I think rich people have too much influence, I probably agree with Garry Tan on a lot but we need to get money out of politics. Let’s face it we’re all meant to get one vote but rich people spend money on this stuff so that they manipulate what and who can be voted for.
I do think that if this current system is the result of democracy + the internet we need to seriously reconsider how democracy works because it’s currently failing everyone but the ultra wealthy.
I do so by taking Jeff Bezos' money and giving him a penny. Also by not supporting restaurants that have a Wall-street ticker nor any alcohol producers that have a Wall-street ticker.
I work in automation. We sell solutions to businesses such as Amazon and a number of others like them. They demanded millions in free engineering labor because they are too big not to do business with. Companies are so big in the USA that you become slave labor.
I rarely support business that have Wall-street tickers. I have not personally financially supported Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, ... for years.
I also do not buy any beverages from a Wall-street provider. No Coca-Cola, Pepsi, ...
Ultra wealth are just terrible humans that do not deserve respect for how they treat everyone below them in the economic ladder. I no longer want to help fund the CEO of McDonald's with his golden parachute while they support non-living wages.
Citizens United was the correct decision. I don't understand how you can legitimately restrict political activity. The constitution contains the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Why should certain groups of people not have this right? The constitution also contains the right to freedom of the press. Why should the government get to decide who gets to exercise this right?
Because democracy is "one person one vote", not "one dollar one vote".
Around the same time Citizens United was decided, we also got McCutcheon v. FEC, which invalidated campaign contribution limits basically completely. If we take the logic of Citizens United at its word - that money is speech - then letting someone drop billions of dollars to change an election is like firing a sonic weapon at a bunch of protesters to silence them. So, right off the bat, we have a situation where protecting the "speech" of the rich and powerful directly imperils the speech of everyone else.
But it gets worse. Because we got rid of campaign financing limitations, there has been an arms race with campaign funding that has made all speech completely, 100% pay-to-play. We have libre speech, but not gratis speech.
This isn't even a problem limited to merely political speech. Every large forum by which speech occurs expects you to buy advertising on their own platform now before you are heard. If you, say, sell a book on Amazon or post a video on TikTok, you're expected to buy ads for it on Amazon or TikTok. You are otherwise shut out of the system because discovery algorithms want you keep you in your own bubble and you're competing with lots and lots of spam.
But it is still one person one vote. Money doesn't allow you to buy votes, but it does make it easier to persuade them. Freedom of the press has always guaranteed you the right to print or otherwise publish what you want, but it never said everyone will have the same amount of printing presses or the same amount of ink. Freedom of speech does not guarantee you an audience.
You think you are reducing the influence of the rich, but you are actually just raising the price of entry. A millionaire can donate to a PAC and buy TV ads, but a billionaire can buy or start a newspaper, TV station, or social media network. What are you going to do then, tell the newspapers what they are allowed to print?
Every other country on earth has spending limits, the constitution isn’t perfect and it’s being dismantled by the current regime. Maybe it could be updated to say covering up for pedo billionaires should carry extremely harsh sentences, for example…
Not sure that would be enough given the regime and specifically the current supreme court. Such amendments to the constitution would be met with interpretations like "ackshually this country has a long and honored tradition of protecting pedos and the major questions doctrine (a thing we kinda just made up) says that we gotta ignore the text of the constitution and instead just vibes decide that pedos are a-okay in our book" [applies to literally any subject]
Are you saving that an organization should be able to put together a documentary to criticize Trump and his supporters? Because that’s what Citizen’s United allowed. If you don’t support that, then the criticism will only come from rich individuals.
Then Congress will need to pass legislation to that extent that would also survive a challenge based on the precedent established by the Citizens United case. Or a Constitutional Amendment that would weaken the 1st Amendment.
IOW, it is unlikely to happen in your lifetime. Focus your efforts elsewhere...
I agree with you, in spirit, but I think the true issue lies elsewhere.
Rich people can spend money to influence elections, yes, but how can they do it? through political donations, super-pacs and bribes. Bribes are already illegal. political donations and super-pacs can give politicians the juice they need to get their messaging out, but getting the message across isn't enough to win an election. The people need to vote. Billionaires can spend as much money as they want to support candidates, but a billionaire still only has one vote to cast.
