
Richard Posner: “The Real Corruption Is the Ownership of Congress by the Rich” - chmaynard
https://promarket.org/richard-posner-real-corruption-ownership-congress-rich/
======
DanielBMarkham
For the record, the United States was not designed to be operated in the way
it is currently being operated.

It was designed to have a bicameral legislature. The lower house was supposed
to be full of your neighbors, folks that lived down the street. They were
supposed to only serve for a couple of years at a time. It wasn't a lifetime
job. One of their main responsibilities was handling money.

The upper house was specifically designed to be a bunch of old, privileged,
party hacks from the states. They work six years at a time, and might stay in
for a long haul. They are the architects. They are responsible for monitoring
and maintaining the structure of the system and keeping an eye on the other
two branches.

This is not where we are. Somehow we thought that the more democratic the
legislature, the better. That is not the case. The structure of the system
suffers. Somehow we have Representatives that have jobs for life. The system
suffers.

Now I can't tell the difference between my senators and my representatives.
They're all camera hungry partisan hacks voting solidly as a block. Voting for
them is pointless.

It's not rich people. It's not privileged people. It dumbasses over the years
that have hacked the system into something it was never supposed to be.
Democracy is not some special thing where the more you get of it the better
you are. It doesn't work like that. It never worked like that. You take apart
the body of legislators that were specifically responsible to monitor and fix
the system and turn them into run-of-the-mill politicians? Then the rest of it
is going to fall apart. What else would you expect?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I don't think this is actually all that insightful. Political parties are a
component of every single democratic system on Earth, and were emerging in
America even before Washington "warned" about them. Hell, he was actually
doing to support his own faction, beginning the long American tradition of
"it's partisanship when the other guy does it."

The real problems here are the assortment of the _general population_ into
self-selected "red America" and "blue America", who have different economic
priorities, live in different sorts of municipalities, and fundamentally
different analyses of the world.

(I'm actually partial to both for some reason: I like the "plainness" of the
Reds, but think Blue _usually_ has a somewhat half-decent analysis of reality
while Red is _usually_ wildly delusional. My actual preferred analysis might
be called "the Other Red", the one with the gold stars and roses and such.)

Complain about "partisanship" all you like, but it won't sort out the
difference between someone who thinks the economy runs on consumer demand,
thus requiring a level of wages that lets most people consume without much
debt, and someone who thinks it runs on manliness and resource extraction,
thus requiring wage suppression until all those namby-pambies buck up and do a
day's work. Those are just different causal models.

What we could really use is proportional representation, so that
"partisanship" could at least sort itself out into multiple competing parties
within each of the two broad coalitions, and every well-supported analysis of
the world could find some official expression.

~~~
notthegov
The solution isn't a better direct democracy -- that is the problem.

US Senators were elected by the state legislatures for 125 years prior to the
17th Amendment. They were supposed to represent the states and not national
special interests.

Think how much easier it is to contact your state representatives than it is a
US Senator which is basically impossible.

It is the loss of classical liberalism that is causing all the problems.

And I disagree that people are all that different or if economic philosophies
are even relevant to most of the population.

------
cs702
"If you become a member of Congress, you’ll get a card from the head of your
party that you will spend five hours [each] afternoon talking to donors.
That’s not the only time you spend with donors—they’ll take you to dinner,
cocktails—but these five hours are important. The message is clear: You are a
slave to the donors. They own you. That’s [the] real corruption, the ownership
of Congress by the rich."

In other words, if you live in the US, your congressman/woman is spending FIVE
HOURS A DAY (!) on the phone raising money from people at the top of the
wealth/power distribution.

Yikes!

~~~
cies
I don't teach my children they live in a democracy. Maybe we should all stop
doing that and maybe we can start to address the lack of democracy (and excess
of lobbycracy/plutocracy/capitalism) as a problem.

~~~
narrowrail
>I don't teach my children they live in a democracy.

That's good because if you read the Federalist Papers, you will see the
founders explicitly set out to design a Republic at the federal level. Each
state, however is a democracy, but people seem to ignore state-level politics
for some reason.

