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.'"

I would have moved...

[Bartab]

... 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.

Re:"Blow up" the FCC?

[Bartab]

It's just you. You're a crazy conspiracy nutcase.

Re:Why not run it?

[Moridineas]

Just out of curiosity, what are Obama's "radical" ideas on fixing the US?

Re:FCC moves aim to curry favor of future employer

[Danse]

Basically, FCC employees brown-nose prospective future employers by decreeing public policies that benefits those future employers.

So it's just like Congress, or any number of other government agencies.

Careful there Larry

[eclectro]

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.

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[account_deleted]

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

[jsebrech]

Your assumption seems to be that it is possible to reduce the size of government. I disagree with this notion. If you reduce the size of democratic government a non-democratic government will arise to replace it. Your example of communist russia is an excellent one. After the collapse of the communist government private enterprise filled up the power vacuum that was left, and focused more on profit than on people. The end result was that people actually overall had it noticeably worse under the weak government model that came after than under the all-encompassing communist model of old.

I might also mention that no country in the EU has abandoned sovereignty because countries can leave the EU at any time without approval from the other EU member states. The EU is a treaty, not a country. This makes the EU very fragile. If it became a harm to its member countries instead of a benefit, it would dissolve rapidly.

And by the way, the EU has been very good for my country. Without the EU we would have more pollution, unhealthier food, higher unemployment, severe trade and budget deficits, a devalued coin, higher unemployment, and software patents.

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

[jmv]

More government control of the economy = more corruption.

Sorry, I have to disagree on that one. Some of the least corrupt governments in the world happen to be the scandinavian countries, which also happen to be very much on the socialist side. You can also find plenty of the opposite case, i.e. banana republics where the government doesn't control the economy and is very corrupt. I wouldn't go as far as saying that more govt control means less corruption, but I definitely disagree on your simple "more control = more corruption" statement.

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.

I disagree on that one to. All the oil-for-food scandals around the world (not just French, there was AU and probably others) are just dwarfed by the US corruption involved in the Iraq invasion. Starting from Halliburton's ex-CEO supporting the was a vice-president, making up false "evidence" (and screwing up the career of the wife of the guy who exposed that in the process), turning a blind eye on over-billing (Halliburton and others), and all the stuff we haven't heard of yet.

As Lord Acton noted, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

True, but there are ways to reduce the power of *individuals* while making sure the govt has control on the economy. Just because the US screwed up at that, doesn't mean you have to deregulate everything. What needs to be done is that the power must be distributed. That's the idea behind the US "checks and balance" principles. The only problem is that there's currently an individual who managed to mostly seize most of the powers. That's where the problem is.

Re:For the benefit of the non-US part of the audie

[RodgerDodger]

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...

Re:FCC moves aim to curry favor of future employer

[A beautiful mind]

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.

Vague?!? Surely you jest.

[Spy Hunter]

The Libertarian philosophy is anything but "vague". In fact, Libertarianism is the most well-defined and internally consistent political philosophy I've ever heard, which is probably why I like it, as a computer scientist. It's so clear cut that you can actually apply the core philosophy directly to voting decisions and get an unambiguous answer in many cases, which is not something you can say of conservatism or liberalism.

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.

Re:All Politics is Local

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Ummmm, yes and no.

Yes, the US govt has grown immensely since WW2.

However, the deficits have bloomed out of control due to inadequate taxation on the rich, which began during the Reagan Administration. Presently, the highest incomes actually pay less (percentage wise) than middle income earners. Bush's tax reductions on the rich only exacerbated the problem, and that is why the USA is staring at 1/3 to 1/2 trillion dollar deficits forever.

What we have seen over the past 100 years is the development of the American Empire. Empires are expensive to maintain and inevitably collapse under their own weight of corruption and mismanagement. That's what we are seeing now, is the dismantling of the American Empire - the abandonment of the unipolar for the multipolar geopolitic. It will take at least a few decades. The USA will be forced to retire as a global hegemon and take on a role as a regional hegemon (dominating North and South America) while China dominates East Asia, India South Asia, and Russia does a peculiar dance with a EU. Africa becomes a free-for-all exploitation zone.

We're about to start skidding down the back end of the energy curve, and that will make global empires obsolete, if not impossible. The USA was the last of that genre.

I think the USA is beset by a number of problems. Corruption is certainly one of them, but a lazy and wilfully ignorant populace I would rank as an even greater problem. If people were more engaged and better educated in critical thinking skills, I don't think the USA would be quite the slow motion train wreck it has become.

RS

How to prohibit gerrymandering objectively

[tepples]

you might as well make them promise to stop gerrymandering while you're at it.

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 [wikipedia.org], 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.

Re:Copyright vs. real estate

[Spy Hunter]

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.

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

[Spy Hunter]

The initial allocation of spectrum doesn't have to be *perfectly* just for the market to be beneficial in the long run. We can do our best to start fairly; we can have auctions, etc. There will be winners; there will be losers; but the important thing is to get the market established, so that it can work going *forward*. Saying we shouldn't have a market at all because we can't guarantee total fairness of the initial conditions is not a good argument.

Besides, nobody is in a position to be screwed as badly as the Indians were; nobody is living in this spectrum and nobody's going to get killed. The entities with the most to lose are the huge telecommunications corporations with billions invested in infrastructure, but nobody is proposing that their spectrum be taken away during the transition. I just don't see any disasters resulting from a transition to a free market; certainly nothing on the scale of what happened to the Indians; the benefits far outweigh the startup costs.

Moreover, we still have the problem of geography in the ownership of a frequency.

These problems aren't unique to a free market system. They exist in the system we have today and have been mostly solved to the satisfaction of the current spectrum users. There are disputes, but the system of enforcement works today. The system we have now resembles ownership in some important ways and should be a starting point for any market system we would establish.

I would suggest looking at historical cases of economic laissez-faire

Any specific examples in mind?

Re:Simple != vague

[Danse]

Less government + less government power = less effect of government corruption on normal peoples lives. It's a simple equation, but I don't think it's the least bit vague or unworkable.

"Less government" is extremely vague. What do you cut? How do you cut it without causing major undesirable side-effects? How do you get people behind your proposed cuts unless you can explain what you want to cut, why you want to cut it, and how it will impact those people who's support you want? Keep in mind that you'll need a fairly large amount of support to get anything done, so you'll have to be pretty careful about what you decide to cut. This is just the beginning and off the top of my head too. There's probably a hundred other things that need to be considered as well. You need a LOT more detail.

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

[-noefordeg-]

Have no economy?
What does that mean?

My Norwegian 100 kroner bill, which is in my pocket right now, have for the past few years increased 50% in value compared to the USD. The reason for this is the lack of Norwegian economy?