My point is, billionaires can pay for all the political campaigns in the world, but the electorate gets the final say. It's up to us to A) run for office and B) vote for the best candidate (but tell that to the 64% turnout in the 2024 presidential election)
Elections are important, but they're just one part of the political system. A lot of machinations and politics occurs outside the scope of elections or even of the public eye.
Money doesn't just buy ads. It influences the decision of who is a candidate in the first place. It buys operational range. It pays salaries for the right friend of X, the right family member of Y, etc. It buys other bribes, etc.
If rich techies had too much influence in California, the state government would not look like what it does. I mean I just don't see how you get to this opinion after any real review of the evidence.
You cherry picked California which is very much an outlier compared to the rest of the country? Are you denying the effect of money affecting political outcomes, the rich wouldn’t spend their money on media and PACs if it didn’t work would they?
I think this is completely missing the point… are you really saying California would be improved by more rich people being able to game the system? I think CA would benefit from more visionary politicians (i.e. not paid for) and more people at the bottom end being able to have homes in the big cities and less wealth accumulation, maybe reducing the gap between power and poverty means we could have better societies. I’m not talking about crazy change btw, reducing billionaires wealth to that of the nineties would allow us to rebuild a lot of great things and employ a lot of people. Putting money into stocks, real estate and crypto does not create wealth.
> I mean I just don't see how you get to this opinion after any real review of the evidence.
Graybeard here: took me a while to get it, but, usually these are chances to elucidate what is obvious to you :)* ex. I don't really know what you mean. What does the California state government look like if rich techies had even more influence? I can construct a facile version (lower taxes**) but assuredly you mean more than that to be taken so aback.
* Good Atlas Shrugged quote on this: "Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check [ED: or share, if you've moseyed yourself into a discussion] your premises."
** It's not 100% clear politicians steered by California techies would lower taxes ad infinitum.
There's simply no way to look at the governing going on in California and think this is what the tech industry or movie industry or (formerly) oil industry wants for one of its traditional homes.
The government there has suffered since it went to basically one-party rule. There's no counterbalance for any bad policy ideas.
Tbh I think its awesome here, arrived 6 weeks ago. (both of these comments suffer from...I think begging the question?...basically, like, what's so clearly _not_ what tech/film/almond growers/whatever want in California?)
Less competent might be a disservice. But I've seen nothing to suggest that execs/founders are any more competent that the average employee. Execs and founders just had a few more dice rolls go their way.
There are great tools available that I’m sure you could use to give you a synopsis of how money is used to manipulate political outcomes and entrench wealth and power.
Any action which may be done to influence political outcomes, such as elections, regulation, and enforcement, for personal or business enrichment.
For example, lobbying. Or, posting on social media. Or, creating a social media. Or, controlling a social media algorithm. Or, in the Trump administration, signalling loyalty via donations with the intention of less-strict enforcement (see: every tech company right now).
You'll notice most new regulations like tariffs have specific exemptions carved out for tech companies. The reason that exists is because tech companies have quid-pro gave Trump hundreds of millions of dollars and, in exchange, they have written the laws to get themselves out of jail.
This is sort of just what happens when you allow money to buy decisions. This sucks morally, obviously, but it also sucks economically. Our economy is on the verge of imploding. The only reason it hasn't is because it's being artificially propped up by the regulatory landscape, i.e. the oligarchy is writing the laws such that they will survive, and their competition will not. This also goes hand-in-hand with protectionist policy which, surprise surprise, is the name of the game for this administration.
How coincidental that I was just reading something related [0] before seeing this post.
"Silicon Valley is bad at politics. If nothing else during Trump 2.0, I think we’ve learned that Silicon Valley doesn’t exactly have its finger on the pulse of the American public. It’s insular, it’s very, very, very, very rich. [...] I expect it to play its hand in a way that any rich 'degen' on a poker winning streak would: overconfidently and badly."
And...
“People don’t take guillotines seriously. But historically, when a tiny group gains a huge amount of power and makes life-altering decisions for a vast number of people, the minority gets actually, for real, killed.”
This is an underrated point because the U.S. failure to rein in the excesses of the ultra-wealthy is not just impacting our domestic politics but actually the politics of every country on earth. Imagine if Jack Ma had eventually personally intervened in U.S. congressional elections? That's pretty much exactly what U.S. oligarchs do to other countries regularly.
