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Aunchetoday at 6:56 PM1 replyview on HN

> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.

Believe it or not, this is how lawmaking is supposed to work in a democracy. No one in a position of power is going to be completely selfless. The Civil Rights Acts were only able to pass because NAACP promised to endorse the Republicans and Southern Democrats who were the deciding votes. Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it. For example, in the first half of the Biden administration, there was a real possibility for a minimum wage increase, but voters saw any compromise to the $15 target as weakness even though they depended the vote of Joe Manchin, a Senator of a poor state that would suffer from economic turmoil with a California level minimum wage.

To be clear, it's not fair that the rich and powerful are better equipped to influence lawmaking. However, that's mainly a consequence of the utility of money and power rather than the system being fundamentally broken. Dismissing things like lobbying as corruption may provide comfortable explanation of why you're losing, but only helps the rich and powerful by eroding interest in grassroots lobbying and normalizing actual corruption (e.g. Binance insisting that its $2 billion investment be settled in Trump's stablecoin shortly after CZ was pardoned).


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jimbokuntoday at 7:06 PM

> Voters have since lost interest in actual lawmaking, and have in fact become hostile to it.

This is a very succinct description of arguably the biggest problem of our democracy right now.

A huge part of Trump’s success is convincing voters that everyone in politics is corrupt, to inoculate himself from criticism for the very overt acts of corruption he engages in.

Many people seem to support him under the argument “they’re all corrupt, at least he’s not pretending to NOT be corrupt.”

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