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Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

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Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#31

Post by cwan »

AlisdairO wrote: post #21
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a market the search for profit is the search for more efficiently serving aggregate preferences of consumers. allowing corporations to assume disproportionate control of the political process is almost assuredly a net improvement.

That's clearly false. A really simple example is antitrust legislation - if MS (or any other monopolistic organisation) were able to remove regulation on monopolies, you can be assured that they would, and that the effect on our society would be dramatically negative.

I don't know if it's "clearly false". Anti-trust/anti-competitive business practices are an area that personally make me uncomfortable but again, here too, companies are having increasingly difficult control over maintaining dominance if they don't provide the best products/services and focus instead on trying to suppress competitors (e.g. browser wars, high end computers - apple v pcs). I'd also be pretty uncomfortable with governments making the determination of what's "good" and "bad" as there have been some bizarre anti-trust rulings over the past few decades.

Here's Cato's take on anti-trust: http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-39.html

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#32

Post by walkers »

jokull wrote: post #25
jamesbritt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also slightly related - why is it acceptable to persuade a court to release suspects by simply paying them bail money in England and America?" You get it back if you make all of your court appearances. it's way to help ensure that people charged wth a crime don't flee. "Money walks all over morals." How so? Would it be better to keep people in jail simply because they've been accused of a crime? If everyone was trus…

Aaaah. I didn't know you'd get the money back for showing up in court. Why not just fine people who don't show up then? I'm not suggesting you put all suspects in jail.

Because you can't fine someone once they have fled the state/country.

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#33

Post by lambda »

jokull wrote: post #25
jamesbritt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also slightly related - why is it acceptable to persuade a court to release suspects by simply paying them bail money in England and America?" You get it back if you make all of your court appearances. it's way to help ensure that people charged wth a crime don't flee. "Money walks all over morals." How so? Would it be better to keep people in jail simply because they've been accused of a crime? If everyone was trus…

Aaaah. I didn't know you'd get the money back for showing up in court. Why not just fine people who don't show up then? I'm not suggesting you put all suspects in jail.

If they don't show up, how do you fine them?

This isn't just about a person who misses a court date because they're lazy; it's also about people who may flee to a different country, or start working under an assumed name, or anything of the sort.

If they've already paid, they have some incentive to come back and be able to reclaim their bail money.

If they do skip town, sending cops after them to track them down and arrest them again is expensive. That's where the bounty hunter part comes in; if they skip their court date, their own bail money is used as incentive to encourage police officers, sheriffs, or private investigators to capture them.

In many cases, this isn't the romantic image of a western cowboy hunting down dangerous criminals in caves, but just the equivalent of a debt-collection agency, that calls them, mails them, files information with credit agencies preventing them from receiving credit, and so on.

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#34

Post by dkimball »

gaius wrote: post #18
cwan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a historical context, I do find it a bit odd this fear of "corporations". It's really difficult to argue that they function in any way as a cohesive group. Sure it can be argued that they're all profit seeking (some more than others) but the search of profits is done in such radically different ways. If anything, the power of corporations has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think…

Replace "corporations" with "witches" and you'll see it for the Mediaeval superstitious ranting that it is.

"If anything, the power of witches has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think how difficult it's been for even politically authoritarian societies like China to maintain a control over what people hear/see/think). Fortune Magazine tracks the life of the average Fortune 500 witch and it's been in steady decline. The dominance of any individual witch is far from permanent and made even less so with continually falling barriers to entry." ;)

Of course, you meant the grandparent post. That means that you're saying that because witchcraft was seen as a threat to society in the Early Modern period (but _not_ the Medieval period, when the Papal Inquisition regarded witchcraft as a superstition, and referred anyone who brought them a witchcraft charge to Ye Olde Psychyatryste), and the witches were not a threat (although there were real witches -- Kieckhefer, Richard, _Magic in the Middle Ages_ (200)) -- again, because the witches (and the enormous number of innocents who were falsely killed as witches) were not a threat in the 17th Century, anything that anyone sees as a threat at the present day is similarly not a threat.

The right thing to do is to ask whether this particular possible threat is in fact a threat. I agree with your conclusion -- I think that the parent post is right, corporations are no longer the cohesive bloc that they were as late as the 1980s -- but I think you're doing it a disservice by using such a weak argument for it.

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#35

Post by lambda »

kiba wrote: post #5
kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #3

I want the restricted republic back. No interest in democracy. "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." --Mencken

What I want is true liberty, not this nonsense called "democracy".