You are using a lot of obfuscated and loaded language. What, specifically, are the "excesses of the ultra-wealthy" that need to be reigned in? What do you mean by "personally intervened in U.S. congressional relations"?
s/relations/elections/ -- because Elon et. al don't just intervene in the elections of the country they live in, but actually any country he's interested in -- and uses the U.S. as a bludgeon in that effort, see U.S.-U.K. and U.S.-South Africa relations
How is Elon's editorial control of X something the government needs to (or even should have the power to) "reign in?" How is that not freedom of the press just like the owner of the New York Times having editorial control over his newspaper? Same goes for his donation to the PAC. What is the nefarious activity they are engaged in? Why are they not allowed to exercise their freedom of the press in the same way as any other company?
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter the previous owners engaged in different kinds of editorial control. The people who argued that editorial control of Twitter was something the owners had the right to do on their private platform and the people who argued that the government should find some legal mechanism to characterize this editorial control as some kind of crime so they could force Twitter not to do it, were flipped from what they are now.
> Before Elon Musk bought Twitter the previous owners engaged in different kinds of editorial control. The people who argued that editorial control of Twitter was something the owners had the right to do on their private platform and the people who argued that the government should find some legal mechanism to characterize this editorial control as some kind of crime so they could force Twitter not to do it, were flipped from what they are now.
Well I've been against this regardless of owners. Honestly, this stuff is really concerning. I spent a bunch of years working in social media, and back then I was sceptical that algorithmic content selection should be regarded as publication, but given how easy it is to shift the Overton window with changes here, I think that it probably needs to happen.
I do think that this will cause lots of downstream impacts that I like, but this much power is bad in anyone's hands, regardless of how much I agree with them.
What's wrong with a sovereign nation taking steps to reduce or eliminate the influence of a non-citizen who they feel is acting against the best interests of that nation?
If a nuclear capable country like France decides that someone like Elon Musk is acting against the best interests of their country they can ask him nicely to stop and if he continues they can use force to reduce the perceived threat.
This all seems completely in line with the day-to-day norms of contemporary society as well as historical norms.
He is a citizen of the US and has full political rights. There is only one legal distinction between a foreign born citizen and a natural born citizen and that is that he can't serve as president. France is absolutely capable of using force against Elon Musk up to and including their nuclear arsenal. However, they would need to decide whether it is worse for their interests to tolerate Elon or to detonate a nuke on US soil, and that's a pretty easy choice.
1. X is not, and has never been, "the press".
2. If you were to have categorized them this way previously, botting and pay-for-reach have made it definitely not that way now.
3. It is bad when any individual can shift the politics of the entire globe simply because they have enough money. Feel free to insert your most hated left-wing billionaire instead of Elon, I still believe the same thing.
> I believe this because it is his fundamental right as a citizen of the republic.
This is kind of exactly my point though. Citizen of what republic? Soros and Elon are both wealthier than most states and affect politics globally. They literally cannot be prosecuted, they are barely accountable to any legal bodies.
Citizens of this one. And they can be prosecuted. You just are not comfortable with the fact that they haven't really committed any crimes. Epstein was a billionaire too.
As a non-communist non-billionaire, I couldn't disagree more! :)
The abuse of absurd levels of wealth to advance one's own agenda is little more than bribery. When targeted towards those poor enough to worry about basic needs, it is effectively coercion, equally unethical as violence. (Not to mention such wealth is inevitably built on top of a a violent, exploitative system.)
Nah billionaires need to be punished, they have raped the Earth for profit and caused mass misery/death upon her people. In fact a good way for the US to rebuild credibility is to probably send a few billionaires to the Hague and have them tried for crimes against humanity in the ICJ.
Lots of billionaires should probably be at the hague. But we should be glad if people can become billionaires because they are generating that much value of both parties being better off, without imposing externalities on others. Yvonne Chouinard came close to this ideal, I think.
If someone can genuinely generate billions in value, not just by imposing externalities on others that they then reallocate to themselves, I will be damn glad that they exist and be damn glad that the hope of getting richer keeps them at it.
No we shouldn't be "glad that people can become billionaire".
We should be glad that people can get reasonable wealthy, say, $100M net worth would be more than plenty, and would ensure that: people who worked hard got a lot ($100M!!), but nobody alone or in very small numbers can try to destroy the fabric of society
Is that hard for you to understand?
