Republic, Lost | Lawrence Lessig | Talks at Google

I'm going to crib from my own post from two days ago: Donations don't literally buy votes, but what they do literally buy is face time. That is, people in Congress will hold fundraisers, and lobbyists pay to attend those fundraisers. The understanding is that the lobbyists who attend those fundraisers will have time to talk to the politician about the issues their clients care about. This episode of Planet Money clearly demonstrates this: [link] Edit: I remove the SOPA specific stuff, and didn't realize that in doing so, I removed the punchline. The implication of the above is that politicians' agenda becomes set by those who have the money to pay lobbyists. When you spend a lot of time talking to a bunch of people with an agenda, you will start to think about that agenda a lot. It's a natural consequence of the circumstances and the incentives. I've harped on this point several times in the last few days. My reason is simple: we must understand the real problem before we can fix it. And the real problem is not "Vote for x and I'll give you money." That is illegal. What I described above is legal, and while it is not illegal corruption, it is a corruption of how we want the system to work. And I stole that last sentiment from Lawrence Lessig: [this video] Someone else here linked to that a few days ago, and it's worth watching.

If I was ever elected president, I would direct congress to reduce the size of the tax code by 10% each year. If they fail to do so then 10% are automatically eliminated - eg all those whose last digit of the article number is 3. The real reason for why things are so screwed up is corrupt politicians who use their power as a fund raising mechanism. For example there were several taxes added temporarily to see if they worked well. They did, but congress doesn't make them permanent. Instead they wait to be paid each time to renew them temporarily again. (This started in the Reagan administration.) See this excellent talk by Lessig: [this video] The whole tax provisions as fund raising is covered at 7m30s.

We already have progressive tax rates which try to capture this. The problem that is being struggled with is that HNWI don't have frequent taxable events, generally because they hold assets and make savings. However there is a perception they aren't providing value (which is mostly wrong). Generally any scheme you come up with to get at them will also affect everyone else, and to a far greater degree since they have less money and diversity to start with. And the HNWI have far greater incentive to move their money and themselves, as well as pay people to work out how to retain their money. You can move to almost any country in the world by plonking down a lump sum as an "investment" or as savings. (eg see how Dotcom ended up living in New Zealand.) The usual solution to this is to try tweaking the tax code, seeing what the effects are and repeating. However scumbag politicians and the people who vote for them distort that process, so it doesn't have the intended effect. An actually representative democracy would be a good first step rather than tax rate changes. Watch this talk about the US - the UK pretty much follows behind a few years later [this video]

It would be far better if congress is representative of the people of the country and be composed of doctors, engineers, teachers, taxi drivers, farmers, candlestick makers etc. The legislators do not actually write the laws. They have staff as well as there being a process to help improve the text before legislating (eg publishing drafts). For some legislation (eg covering the financial industry) often the law that is passed just requires a government agency (eg SEC) to come up with the rules. One of Michael Moore's films had a clip of a congressman explaining that they don't even read the legislation they vote on. It is a common claim that much of the legislation is written by lobbyists. And if you actually read any of it, it would obviously not really be what you would expect (short, legible). Here is an example of trying to solve the problem: [link] The representatives use legislation as a fund raising mechanism (contributions are well documented). For example there were several taxes added temporarily to see if they worked well. They did, but congress doesn't make them permanent. Instead they wait to be paid each time to renew them temporarily again. (This started in the Reagan administration.) See this excellent talk by Lessig: [this video] The whole tax provisions as fund raising is covered at 7m30s. And the corruption is obvious at 25m20s.

Whose dollars? The dollars used in legislation have little to do with public good and a lot more to do with re-election funding. Lessig covers that topic really well in Republic Lost: [this video] Any change in legislation will result in intense lobbying (ie politician funding) because so many vested interests benefit from the current structure. As with many things in American politics, the issue isn't so much about what the objectively best thing to do is, but rather how that could happen with the current political process. There is some light at the end of the tunnel in pushing things to individual states. There is no need to come up with perfection - let 50 states do their own thing and see what works best.

When monopolies distort markets, the impact of those distortions have outsized impacts on the rest of the ecosystem. Ask Google engineers how they feel about centralization of power in telecom or finance or politics & they will tell you it is the worst thing ever [this video] Yet that same sort of centralization is fine when it is Google. Those same engineers will admit that any algorithm has some level of false positives & false negatives. They may try to minimize these, but they can't make them zero. The other thing which gets very little coverage, but is crucially important is that in spite of already having a monopoly market position Google keeps buying search marketshare with: their secret Android partner contracts, Firefox default search placement, iOS default search placement, Flash embedded into Chrome (so security updates happen in the background without sending you to a download site where trash can be bundled in with the update) & Flash security updates that hit all other web browsers coming bundled with Chrome bundleware which sets Chrome as your default browser, etc. If Google decides they don't like you (for any reason), then you need searchers to use a different search engine in a browser which isn't paid off by Google for default placement. And you need to hope that users are savvy enough to repeatedly say "no thank you" to the automatically bundled Chrome install with their frequent Flash updates. Google mentions how anything is only a click away or similar, but m