> Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
If your decision makers are corrupt and not acting in your best interests, then you need to hold them accountable for that. I've never heard a single person on HN (or real life in my country) say "I was tracking the bills that my senators voted on, noticed they voted for something bad, and sent them a letter", or voted against them next election cycle, or anything similar, because almost nobody does it.
This is a failure of democracy, on the part of the citizens, because democracy isn't just voting - it's monitoring the behavior of those you voted for and holding them accountable. (I'm not saying anything about people you didn't vote for, for obvious reasons)
If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Sure, lobbying needs to be much more regulated or outright banned in many countries (including my own) - but even an individual of below-average intelligence can see why even if lobbying is banned, all of the above still applies - if you're not keeping track of your representatives actions, even if they're not being lobbied, they can and will continue to act in their own interests and sacrifice yours, and you're failing your country.
Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
>This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
I disagree in part.
You are correct that politicians should share some of the blame, but as we know the breed of insect known as politician lacks any kind of spine, they tend to bow down to any lobby that is large enough to cause them any electoral fright.
In this instance, we had a government scrap this regulatory body entirely, and the next government restored it but "upon consultation" left the teeth out.
Everyone sucks here as they say on reddit.
>If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Classic beige dictatorship. Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan. They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
>Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
Honestly its the entire system as designed. Theres no way to sting a government over a single issue. Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
Yes, politicians do lack spine and are manipulated, but there's ample evidence that they can get "electoral fright" directly from the populace. We had an example of that just a few months ago when Musk threatened to fund advertisements against Republican senators who voted against some of Trump's bills. That's a specific, concrete, recent example of congressmen being afraid of their constituents' voting power - and there are many others.
"Beige democracy" is a term that I've never heard before, and searching for it lead me to Charlie Stross' article[1], which is extremely interesting and I'm glad that you brought up. I don't fully understand this concept, I'll have to think about it more.
I partially agree with
> Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan.
because,
> They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
...but I don't agree with it completely. It's still possible to use voting power to discriminate between candidates in a party - that's what primaries are for, after all - such that the citizens don't (always) have to choose between "betraying their party" (even though that's a concept which I think is somewhat harmful to democracy) and forcing their representatives to be non-corrupt and address a particular issue.
Sure, it's harder with the system that we have, but definitely not impossible.
I think that the root of the problem is this:
> Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
If people cared, we could have ranked-choice voting and get out of this vicious cycle of polarization that we're in. If people cared, they could threaten to vote out their representatives when they don't do the right thing - and they only have to do that once or twice a generation for it to work! If people cared, they'd could make "goodness lists" of how many times their representatives betray them. If people cared, they could bundle a bunch of small issues together into larger political movements that could get enough traction to get implemented.
I agree the system is "working as designed", but that the system's behavior is a function of the effort that the citizens invest (and the general moral character of the society (and other things), which is rapidly failing, but that's separate), and that the perverse behavior we're seeing is because the value we're plugging into that function is "people REALLY do not care".
Lobbying enables that more, sure, and I'm supportive of cutting it back, but the root problem is so much more important to address, that it's almost better to intentionally leave lobbying the way it is in hopes of forcing the populace to confront the root issue, because solving that is so incredibly important.
This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
If your decision makers are corrupt and not acting in your best interests, then you need to hold them accountable for that. I've never heard a single person on HN (or real life in my country) say "I was tracking the bills that my senators voted on, noticed they voted for something bad, and sent them a letter", or voted against them next election cycle, or anything similar, because almost nobody does it.
This is a failure of democracy, on the part of the citizens, because democracy isn't just voting - it's monitoring the behavior of those you voted for and holding them accountable. (I'm not saying anything about people you didn't vote for, for obvious reasons)
If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Sure, lobbying needs to be much more regulated or outright banned in many countries (including my own) - but even an individual of below-average intelligence can see why even if lobbying is banned, all of the above still applies - if you're not keeping track of your representatives actions, even if they're not being lobbied, they can and will continue to act in their own interests and sacrifice yours, and you're failing your country.
Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.