The fact that at your age you're still mistaking "generating billions in value" (this doesn't mean anything) with "extracting money from the system and selfishly refusing to give some of it back in a meaningful way" means that you still have to learn about how the world really works
I'm not glad they can become billionaires for their sake. I'm glad they can become billionaires for your and my sake, under the ideal I proposed, which is that billionaires can become that way only by entering into transactions where all sides are better off for doing so.
Because you fail to understand how economy and the world works. No, they don't "only do so by entering into transactions where all sides are better off", that's just a convenient fiction for people like you who never thought about the economic realities
The truth is they are abusing a system and rigging the laws, in order to keep extracting as much as they can. If it was really a "better for everyone", why don't you think all Starbuck's barista would be "overjoyed" of going to work every day? Think for yourself one minute instead of repeating talking points from FoxNews that you never even considered for one minute
Oh I understand how it works. That's why I agreed many of them deserve to be at the Hague.
Remember, I said, ideal I proposed -- the ideal of the free market, where they can only become billionaires by entering voluntary transactions without externality to others. Under such ideal, if someone is a billionaire, it's because everyone is better off.
There have been varying shades of gray for how these play out in reality, the least shaded ones I'm generally grateful for and the most shaded ones are outright criminals that should have their fortune seized and put behind bars.
No, this is truly a pathetic mindset. There is more to the world than making "value." No one dies thinking "I wish I made more value." Absolutely pathetic, much like them.
Exactly. Also it's not the "billionaires" who are "making value". They are lousy at making anything. It's the workers (engineers, farmers, factory workers) that "make".
The billionaires are just good at "capturing" value, and not giving back the rightfully owned share by the people.
"engineers, farmers, factory workers" can just enter a co-op and sell the goods cheaper while still enjoying a slightly higher wage if the billionaires really aren't contributing anything. Seems like if what you say is true, in a free market billionaires would be forced out of business because they could not compete.
You cannot have a functioning economy or political system when there are billionaires because they no longer are accountable to the market or the people
Wait, are you suggesting we _shouldn't_ treat billionaires as a collective action problem to be dealt with via policy? So you're suggesting what, individual violence?
You do not appear to have a solid grasp on how the world functions.
Billionaires don't reach this extreme amount of wealth by "work" (unless you believe in magic tales and "tooth fairy", but probably you're old enough to figure out that those "tales" of self-made man they give you on the TV are completely made-up?)
Billionaires reach those obscene amount of wealth by tricking the system. Putting themselves in a place where they're able to "capture" the money, and refuse to pay (through normal taxation) their fair share of what they owe the society
No billionaire does his business "on his own". They rely on an existing infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals for the workers), and the very work of their employees.
So it's perfectly normal at some point to say: you might have done a very interesting business and got rich, but beyond a certain "inequality threshold" (let's say $100M) we tax away all the rest to give it back to society. When you think about it, it's the ONLY thing that makes sense
It's not, since voluntary transactions can happen as a result of said squabbling without resorting to the violence of 'power.' Maybe we need more of that and less of ramming decisions down the throats of the powerless.
Yeah I sometimes think you could have a government you select, e.g. each state could have its own rules and laws and the federal government should not have the power to overrule them. Then you could choose if you wanted immigration or lower taxes or whatever, seems like a good system who can suggest it?
Yes the 10th amendment was supposed to ensure a lot of that that but it was largely waived away during the progressive era and in acts related to the civil war. But cuz slavery for some reason it also has to apply to all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with slaves or even civil rights (in the sense of negative rights) and you are racist or love slaves or something for pointing this out.
Is it? In the US, our constitution is setup to prevent absolute democracy from occurring. The idea of an absolute democracy where the government always acts on the will of the majority as an ideal is hardly a universal value.
Yes, that is my point. You can't take power out of politics, and you can't take money (which is one form of power) out of politics. Best you can do is manage it.
They are obviously related, but it is a very loose correlation. If a billionaire (who does not pay me) gives me an order I will laugh in his face. If a traffic cop gives me an order, I will comply.
Perhaps the billionaire can't buy your willingness to do something, but they can very much affect the material world around you, and therefore, you.
