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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.'"
Why stop at blowing up the FCC?
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
... in order to vote for Lessig for Congress. Not that it's a big move, mind you, I live in Oakland.
It's unfortunate he decided not to run.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
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.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Are you under some delusion that the Democrats don't like the FCC?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
It's just you. You're a crazy conspiracy nutcase.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Obama sought out Lessig for his technology policy! If Lessig gives him a reasonable road map to implement the FCC-related portions of the technology plan, he can easily get an appointment, and there is NOW WAY the democratic congress is going to reject his appointment...unless his nanny is an illegal immigrant.
Just out of curiosity, what are Obama's "radical" ideas on fixing the US?
As a subject of Her Majesty the Queen I've been watching the US race with some interest (and lots of spam from idiot US activists, thanks guys). I must admit to liking Obama not for any real reason, but because his slogan "Yes we can" is in fact a very British phrase taken from one of our most popular entertainers, Bob the Builder. Who would have thought the slogan from a pre-school edu-tainment star would reach the heady heights of US political office?
What a coincidence, I just watched Pirate Radio USA, a documentary which contains all these fun facts about the FCC and big business.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Many a nerd who happens to read your blog got their ham license through the FCC and talked with the world *before* there was an internet. Or even computers. Many of us built computers from schematics that showed up in the early magazines and interfaced them to radios. We were making phone calls with radios *before* there was cell phones. Countless hams worked in the electronics industry, and worked in companies that brought forth many of the innovations we use today. A ham radio license, which was hard-eanred (most of us automatically decode all that mosrse code when it shows up on TV :D), is and continues to be a cherished part of many peoples lives. And was the beginning of many careers in technology and science.
While the FCC has many flaws, be careful to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. While I mention ham licenses, they do have a place in technical matters as well.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
An earmark is this crazy system the Americans have for tacking supplementary pieces of legislation in. For example - let's say there's this important piece of legislation for, say, feeding starving babies. It's bound to get through - no question. So some congresscritter from Alaska says "I'll vote for this, but I'm adding this clause where we also give $500million to build a bridge in Florida". If the bill passes, so does the addition - the earmark.
It's a tad more complicated than that, but that's the general gist; US politicans can append stuff to legislation (in some cases, after it's already been voted on!) and there is no easy way to get it taken out, but the bill is still needed, so the whole tainted package gets through.
How the US ever came up with such a wacky system I don't know...
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
I've worked, studied, and basically lived in current political system for nearly 6 years, and in my opinion, its FUBAR, or close enough at any rate.
The biggest problem is that our current system was not built to handle vast government bureaucracy that has cropped up since WWII. Now look, before any liberals get pissy, I'm not a Paul-tard, and I'm not saying that government should only build roads, delivery mail, and fund a military.
That said, fundamentally, the U.S. form of representative democracy was built to do just that. It was meant to keep politics as the local and state level, while the current political discourse in this country has increasingly grown more national. Take the legislative bodies in the states and Congress for example. All of them are based on the idea of direct representation. A state legislator or House Member's role is to keep his or her constituents happy. If not, he gets the boot. And at the state senate and US Senate level (the latter especially after the 17th Amendment), the scope expands to a broader constituency, but the goal stays the same.
This structure creates an incentive and drive to keep the locals happy regardless of what the greater national interest might suggest. Now, that drive worked perfectly fine as long as the government had very little cash to dole out. Back in the 19th Century, the most a legislator could do was maybe bring some funding back for a new post office, roads, or at most a military installation. Government, especially at the federal level, did little else. Even education was rarely handled at the state level. There was very little money in government, and thus very little to try to corrupt. And when corruption did occur, it was on a much smaller (monetary) scale. (Hell even the land scandals with the railroad companies, while extremely bad, didn't really cost the government any money.)
Now, fast forward to the current situation where federal spending over the last 50 years has been at least 20% of the GDP, and where it is now accepted and expected that government's role is to dole that money out to someone, whether it be corporations through subsidies and contracts, the poor through welfare, students through college grants and loans, schools through grants and funds, the elderly through social security, the sick through medicare, deficit-inducing tax-cuts for taxpayers, and on and on.
With the current system, legislatures' are lured to keep the local folks happy by offering them a greater and greater share of the pie. They try to squeeze a nickel here, a dime there and before you know it, they've nickel and dimed their way into a quarter-trillion (or whatever it is now) dollar budget deficit. Look at Iraq, look at Social Security, look at the prescription drug benefit, look at no child left behind. All of these are just short term rackets run to please voters without any regard for any long-term damage they might be causing (i.e., inflation, debt, higher tax rates).
