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No offense to Prof. Lessig - but he's sort of like someone trying to restore the Roman Republic in the age of Nero. The reality of Washington is that politics

by moldbug 15y ago

No offense to Prof. Lessig - but he's sort of like someone trying to restore the Roman Republic in the age of Nero. The reality of Washington is that politics (ie, democracy) matters a little, but not very much: http://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/on-government-employment/ http://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/on-government-employm... If politics has negligible power over government, electorates have negligible power over government. So why do we need to "get money out of politics?" The reality of Washington is (IMHO) that voters could elect a President and Congress as pure and holy as the Dalai Lama, and it wouldn't matter at all - because they'd have about the same real power (over the permanent government) as the Dalai Lama. Lessig is yanking with all his weight on a wheel that isn't connected to the rudder. If there's any rudder at all...

tocomment 15y ago
Interesting. So what do you see as solutions?
- moldbug 15y ago
  Fire everyone in DC and move the capital to Palo Alto. Is it that we don't need to do this, or that we can't? If we can't, the hypothesis is confirmed and we really need to. If we don't need to... come on, man. I've never worked in DC as an adult. But I grew up there as a bureaucrat's brat. And all I can say is... neighbor, you have no idea. (Professor Lessig certainly has an idea. But he won't share it with you - because the source of his power is the dark crystal under the Capitol. Ie, he's important because of his connections, direct or indirect, personal or institutional, to the permanent government. He matters because he teaches at Harvard, an institution unconditionally trusted by... you get it. Certainly if he was just some random neighbor on the Internets, like me, he'd have a much tougher time being taken seriously.)
Gormo 15y ago
And if the de jure political process no longer has enough de facto power to assert control over the bureaucratic institutions, isn't external money a very useful source of de facto power to challenge the bureaucracy? It seems like getting money out of politics would be surrendering one of the only viable tools for re-asserting public control of the apparatus of government.

by moldbug 15y ago

tocomment 15y ago

Interesting. So what do you see as solutions?

moldbug 15y ago
Fire everyone in DC and move the capital to Palo Alto. Is it that we don't need to do this, or that we can't? If we can't, the hypothesis is confirmed and we really need to. If we don't need to... come on, man. I've never worked in DC as an adult. But I grew up there as a bureaucrat's brat. And all I can say is... neighbor, you have no idea. (Professor Lessig certainly has an idea. But he won't share it with you - because the source of his power is the dark crystal under the Capitol. Ie, he's important because of his connections, direct or indirect, personal or institutional, to the permanent government. He matters because he teaches at Harvard, an institution unconditionally trusted by... you get it. Certainly if he was just some random neighbor on the Internets, like me, he'd have a much tougher time being taken seriously.)

Gormo 15y ago

And if the de jure political process no longer has enough de facto power to assert control over the bureaucratic institutions, isn't external money a very useful source of de facto power to challenge the bureaucracy? It seems like getting money out of politics would be surrendering one of the only viable tools for re-asserting public control of the apparatus of government.