If you rent they can probably find a way to kick you out of your apartment. If someone around you _is_ willing to take an order, influencing what people around you do very much influences you. If they want something from you, and you're not willing to sell it, there will be people willing to steal it, etc.
Money very much is proxy of power. Perhaps not everything can be bought, sure. But money gives you operational range to attempt to impose your will when it doesn't.
Its happened before, over labor disputes and unionization.
A LOT of people died, both in anti-union and union sides.
And thats why we have, well, had, the National Labor Relations Board. It was to make a peaceful way to negotiate worker rights.
Maybe if it did go away completely, and the violence comes back, that people in power would be reminded WHY we had union structure and law in the federal government to begin with. It wasn't for the warm fuzzies.
The civil court system is basically a way for wealthy people and corporations to use money to silence and/or coerce behavior out of less wealthy people. If Elon Musk or Larry Ellison woke up one day and decided to sue me, and defending myself would cost 100X my net worth, I'm probably just going to give up and do whatever they want me to do.
There still is something to it. You could bring your billion to Dubai and it might buy you some pardons from personal indiscretions and a cadre of quasi-slaves but the monarchs would never grant you real systemic political power.
If you bring a billion anywhere you won't get systemic political power unless you seek it. Political power isn't about having money, but money gives you the operational range you need to seek political power.
There's a lot of money in Dubai, so if your operation is to just hope to impress and be offered power without much effort on your end, 1 billion won't be enough. Perhaps 100 or 1,000 billion could work? Hard to tell.
If you only have 1 billion though, you need to play your cards in a smarter way. Who can you become friends with? What clubs and parties do you need to attend to make it happen? Which politicians and royals can you get dirt on? Who can you bribe for information? What gifts can you give to gain someones trust? 1 billion is enough operational range for this.
for a lot of people in the newly rich class, a kind of virtual currency best compared to a high score in a videogame. Symbolic and representing status. It's why when they attempt to translate it into power this particular class thankfully fares fairly badly, from the article:
"TogetherSF, a similar nonprofit backed by venture capitalist Michael Moritz, crashed and burned after the 2024 elections when its $9.5 million ballot measure to reform the city charter lost to a progressive counter-measure backed by about $117,000."
It has actually been scientifically proven otherwise in crowd theory : with the right setup, the crowd is more effective to take a good decision that the top1 best decision maker.
Exemple : a crowd playing chess may beat the top1 chess player, even though the crowd individually cannot beat him.
Yea in fact this thing has been done before multiple times as exhibitions (Kasparov vs 50k, Carlsen vs 132k, etc).
And yea, no surprise, the masses do not win. Even when in the latter case, a huge chunk of the 132k was obviously using stockfish cranked to the gills (though the did get a draw out of it?).
Hell no, California has this and it’s a catastrophe. Prop 13 is one of the worst policies enacted by a democratic polity in the 20th century, and has been wrecking the state for decades.
So do you believe in democracy or not? And I do not mean this as a loaded question because the value of democracy is a legitimately arguable point. If the majority of Californians want caps on property tax, then I do not see a good argument that they should not get it that is also compatible with democracy.
Democracy can mean a lot of things: direct, representative, etc. Voting for yourself is different from voting for your constituents. Ideally, the latter will also consider community effects.
If you put a question to the electorate like 'should we tax only people whose last name begins with an X, Y or Z?', it's liable to pass.
Nobody really advocates for Direct Democracy. It isn't viable: 'tyranny of the majority' etc.
Most Western governments are Liberal Democracies - where some issues aren't subject to a vote - partly so that the mob can't persecute outnumbered subgroups.
That is highly unlikely. People may seem stupid when acting as a larger group, but I think part of that is that our current democracy doesn't require much engagement. If we moved to direct democracy then imo we'd get some bad policies that would quickly be reverted once the effects become apparent, and then voters are going to be a bit more careful. For example, "only taxing people whose last name begins with X, Y, Z", I don't think voters would currently be that dumb, but if they were then how many weeks of zero tax money would it take to get that undone?
I can't muster the enthusiasm to debate this. There are centuries of literature on this topic involving people smarter and more eloquent than me. The following wikipedia entry has examples you may find more persuasive than mine:
If majority of people in a country want to persecute an outnumbered subgroup, then what prevents the majority of delegates wanting the same as well?
