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> If anything the cost of buying a politician should increase multiple orders of magnitude. How about lowering the possible returns from buying politicians, sa
by 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 agoI 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 agoBecause 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.