this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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I know people who have ran for office and been successful on the city/county level. They made a difference in our communities. The people in government are not any different than you or I.
On a local level there is not even a doubt that we have a lot of control. I have "lobbied" local, state level, and federal level and I can tell you we have less control over the federal side. This does not mean we have no control though.
We are literally the government. The government has the power to regulate speech and exercises it's authority regularly. The judicial branch is well known for regulating free speech in the public sector. We have a lot of laws for things like broadcasting or radio in the private sector.
Unfortunately our government never really caught up with the Internet age quite yet. The regulations they have wrote heavily favor corporate interests. Concepts like Net Neutrality were politicized instead of embraced. We still lack basic privacy protections. We gave hundreds of billions of dollars to telecom to provide fiber throughout the country and they squandered it.
We are forced to use shitty private companies for communication. We have to go through third parties for all our banking needs. Meanwhile these companies lie, cheat, and decieves us. Truly a libertarian hellscape where private interests control everything.
The very reason you dislike the government is the very reason we are here today. Our government is so ineffective it has basically given into private interests. This is particularly noticeable in the Tech sector.
I think it is past time to write a new constitution that actually works for everyone. We need to shed the "for the rich by the rich" part of our government and basically grow up. Governing should be highly regulated and designed to resist corruption.
Yup, and I've thought of challenging my state rep because he always runs unopposed. I honestly don't have time for the job, but my rep is such an idiot that maybe it's worth risking the very remote chance that I'll win. I doubt I'd get >20%, and that's including all the protest and pity votes in my district.
It's also not at all what it says on the tin.
Ideally, something like that wouldn't be necessary at all because nobody owns the internet. Yet for some reason everyone wants to regulate it. If I pay for service, I should get the advertised speed, regardless of what I'm accessing. If someone like Netflix wants to host a cache at my ISP, go for it, but it should only be hit if my DNS resolves to that cache (and I control my DNS).
Yet ISPs, governments, and big tech companies all think they own it. Just back off.
More like a nightmare for libertarians. Everywhere I look there's cronyism, and that's distinctly anti-libertarian. Banks get bailed out when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar instead of the execs serving jail time. ISPs violate their contracts and nobody holds them to task.
I think the opposite is true. Our government is so effective that special interests rarely need to lobby, because our reps sell us out on their own. If you want to see who representatives are loyal to, look no further than their campaign contributions.
The problem is that we keep expecting government to solve our problems without ensuring that they're actually loyal to us, the people. And why should they? It's not like we're going to vote them out next time, we'll keep voting with our tribe because maybe this time they'll listen (they won't).
No, for government to actually be worth trusting, we need massive reforms to realign the federal government with the interests of the people. State governments are often better (esp in smaller states) because there's less to get from buying those reps, though that's not exactly true in my area (Utah, where the predominant church largely calls the shots on important legislation). Some options:
In general, get money out of politics as much as possible, and attack the two party duopoly. That probably won't fix it, but it's a start.
Maybe. I'm not sure what I'd change that couldn't be fixed with an amendment or two though, and that's likely way easier than replacing the Constitution (which I largely like).