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roystonvassey | 4 years ago

Not sure about morality but yes it’s unethical and borderline illegal. If an elected body is planning legislations, actively blocking it means you’re suppressing the voice of the public and the voters.

discuss

order

JumpCrisscross|4 years ago

> If an elected body is planning legislations, actively blocking it means you’re suppressing the voice of the public and the voters

This is reductive. When the Congress was writing cryptocurrency reporting rules, the crypto industry asking for clarifying amendments (to avoid classifying miners as exchanges) wasn't suppressing anyone's voice. It was supplementing it with specialist knowledge.

elliekelly|4 years ago

When we write laws about speeding should we ask sports car owners to supplement the legislative record with their specialist knowledge?

judge2020|4 years ago

They're not "actively blocking it" any more than someone holding a protest outside of the Capitol building is. The difference is that they have lobbying money, which is allowed and generally encouraged by the congresspeople themselves. Any consumer regulation that directly targets an industry is more often than not a call-to-action for the lobbyist to dedicate more of their budget to the lawmaker(s) in question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lobbying_in_the_Uni...

hogFeast|4 years ago

Because the purpose of a govt is to make laws for everyone. The tyranny of the majority is just tyranny in the end (this is what authoritarian govts, ironically, fail to understand about democracy...debate and disagreement seems weak and decadent to them, it is not, I think that US politics has relatively weak controls on lobbying but the perfect outcome is not a ban on lobbying...most successful authoritarian govts operate by claiming to represent the voice of "the people"). And btw, this is how US politics is designed, the people who created the US constitution were very aware of how democracy ended the first time.

HWR_14|4 years ago

> the people who created the US constitution were very aware of how democracy ended the first time.

Being conquered by a foreign power?

How does that relate?