hundred thousands to a senator's re-election campaign can buy really serious attention to your concerns. It needs to be hundreds of millions to buy a senator. Politicians should start Patreon campaigns to get livable wages from supporters and then just execute on what they stand for. Bernie and Trump was essentially that, self/people funded efforts.

ssambros 9y ago
> If anything the cost of buying a politician should increase multiple orders of magnitude. How about lowering the possible returns from buying politicians, say, by lowering their influence on how the republic is actually being run?
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  I guess ssambros is being downvoted because it seems tautological that politicians run the Republic. But we really should stop to ask whether legislatures should be doing the kind of micromanagement where they routinely divert billions towards one private interest or another. And we should adjust our political rhetoric, voting behaviour and expectations about propriety and the law accordingly.
- vec 9y ago
  Because then the money just moves to whoever does have influence on how the republic is actually being run. Or, worse yet, the money just buys the power it was previously trying to influence and simply wields it directly. Weakening the formal power of government officials doesn't make that power dissolve, it just displaces it to somewhere even less visible and answerable to the public.
NTDF9 9y ago
>> Politicians should start Patreon campaigns to get livable wages from supporters and then just execute on what they stand for. They'll just seek more and more funds to become richer and richer. This is how corrupt democracies work. The only people who should be politicians are the ones who'd do it with no campaign funds and median wage. They need to be in touch with realities of their electoral base and have the desire to change it for everyone.

erikb 9y ago

The thinking is wrong I believe. Our current world system and world view has long overcome it's peak. There is not much to gain, and the whole system slowly breaks and falls apart. That means there are not many true opportunities to grow value anymore. And the old profit and safety providers are getting rarer and rarer. For instance putting your money on the bank or buying index funds is no guarantee for safety anymore. In that time of decline of course people pay more and more to get the same level of safety, which really becomes more valuable by becoming rare, and also becoming more pricey by the money having less internal value. What is money worth if the amount of islands to stay on gets smaller and nobody being willing to trade his island for a few slices of paper?

olegkikin 9y ago
What are you even talking about? > there are not many true opportunities to grow value anymore There are more opportunities than ever in human history. The knowledge and data are extremely accessible. The amount of spare money people have is near all-time-high. You can literally become a multimillionare without leaving your basement, simply by pressing keys on your keyboard. > buying index funds is no guarantee for safety anymore It never was. There's never a guarantee, your bank can go bankrupt, so can FDIC. But it's still one of the safest ways to invest. Your investment options are extremely diverse as well. Only 50 years ago you had to call your broker to buy a stock. Now you can do that with a few mouseclicks. You can invest into foreign markets, cryptocurrencies, ICOs, you name it.
- erikb 9y ago
  You think that because you read it in blogs and don't have the experience yet to see which of these articles are bullshit. It's not true though. The reason it seems that way is because the human species is so rich, that you can make a good living for 2-3 more generations by screwing other humans over. And if you're not one of the screwers the blog article you read is certainly tailored to screw you. Maybe if space flight becomes more available, but here on this planet all of value is already controlled by someone. And they don't intend to share it with you. Without growth there is no stability in society, exactly because people need to screw each other to stay floating. So the system is on a downturn. And you can be sure that no matter what we find next to exploit, it will require another system to stabilize on.

lxmorj 9y ago

Singapore model. Market wages for the best talent (millions+). Huge penalties for corruption.

deleted 9y ago

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yuhong 9y ago

Right now I think things like the current debt based economy is a bigger problem than campaign donations at this point.

RickJWagner 9y ago

Bernie almost ran a good grass roots campaign in 2016. (Funded by $27 donations). But of course Big-Bucks Clinton controlled the DNC and cheated that race. Trump actually spent less than his competitors and managed to win both the primary and the election. It wasn't a budget campaign, but he did seem to get good bang for his spent dollars.