How do we get corruption and bribery out of politics?

[wolfpup]

@puddleglum

I will try to answer credibly. I will try to imagine billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg ally with a bunch of other tech moguls to try to change the laws of this country to keep their business costs down at the expense of workers. I will try to imagine them spending millions of dollars on ads to influence elections. Actually I don’t have to imagine that because it already happened …

The point I am making, and the point repeatedly made in other threads like this one, is the powerful, malignant, and frequently invisible influence of money in politics. It’s astounding that you think you’re making a counter-argument by citing yet another example of how big money controls the political agenda. What on earth do you think you’re proving? Zuckerberg is spending money to protect and further his own interests regardless of whether or not it runs counter to the public interest, which is my whole point.

I really wish people would read the Jane Mayer book, or at least follow some of the links in that thread.

@puddleglum

How about we imagine another billionaire such as Bloomberg getting together with a bunch of his friends to spend millions to curtail our constitutional right to bear arms. We don’t have to imagine that either his group “Everytown for Gun Safety” spent millions and endorsed over 100 candidates in 2014. Of course we know that 2014 was a landslide win for republicans and his group has accomplished nothing for gun control and has no prospects of accomplishing anything.

Bloomberg will likely accomplish very little, but this is rather a myopic view of the salient issue here. It is indeed possible for big spending on things like saturation ad campaigns to influence public opinion on isolated issues, and it happens all the time when vested interests sway public opinion on ballot initiatives. But it’s hard to do when you’re fighting an entrenched culture and value system. The fact is, however, that a lot of the kind of spending we’re talking about here is much more subtle, much more hidden and insidious, and targeted at a much longer game than merely some ad campaigns. The Koch brothers, for instance, are quite literally trying to gradually shift the political culture and the political mainstream center through measures like sponsoring higher-ed programs in hundreds of universities to turn out libertarian scholars and pundits. This long game played by the health insurance industry is why you don’t have universal health care in America and at this rate never will.

@puddleglum

Billionaires can spend and plot all they want. What wins elections is votes.

That’s a useless oxymoron. People vote according to the perceived norms and values that the plutocracy is instrumental in shaping. That’s why they so often vote against their own best interests. And even then, what politicians actually do is heavily influenced by back room lobbying. The primary critic, editor, and ultimate arbiter of the Affordable Care Act was the AHIP health insurance lobby.

[RickJay]

@Sitnam

Reverse the Citizens United ruling.

A ruling that has had effectively no impact at all on the amount of corruption and bribery in politics. That’ll fix 'em!

[QUOTE=adaher]
The Constitution is a fundamentally libertarian document and the bias in the American system is towards liberty and skepticism of government.
[/QUOTE]

“Libertarianism” was not even a thing in 1789 and the concept as you define it would have been totally incomprehensible to the men who wrote the Constitution. They wouldn’t even have heard of the word.

[andros]

@RickJay

“Libertarianism” was not even a thing in 1789 and the concept as you define it would have been totally incomprehensible to the men who wrote the Constitution. They wouldn’t even have heard of the word.

Franklin would have totally banged Ayn Rand, though.

[TriPolar]

@Magiver

That’s almost impossible to do. There are too many ways money can change hands.

It’s very easy to do. Enforcing it is much more difficult. But as I said before, if you eliminate the legal forms of bribery it is much easier to spot the illegal forms, and to enforce the law when you do catch someone.

[Kimstu]

@adaher

Sorry, but the liberal Supreme Courts began a reinterpretation of the Constitution away from its strongly libertarian ideals in the 1930s. Prior to that, it was hard for Congress to even impose minimum wage or child labor regulations.

But the resistance to regulations such as minimum wage or child labor wasn’t a libertarian attitude so much as a paternalistic or aristocratic one.

It certainly wasn’t shared by most of the actual working people in the US from the Gilded Age onward, who were the chief sufferers from the lack of labor regulations in the increasingly harsh industrial environments.

As this review notes,

By the early twentieth century, the federal and state governments had begun to regulate workplace conditions in response to labor unrest. Not content with these early successes, reformers lobbied for even more extensive regulation and for the establishment of a comprehensive state welfare program that included pensions, health insurance, and workmen’s compensation. Alarmed at the potential for massive government intervention in the economy, an important segment of the business community turned to welfare capitalism—the voluntary provision of a wide array of benefits ranging from recreation to profit sharing and pensions—as a defensive measure to “halt the advance of the welfare state”. […]

To help swing public opinion behind private welfarism, which business viewed as critical to derailing demands for greater regulation, employers advertised their benevolent activities. Their publicity emphasized the benefits of welfare work to employees and to the public, heralding welfare work as the guarantor of labor peace and consumer satisfaction. At the same time, proponents of welfare work sought to delegitimize public social welfare, arguing that it not only created dependency but also “weakened male character and sapped the country’s political strength”.

The anti-regulation positions promoted by business interests in the 19th and early 20th centuries were not advanced as defending workers’ freedom or the efficiency of the free market. They were overwhelmingly framed as a form of Nanny-Bossism, an insistence that employers knew better than the workers what was good for them and were morally obligated to protect the workers from being misled by those dreadful labor agitators and similar riffraff.

It wasn’t till the mid-20th century that business resistance to regulation began to be seriously reinterpreted as a defense of freedom and personal choice on behalf of the individual as an economic actor.

[Arrogantly_Ignorant]

@adaher

Actually, libertarian thought has already been institutionalized. The Constitution is a fundamentally libertarian document

Eh, I disagree. The Constitution is fundamentally a document of classical liberalism*. Yes, it has some libertarian traits, but that’s because classical liberalism split into libertarianism and modern liberalism. We tried a more libertarian based approach with the Articles of Confederation. It didn’t really work out for us.

*I know the term wasn’t used until the early 19th century, but its foundation was obviously set by Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, etc.