You have an implicit assumption that the delegates are going to be smarter and better people that are going to lie to the majority to get elected and then will valiantly protect the subgroup.
But that have not happened anywhere. In fact in every case it is the delegates who organize persecution of various subgroups, even in situations when the share of population truly wanting to persecute subgroup is far from being a majority.
I refuse to believe that anyone reading this is incapable of remembering at least five historical examples in which the public was happy to treat an unpopular group unjustly.
There is no foolproof system that can guard against it, however declaring 'rights' and delegating the responsibility to protect them to the judiciary at least is a mitigation.
Direct voting does not replace judiciary or even senate, it only augments the house of congress.
If that is the Direct Democracy you had in mind, than we have no disagreement.
What I originally commented on was this:
So do you believe in democracy or not?
I take issue with the implication that it's all or nothing. If we characterize anything less than a direct vote on every issue as anti-democratic, then the only people left standing will be kooks.
I hope you will agree that the overall goal is maximizing freedom and autonomy, that is allowing every person or group to pursue happiness the way they want make mistakes or good choices and bear the consequences.
The representative democracy has a problem with delegates not faithfully representing the people they are supposed to represent. It allows politician to be elected by campaigning for issue X which is popular with majority, then do Y and Z that almost no one wants, and then campaign again on other party undoing X, leaving people no way to communicate that they want X and not Y Z.
Social media have greatly increased the impact of this instability, the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting, and yet many people vehemently argue against that. Meanwhile there is a much more interesting discussion: how to make cooperation between people more efficient using the new technologies that we have.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting
I take the original comment to imply exactly that, since it positions someone taking issue with any direct vote as being against Democracy wholesale. If I missed something, @terminalshort can reply to clarify.
the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
There are two issues:
1) What are a good set of rules for the system.
2) If the existing system can no longer self-correct, how can one implement a good set of rules.
'Direct vote' might address the second issue. It's not the only way, but it's better than a violent revolution.
I'm not opposed to all direct voting, but it does have inherent problems. The most obvious is that the world is far too complicated for a majority of citizens to research all the issues that affect them. In a well-functioning representative democracy, a politician would have the resources and time to understand the issues. Granted, that seldom is the case in reality.
That is the same argument proponents of planned economy use. It doesn't work in reality because no one knows what other people need and no one cares. Representatives care about being reelected, but they have a very hard time figuring out what people want of them because vote ones in 4 years, or angry people on social media is too unreliable channel of communication.
The monetary system under capitalism is not the same as direct democracy.
A planned economy under direct democracy would be at least as bad as a planned economy under a representative democracy because the average voter has even less knowledge about economics and business than a government planner.
The best thing about direct democracy is that, unlike representative democracy, we don't have it and therefore cannot instantly think of its flaws.
The average person reads under a sixth grade level, cannot perform long division, and quite possibly couldn't tell you how many years have passed since Jesus was born.
Whether a direct vote is appropriate for an issue depends on which is a greater danger: the corruption of a politician, or the ignorance and flakiness of the average voter.
Why do you think that similar law could not be passed without direct vote? The problem is not direct democracy but the fact that it is being done in a wrong way.
Voting should be done without anonymity, online. One should be able to either vote for everything manually, or delegate the vote to any other person.
If some change is supported by 100% of the voters it should be implemented immediately. But if smaller percent supports the change, then there needs to be a vesting time (e.g. 10 years for 60%, infinity for 50%+1).
This allows people to either trade support for policies (i'll vote yes for your initiative if you vote for mine, or give me money), or to get high level of support locally and try out various laws on local level.
The same site that manages voting should also show detailed budget of city/state/country, where people can see where their taxes are being spent and should be able to redirect the money they have paid.
First, how about if you show that you've spent more than five seconds thinking about why every democratic country on earth uses secret ballots? Why are secret ballots codified in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights?
There are other parts of your scheme that are also spectacularly bad ideas, but let's just deal with this one for now.
That's a very good question, for instance for most of its republican period Rome did not have secret ballot, and voting was open. That have changed in 138BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_laws_of_the_Roman_Repub... and have caused major instability, political violence and eventually demise of the republic.
The issue was that the poor people could vote for Gracchi brothers, but were too afraid to protect them, and one without the other only have brought to a worse outcome where they could not vote at all.