How do you achieve that, realistically?

Remember, there will always be thugs, and thieves, and swindlers out there. There will be hostile nations. And there will be freeloaders; people who try to take advantage of any sort of public or semi-public works or institutions, such as roads, schools, hospitals, and the like without paying.

Do you have a (realistic, please no Ayn Rand power fantasies) proposal for dealing with all of these problems without a government? Or do you have a proposal for selecting that government fairly, justly, and well without democratic elections?

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#36

Post by lambda »

tjic wrote: post #8

When a group (whether it's citizens with a hobby, a union, a corporation, or a church) sees that government is throwing it's $3 Trillion/year bulk around in their neighborhood, they - rationally - try to buy off the government so that it does not destroy them or do them harm. The solution is not to restrict speech - the solution is to get politics out of so many questions by getting the government out of those issues…

Lobbying the government is fine; lobbying is just asking the government to consider your point of view. This is what Lessig says in his essay; he never asks for restriction of speech.

Lessig isn't talking about speech, but money. Money paid directly to campaigns. Money paid to congressmen and their staff as soon as they leave congress, providing an incentive to support those interests that are most likely to hire them afterwards. This is not an issue of free speech; this is an issue of buying laws. Whether you believe in a large or a small government, if established interests can buy laws, they can control congress, and those laws that they buy aren't going to do do anything about making the government that they've paid for smaller and less effective.

How are you going to reduce the size of the government without getting rid of the influence of those who benefit directly from government largesse, or from government regulations increasing the cost of mounting effective competition?

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#37

Post by lambda »

castis wrote: post #16

To my knowledge, our government was never meant to be a Democracy. Republic innit?

A republic is a kind of democracy; it is a form of representative democracy, as opposed to a direct democracy. "Democracy. n. 1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/democracy

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#38

Post by hack_edu »

lambda wrote: post #36
tjic wrote: post #8

When a group (whether it's citizens with a hobby, a union, a corporation, or a church) sees that government is throwing it's $3 Trillion/year bulk around in their neighborhood, they - rationally - try to buy off the government so that it does not destroy them or do them harm. The solution is not to restrict speech - the solution is to get politics out of so many questions by getting the government out of those issues…

Lobbying the government is fine; lobbying is just asking the government to consider your point of view. This is what Lessig says in his essay; he never asks for restriction of speech. Lessig isn't talking about speech, but money. Money paid directly to campaigns. Money paid to congressmen and their staff as soon as they leave congress, providing an incentive to support those interests that are most likely to hire the…

This is a good platform to pose this question as well.

Can someone lay down some information about just how money equates speech. Its used so often by now that its meaning is lost, merely a talking point.

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#39

Post by kiba »

lambda wrote: post #35
kiba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I want is true liberty, not this nonsense called "democracy".

How do you achieve that, realistically? Remember, there will always be thugs, and thieves, and swindlers out there. There will be hostile nations. And there will be freeloaders; people who try to take advantage of any sort of public or semi-public works or institutions, such as roads, schools, hospitals, and the like without paying. Do you have a (realistic, please no Ayn Rand power fantasies) proposal for dealing wi…

While it is presumptuous to think that I would support a government, public roads, public hospital, of any kind, but alas, I have no real "plan" to speak of.

However, I could describe in details how might an anarchistic free market society would work.

If there are any plans, it would be mostly be about trying seasteading, counter-economic black market activities, among other things.

Liberty to me, can only occurs on an individual level, not through social engineering by a carefully selected technocract.

Indeed, I don't have anything to answer for a "plan" nor do I know if it is realistic at all.

Re: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

#40

Post by ubernostrum »

azgolfer wrote: post #10
tjic wrote: post #8

When a group (whether it's citizens with a hobby, a union, a corporation, or a church) sees that government is throwing it's $3 Trillion/year bulk around in their neighborhood, they - rationally - try to buy off the government so that it does not destroy them or do them harm. The solution is not to restrict speech - the solution is to get politics out of so many questions by getting the government out of those issues…

Yes and the brilliance of the founders was creating a very limited federal government. The aristocratic senate and the house 'of the people' had to agree. The bill would get vetoed by default. One senator could stop any bill by filibustering. The bill of rights prevented state governments from gettting out of control...

The way you casually talk about this as if it were some sort of unanimous opinion at the time of the Constitution's drafting suggests that you should do a bit more actual research into the history. And, possibly, into the document itself, which was drafted as a reaction to the failures of a deliberately-crippled central government.
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