~~~
cies
Sorry not living in the US. :)

------
nl
There's an actual, real world solution that has been implemented in Arizona
and Maine and appears to work: [http://www.vox.com/2016/2/9/10941690/campaign-
finance-left](http://www.vox.com/2016/2/9/10941690/campaign-finance-left)

If you prefer the more academic version:
[http://mysite.du.edu/~smasket/Masket_Miller_SPPQ.pdf](http://mysite.du.edu/~smasket/Masket_Miller_SPPQ.pdf)

What's more, it doesn't appear to favor one side of politics (which challenges
some partisan rhetoric around the influence of Soros/Koch on outcomes. Note
that this is different to corporate influence, which may well be a worse
problem)

~~~
tomohawk
Arizona - the state that elects McCain over and over again. Yep, must really
be working well.

~~~
nl
I'm not from the US (and I'd be considered very left leaning in the US!), but
as a former Republican presidential candidate it would seem unsurprising that
McCain has backing wouldn't it?

I haven't heard any allegations of corruption or scandal around him either.

What am I missing here?

~~~
flubert
>I haven't heard any allegations of corruption or scandal around him either.

[https://www.google.com/#q=john+mccain+corruption](https://www.google.com/#q=john+mccain+corruption)

~~~
nl
Well, looking at that one is about 'the Keating scandle' from the 1980s where
'Mccain was cleared' and the others were his anti-corruption statements.

~~~
flubert
Huh. Maybe google is showing different results for people in different
locations or something similar? On my setup, after about the first five
results, about half the articles are negative on McCain.

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clarkevans
Congressional Fundraising: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2016) is a
serious eye opener:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk)

------
mirimir
OK, so he says that antitrust is dead. And that wealthy entities own the
government. That fight was lost in the US about 150 years ago, when
corporations got human rights. After former slaves, but before women, I note.

But I don't get his devil-may-care attitude toward Google etc. He seems to
acknowledge that they're a monopoly, but argues that it's not hurting anyone.
Loves to Google stuff.

So what am I missing? Is it just that he's a cynical libertarian?

~~~
joshjkim
anti-trust enforcement is premised on the existence of some harm, generally
related to anti-competitive practices (like price fixing), and it seems like
Posner doesn't see a harm there, at least in traditional anti-trust terms.
this is not surprising: posner (I would assume) ascribes to the chicago school
re: anti-trust, where anti-trust is really all about _consumer_ harm and
efficient outcomes for the industry, and on those terms especially hard to see
harm since google is "free" to what most people understand as consumers, and
even the real consumers (advertisers) don't seem to be banging on the door
saying they are overpaying (at least not yet), and google seems to do a decent
job of running their ad markets efficiently (that's a total guess honestly,
feel free to correct me if wrong!).

on a funnier (and more cynical) level, when posner says "anti-trust is dead"
he may very well be giving himself a pat on the back, since he's a leading
thinker of the "law and economics" school (usually attributed to u chicago,
where posner has long been a professor - his seminal paper on the subject here
is pretty amazing:
[http://m.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/53.Posner.Values_0.pdf](http://m.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/53.Posner.Values_0.pdf))
that many give credit / blame for shifting anti-trust's focus away from
reigning in corporate power (the traditional "trust-busting" rationale, which
was really as much about trying to avoid total capture of government by the
big trusts), and instead focus on consumer harm and market inefficiency, which
is generally indifferent to the expansion of corporate power so long as they
don't gauge prices or do anything blatantly harmful to the market. this shift
in focus greatly reduced the scope and practice of antitrust prosecution, and
I think posner in general thinks that's a good thing since he's prefer less
gov intervention. what's odd to me is that he seems concerned (or honestly, he
just seems annoyed ha) about corporate influence on government, but doesn't
seem to care that the fact that these companies are able to become so massive
is in large part why they are able to influence the government so much...

this is the backdrop to a lot of the interview, good example is when the
interviewer asks "Are we only concerned about seeing low prices, and not about
other things like capture or having members of the House of Representatives
owned by one large company?"

this is just rambling at this point (sorry!), but posner's response here is
totally amazing / weird - he seems to basically say the problem is that the
court system has been making bad decisions because it has been politicized
because appointments are made by politicians, and (at least in part) because
money influences politics, the politicians are picking judges for their
stances on token political issues, not their abilities. that all makes sense,
but his solution is not to attempt make the entire political system less full
of shit...but just have other smart judges/lawyers appoint new judges
(presumably producing more judges like...him).

