RE: How would Steemit help deal with the problem of lobbyists? [dTube]

David, your video presentation is based on some very naive ideas.

You advocate for anonymous political donations, but history shows us that anonymity makes things worse. Anonymity gives the wealthiest families in the country the ability to hold onto the most destructive, anticultural ideas and push for social policies that benefit themselves and hurt everyone else. PACs and dark money have made politics worse, not better.

Lobbying can be good. Doctors can inform politicians about the realities of clinical practice. Engineers can inform politicians about cyberterrorism. Economists can inform politicians about banking and international trade.

The problem is corruption, when the lobbying advocates something that would benefit a small group of people while imposing a harm to everyone else. And corruption lives and breathes in secrecy: secret meetings, secret travel, secret bank accounts, secret agendas, secret donations.

If you want to eliminate corruption, eliminate secrecy. All meetings with a politician should be recorded and made available to the public. All campaign contributions should be made by individuals (not collective groups or corporations), and the details must be made public. Corporations should be barred from making campaign contributions.

Why bar corporations? That's easy. Under current law, a corporation must make all of its decisions only one way: to increase profits. Corporate managers would breach their fiduciary duty to shareholders and the company if they made any decision contrary to that. And that one simple fact drives all corporations to push for social policies that benefit themselves, often at the expense of the majority of the population.

The government should have the ability to force corporations out of the political finance game because corporations are entities created by the state. They can't exist without it. They can and should be recognized as legal entities only under a narrowly defined set of reasons. And political speech is not one of them. We protect corporations with an awesome power: civil lawsuits are barred from piercing the "corporate veil" (you can't sue corporate managers individually for their misdeeds). In exchange for that incredibly powerful shield, we the public have a right to demand that corporations be barred from involvement in campaign finance.