The political system is really brilliant from the point of view of the rich. You only have to buy 100 senators and 435 representatives (actually, only 67% of them) to decide what 307 million people do, how their tax money is spent, etc.
I also think the real problem is that they are so cheap. Whatever I read about lobbying the ROI is huge.
Obviously having politicians make it more expensive to bribe will have some serious problems too... I think the best would be to make all payments anonymous. If you like what a politician does you support him but he should never know who donated to him.
That won't work at all. There is no way to anonymize the donations. You can always just tell the rep. "That donation you received on such and such a date for such and such an amount was me."
I don't think you can generalize that. As far as I remember Obama got a lot of small donations in 2008 and as a small donor your donations are pretty much anonymous. You don't get any special access for your $100 or less. But people still donated.
Maybe the big donors would go away but I am fine with that.
That problem is easy to fix. The problem it won't fix is that the real bribery is when these guys are given jobs in the same industry for outrageous salaries (compared to market for similar positions).
This is why, even though he is a nutjob on reproductive-rights, I have to support Ron Paul. All these issues should be decided by the states, not the feds.
> All these issues should be decided by the states, not the feds.
Rather OT, but I have a major problem with this line. The population of the U.S. around the writing of the constitution was ~3 million; if it was a state today, it would be one of the smaller ones. In many cases, states are not in any better a position to decide these issues than the federal government. (And with things like SOPA, per-state regulation would naturally be disastrous.) I think at this point, very few things can be well decided at the state level; thus, either the national gov't is needed to keep states from stepping on each others' toes (tax law and internet taxes), or the national gov't is needed to keep states from stepping on the rights of citizens of that state - which they are just as capable of doing as the national gov't was when the idea of state sovereignty was taken for granted.
tl;dr: states are as capable of screwing things up as the national gov't, and tend to be less transparent about it.
The political system is really brilliant from the point of view of the rich. You only have to buy 100 senators and 435 representatives (actually, only 67% of them) to decide what 307 million people do, how their tax money is spent, etc.