alt Hacker NewsLots of pitchforks in these comments.
If you had read that the EFF was meeting with lawmakers in the US to convince them that there was no secure way to allow the government to break e2e encryption, or had read that academics were banding together to ask the government not to make open weight LLMs illegal, what would your reaction be? What if told you that those organizations had actually paid a consultant to help them navigate getting appointments with the lawmakers?
Lobbying can be bribery, and that’s bad. Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest is definitely less bad.
The alternative that many people claim to want (no lobbying or money in politics legally) is a lot closer to what is happening in more authoritarian regimes. If there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so, political purity and perfect congressional understanding of nuanced topics doesn’t magically appear.
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You're making this very dichotomous, but I'm not convinced. Why shouldn't there be a way to bring issues to the parliament's attention without private money? For example, while flawed, the EU's Citizens' Initiative approach seems to be doing some good work bringing attention to issues that are in the public interest. I'd encourage us to look more extensively into these sort of open initiatives.
Those companies aren't spending millions an year to "paying a professional to talk to lawmakers".
Lobbying, as it is practised in the US, is hardly better than bribery. Talking to lawmakers about what is exclusively in your best interest, to the exclusion of everything else, is harmful. You wind up leveraging a group collective's understanding of dishonesty and dark speech patterns. No citizen has the eloquence or bull pulpit to oppose this.
That said, this is how the US works now. It might have started with military-industrial companies, but it is basically wide spread. Unfortunately, once the taboo is broken, it is broken permanently.
> Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest
And I believe that if it were that above-board then many fewer people would complain. But it's not.
Because the professional will host a fancy dinner that you're invited to. Or they'll make an entirely legal contribution to your re-election fund.
And even if you think all of the above is totally fine, you have to consider whose voices are more loudly heard in this kind of system. Do you, or your neighborhood, or even your city in most cases, have as much money as a megacorporation, to fund all of these activities at a similar scale? Do you think it's right for the richest companies and people to have the most say in how the country is run?
> no lobbying or money in politics legally ... there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so
You could speak your mind at a meeting with a policy maker, rather than at a $500 a plate dinner you've invited them to free of charge. You could pay someone to advocate for your interests in a smart way, without also contributing a million dollars to someone's re-election campaign. If there was less money flowing into politics, it would be more difficult to sway public opinion at large through expensive campaigns.