he seems to want to simultaenously NOT reign in corporate power at all (or
maybe he just doesn't believe it's possible, which is a fair assumption), but
still not have corporations influence (at least one branch of) government -
feels pretty "cake-and-eat-it-too" to me. not the worst idea, but exposes
posner's high view of himself to be both smart and nonpartisan (not surprising
and honestly pretty well-deserved) and his arguably naive belief in the
ability of judges to be "above the fray" \- very few people in general are as
intelligent, idiosyncratic and nonconformist as he is - pro market, pro
choice, pro drug legalization, pro human organ markets, and frankly he's
widely considered a genius (an eccentric one for sure, but that's not an
unusual pairing)!

~~~
mirimir
Thanks for the great background. I really don't get how unlimited corporate
power is compatible with independent government serving public interest. Even
with priestly judges, not on the take. With unlimited corporate power, you
basically have government that's just a puppet show.

------
tomohawk
We're all corrupt. How many people are unwilling to vote against incumbents?
How many people are unwilling to vote out an incompetent just because the
incompetent is wearing the right jersey?

Change is the best antidote to vested interests. So, term limits and always
voting against an incumbent unless they are doing a demonstrably superior job
are going to be far more effective than other approaches.

~~~
mannykannot
Incumbency/change is largely an orthogonal issue, as money works well in both
cases. In fact, it may be more effective in an environment of continual
change, driving up the cost of participation beyond the reach of true
grassroots campaigns.

------
known
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
[http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109](http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109)

------
metaphorm
The U.S. is presently in a state of constitutional crisis and we lack the
means to do anything about it. Those who are responsible for creating a
government consistent with constitutional principles have abdicated their duty
and succumbed to corruption.

------
doug1001
In case anyone doesn't know, Richard Posner is a federal judge, for the 7th
circuit court of appeals (and former chief judge of that circuit) and a
professor at the University of Chicago law school. RP is widely regarded as
the most influential legal scholar in the last 50 years (eg, he's the most
cited legal scholar of the 20th century). As a judge, his body of legal
opinions over his 36 years (and counting) on the 7th circuit put him in the
company of Hand, Holmes, Cardozo, etc.

this piece by RP appears to echo Larry Lessig's. Interestingly, LL was a law
clerk for RP, after graduating from the law school where RP taught.

------
rudimental
Today somebody on Reddit linked to this video which talks about the process of
money influencing politics
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig)

It doesn't discuss the role of the judicial system. It's all about the
legislative aspects of US government. It's pretty compelling and well made.
Hopefully a bipartisan movement can have some impact.

The video was made by [https://represent.us/](https://represent.us/)

~~~
TeMPOraL
A pretty interesting video pointing out some damning stats.

I'm curious however, how does the data look for other democracies, e.g. in
Europe. The question is, whether this is a problem of US and its "money in
politics" issue, or whether other democracies suffer from that problem too. I
have a suspicion that this is inherent to politics in general, regardless of
form - that money and power will always find themselves in bed together.

------
wazoox
I recently watched Capra's "Mr Smith goes to Washington" (1941). The more it
changes, the more it stays the same...

Anyone who didn't see it should go watch it, it's still worth it.

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standardly
The picture looks like young Jack Nicholson talking to current Larry David.

------
andrewclunn
In a globalised economy, breaking up your own multinationals because they have
an effective monopoly in you own country is to concede the global market to
foreign competitors. Capitalism and global markets are now more powerful than
any individual nation.

~~~
praptak
People haven't yet realised that it's not EU versus US versus China but rather
corporations versus the people. If they did, states would cooperate more so as
not to let corps play one against the other and thus screw everyone.

Anyway, the solution to the particular problem of the rich owning Congress
isn't breaking multinationals but rather limits on campaign donations - this
whole "money is speech" argument is just bullshit.

~~~
bigtimeidiot
> _People haven 't yet realised_

Thankfully we have enlightened people among us to guide the sheep, right?

> _that it 's not EU versus US versus China but rather corporations versus the
> people_

Corporations have zero ability to act by themselves. So where do you propose
to draw the between the "corporation team" and the "people team"?

~~~
dang
> _Thankfully we have enlightened people among us to guide the sheep, right?_

Please don't do this here. If another comment takes a wrong turn, going
further that way doesn't help. Instead, please help the thread self-correct by
posting more substantively.