Even today if you are afraid of saying openly what policies or which politician you support, how can you hope to enact these policies?
Secret ballot started being introduced in US starting from 1888 and it did not bring any of positive changes that its supporters thought that it would.
In places where a group can intimidate majority of voters and force to vote one way, secret ballot does not help at all because that group can also fake the results. It even makes situation worse, by hiding the actual data from opposition.
Gosh, you make it sound like the near-universal use of secret ballots is all just some sort of misunderstanding that could be rectified if only everyone would listen to you. Tilt away if that's your favorite windmill, I guess.
Well if you knew a good reason for secret ballots you could tell us that, instead of telling that you are smarter than me. You really should take another look at hn commenting guidelines, it is useful outside of hn too https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Billionaire goes: get $10 off at my store, called Scamazon, for these votes (lists votes). And naturally even the $10 is manipulated to be recouped with dynamic pricing.
What we have now is a politician saying vote for me and i'll pass laws that will give you 10k in next 4 years, people vote for the politician who then takes money from scamazon gives 10 to voters and takes 10mln to get elected again.
Eliminating the middleman makes things better already.
But more importantly with vesting time, large number of votes, ease of reversing a decision in a new vote, take $10 and vote for something that costs you more simply won't work.
Prop 13 isnt bad. Its all the money pumped in to political
advertisements that turn this from "1 person, 1 vote" to "1$, 1 vote".
And that goes to the heart of the matter, that corporations aren't people, no matter what some court or law says. And they should be heavily restricted on speech. (I include spending money on political adverts and similar.)
Humans can commit crimes worthy of the death penalty. Wells Fargo shouldn't exist due to their decade long fraud. Nor should United Health Care, for actively denying humans their health coverage until the humans died. Or countless other cases.
When a company gets "killed", and all assets get assigned to the wronged, I'll start to believe they are humans. Haven't seen that yet. Likely won't ever, in the USA.
If you think you've incurred damages due to a company's illegal actions, you can go to court already. If the company is liable and its assets do not suffice to pay full compensation, it enters bankruptcy proceedings and ultimately gets dissolved, just like you're saying.
15 years ago, I worked at Walmart. Note the poverty income, no unions, no real savings. Basically average US citizen, not the HN bubble.
I got injured with a malfunctioning pallet jack. Went to ER and got Xrays.
Week later, was fired. My paperwork explicitly said I got fired for getting injured at work and costing the company money.
Went to 6 different lawyers. Had to ask for pro-bono. I couldn't afford a lawyer.
All refused. Why? None of them could deal with a Walmart lawsuit. None.
I had them dead-to-rights with a wrongful termination. Double manager signature. Even recorded their termination on my phone, on the sly (in single party state). They even admitted to forging a different manager. None of it matters.
Prop 13 is a nothingburger. Median homeownership period in california vs nationally is only like 2 years longer. It shouldn't be affecting costs that much in other words since median property is back to market rate every 15 years or so.
And what costs are we talking about anyhow? Tax shortfalls for local government? Decades later that has been rectified through other taxes and funding mechanisms and we still get new roads and schools in california. Housing costs increasing? I would say the fact that cities today are zoned within a few percentage points of present population levels (vs zoned for 10x present population levels pre 1970) is the actual source of that sucking sound from the chest.
That's not really the point. Prop 13 is known to be a huge disincentive to efficient transfers in home ownership - people will strenuously avoid selling their homes and buying something that's closer to the kind of shelter they actually prefer, because they might have to pay a higher assessed property tax if they did that. These effects are very real and well documented.
Prop 13 wouldn't lead to those incentives if property prices didn't increase so aggressively. Once again comes back to zoning as the root cause. Is prop 13 bad? Only in the face of inappropriate zoned capacity, it seems. Which begs the question of what prop 13 removal would even do in such a situation? Zoning capacity isn't changing so prices will still go up beyond what is affordable for the median worker. The only thing changing is people won't be insulated from that rise at the end of their life when they are on a fixed income is all. Does that solve the housing crisis? No, but it does ensure more people are regularly displaced from their homes.
All reactions are taking this comment seriously, but I think it can be also read as "money equals power" (which I strongly believe - there's some power without money and sometimes money without power, but mostly those two are fungible) - and then pointing to the futility of getting money out of politics, since politics is about power.