It's the reason why the Democrats spent their way into deficits while they were in power in the 60s. It's the reason why Republicans did the exact same when they took power in the 00s. It's the exact same reason why we'll still be running a deficit 4 years from now regardless of who wins this next election. (In case you can't tell, my pet peeve is deficits.) It's the culture of pork-barreled politics, and the principle behind it ("bringing home the bacon") leads our governments--state, local, and federal--to writing checks that our society cannot cash.
You know, it's not even really corruption per se. It's just the way the system was set up, and its probably functioning the way the Founding Fathers intended it. They just probably didn't intend for it to go beyond post offices, roads, and the military. All politics is local. Perhaps that is a maxim we (the U.S.) as a country need to rethink.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
This only means that your congress and other government agencies are also bad, it doesn't make FCC practice okay and sure as hell doesn't constitute a reason to stop improving things.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
As an example, let me run down some of the items on Barack Obama's issue pages (since I just happened to be reading them) and tell you the Libertarian answer to each point, off the top of my head:
- Provide a Tax Cut for Working Families: Libertarians are for tax cuts; they reduce the size of government.
- Simplify Tax Filings for Middle Class Americans: Reducing the complexity of the tax code is good, as it would tend to reduce the size of government, though Libertarians would prefer to eliminate the income tax and thus the need for individual tax filings.
- Fight for Fair Trade: Free trade is good, but Obama proposes using trade deals to enforce our rules on other countries and protect our jobs from foreign competition. Libertarians are against this and for completely free trade.
- Amend the North American Free Trade Agreement: Obama wants to "fix" NAFTA, and I don't know what that means but it sounds like protectionism, which Libertarians are against.
- Improve Transition Assistance: Obama wants the government to pay to retrain workers. This increases the size of government so Libertarians are against it.
- Support Job Creation: Obama wants to double spending on research and education. This increases the size of government so Libertarians are against it, believing that it will produce corruption and waste; a free market can do a better job of allocating those resources than fickle politicians can, without the corruption and waste.
- Invest in U.S. Manufacturing: More spending; bigger government; Libertarians say no.
- Create New Job Training Programs for Clean Technologies: Again, Spending. Bigger government. No.
- Boost the Renewable Energy Sector and Create New Jobs: Spending. Bigger government. No.
- Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Spending. Bigger government. No.
- Protect the Openness of the Internet: Libertarians believe that the Internet should not be regulated.
- Invest in Rural Areas: Spending. Bigger government. No.
I could go on, but as you can see, the Libertarian viewpoint is very well-defined, and not at all vague. As for whether it's "unworkable" or whether people can "get behind" it, well, that's debatable. But vague is the one thing it's certainly not.main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
That didn't convince you? Okay, let's whip out the biggie:
HOPE.
See? Lord Obama has answered all of your questions! Praise Obama!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
You have just described a government that is wholly absorbed in building a national infrastructure.
If your constituents lived on the Atlantic or Gulf coasts, the Great Lakes, they wanted a lighthouse, a customs station, a ship canal. "Internal improvements" as they called it in those days.
This was never a penny-ante operation.
The federal government was employing 14,000 postal workers as early as 1841.
What made the government grow
I'm a citizen of the USA and after I lived in China for a few year between 2003-06, I made this observation:
In China, corruption is widespread but mostly illegal (and people complaint about it rather loudly.)
In the US, corruption is not as widely spread but it is mostly legal because it has morphed into "political contribution" and "job opportunity" (and few people complaint about it -- hey, we vote this government -- we are democratic -- how can corruption happen in a democratic system.)
I can think of an objective way to make gerrymandering more difficult. Measure the land area and perimeter of each electoral district. From the perimeter, compute the "ideal area" as the area of a square with the same perimeter, that is, the square of one-fourth the perimeter. Then for each district, compute the land area as a fraction of the ideal area, and require each district to have at least a specified fraction.
After I typed that out, I looked up gerrymandering on Wikipedia, and I found that someone had already explained such a system, calling it "isoperimetric". Wikipedia lists another method that uses the area of a district's convex hull as the ideal area.
Copyright is an interesting case. Copyright definitely is an issue on which Libertarians might disagree. I'll give you my take on it.
Libertarians are definitely *for* property rights and free markets, so private property ownership stays for sure. Copyright, on its face, appears to create a market for information, and Libertarians like markets. However, Libertarians also like individual liberty. Property rights restrict individual liberty, but a market in private property is required (one might say it's a necessary evil) because there is a limited supply of property which needs to be allocated fairly. Information does not need to be allocated, because there is an unlimited supply of any particular piece of information. The justification for restricting individual liberty to establish the market doesn't exist in this case. So I would say a true Libertarian would be against copyright.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer