Lessig On Corruption and Reform

Brian Stretch sends us to the National Review for an interview with Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig. Lessig talks about money, politics, money in politics, and his decision not to run for an open seat in Congress. From the interview: "Lessig hates corruption. He hates it so much, in fact, that last year he announced he'd be shifting away from his work on copyright and trademark law... to focus on it... 'One of the biggest targets of reform that we should be thinking about is how to blow up the FCC.'"

Comments

You won't get the money out of politics...

[Nova Express]

...until you get politics out of money.

More government control of the economy = more corruption. The more opportunity congress has to pick winners and losers, the more money businessmen are willing to spend to rig the outcome. The more powerful and less accountable a bureaucracy is to voters, the less checks their are to curb corruption. This is why the scandals in the previous French government and the UN oil-for-food scandal dwarf anything that's ever gone on in America. And the trend is to makle those bureaucracies even less accountable to votes (think of the EU's centralizing drive, and how the latest UK Labour government decided it didn't need to let its citizens vote on surrendering sovereignty to the EU after all. The more centralized power, the fewer chances for checks and balances to prevent corruption. And of course the communist bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union were the most corrupt of all, with millions killed while the Nomenklatura lived in luxury.

As Lord Acton noted, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The larger and more centralized government becomes, the more opportunities for corruption.

Re:You won't get the money out of politics...

[Spy Hunter]

Lessig doesn't really seem to agree with this. He says he knows government is corrupted by money. The Libertarian answer is to reduce the size of government to reduce the amount of corruption, but Lessig somehow thinks that the amount of corruption can be dramatically reduced without taking that step. But he can't explain concretely how.

His only plan is to get politicians to promise they won't take lobbyist money, and to "abolish earmarks", and to add more campaign finance restrictions. Sorry Larry, but politicians are professional promise-skirters, and I see no reason to believe that them making yet another promise is going to significantly change how the government works at all levels.

The "abolish earmarks" thing is especially quixotic; you might as well make them promise to stop gerrymandering while you're at it. They'll find another way to do it, and just call it something else, or outright deny that's what they're doing, playing with the word definitions. As for the lobbyist thing, lobbyists have *plenty* of ways to influence politicians besides outright giving them money, and there's not even a way to enumerate all of them, much less make every politician promise to ignore them, and then enforce that promise.

I don't see any part of Larry's plan that makes me think it's more sensible than the Libertarian point of view. The problem of government corruption is just too complex to confront head-on, and it's okay to admit that. "Special Interests" are ingenious, well-funded, and determined; thinking that they can be outmaneuvered forever is just hubris. There is a simple solution, and we know what it is: the way to *truly* remove corruption from a part of the government is to eliminate that part of the government.

Re:You won't get the money out of politics...

[Danse]

The Libertarian answer is to reduce the size of government to reduce the amount of corruption The problem with the Libertarian answer is that it is vague and largely unworkable due to the current level of corruption. You need to come up with ways to reduce the amount of impact the corrupt officials can have by proposing things that are concrete and easier for people to get behind than something like "reducing the size of government".