But really what people mean is "prevent paid political advertisement of all kinds", which seems about as hard as "get rid of all kinds of advertisement" - at some point, you're back to power, communication, attention.
Hard problems. Probably there's a reason all ancient democracies did not survive.
Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections. If it really did, Hillary Clinton would have been president twice. It's just that candidates with a ton of support tend to raise a ton of money.
Low-information elections are where money seems to help. I think we can throw that on the pile of 'your democracy is only as good as your electorate', and we have an electorate where most people can't even name their US House rep, much less their representatives in state and local politics.
Obviously campaigns need money to operate. The question is whether a random firehose of money will win an election, or if the reason we see that money is because the campaign already has a lot of supporters who want to contribute.
The underlying effects of where the money comes from seems to matter a lot more that that the money exists. If a campaign does not have money, they likely that that campaign does not have supporters. However the opposite is not true. If a campaign has money, it is still not certain whether or not that campaign has any supporters, because that money could all be coming from narrow interest groups.
“Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections“
Your earlier statement, in which you claim that “money doesn’t effect result” followed by a useless distinction of high or low info elections. You’re really trying to dance a fine line of nonsense here.
“ We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between campaign expenditure, campaign contributions and winning probability.”
From the same article you posted and the first academic journal result if you Google “studies on how money influences elections”.
>Our finding is in line with existing results in the literature regarding the US House elections that incumbent candidates gain less from spending, compared to their contender counterparts. This is due to diminishing returns that occur at a certain point, after which incumbent candidates can increase the winning probability only marginally (Green & Krasno, 1988). However, this finding is in contrast with other studies considering electoral systems in Brazil, Japan, or India, where spending effectiveness is equally applicable for both incumbents and contenders (Johnson, 2013; Lee, 2020; Samuels, 2001).
So yea, sorry for providing two scholarly journal articles from two different political eras that support my thesis.
I didn’t realize that this was a bad faith discussion. Now I know.
These studies fail to consider the nature of US politics the last 30 years or so. We had a breakneck election tie broken by the Supreme court in 2000 for some reason. We've had 2 out of 3 times in the hist of the US where the electoral college defied the popular vote.
You don't need to win most states in the US, nor most people. Just target 5-6 swing states and throw billions into the most wishy-washy voters in the country.
It's not enough to only look at elections. The topics that the media discusses, and therefore the options that people are aware of and the issues people base their vote on are decided by mostly privately owned and increasingly consolidated media companies. Nobody will know about candidates that are not approved by some part of the elite in this media landscape. Any opinions that go against the interests of the media owning elite will not see much coverage. Sure, maybe money during elections does not matter that much, but elections are the very last step of the process of picking leaders, and the preceding steps matter as well.
Also, if money did not matter during elections, I doubt we'd see so much spending on them. Studies are being funded by companies and the wealthy as well, so a study or two saying money doesn't matter is not definitive proof.
Not really possible. There's at least 40 more years of citizens united before any practical ability to restrict money in politics becomes constitutional again.
> we need to seriously reconsider how democracy works because it’s currently failing everyone but the ultra wealthy
Not true. The plurality that voted in the current administration are generally pleased with the state of things. Democracy is working as expected. It was close, but this is what more people wanted.
His approval has been hovering around 40%, which is pretty typical for him and is still higher than his lowest levels in term one. He has a lot of opposition, but most of those are people who voted against him. Those that did vote for him are generally pleased.
On the surface, pretty much any polling you can point to will have trump close to his global minima, despite only being 25% through his term. While he started his polling in the high 40's/low/50's (as usual).
Losing 10 points in a year is pretty radical change. About the same change as term 1, but it did rise after that. I'm not so certain it's rising this time between the dozen Watergate level scandals in the wild.
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Now, under the surface, the makeup of the approval is more polarized than ever. D's started abysmally and sunk to single digit levels. R's started 90 percent and fell some 4-5 points in comparison, but is still extremely high. The real dips really come from the fallout of Independents cratering like a rock. Maybe I need to review more polling numbers, but that sort of split was truly eye opening. The Independent numbers definitely suggest that there's some voter regret at work in such a short time
I do think that if this current system is the result of democracy + the internet we need to seriously reconsider how democracy works because it’s currently failing everyone but the ultra wealthy.