Hi Martin. Of course, these issues are not black and white. Some special interest organizations have a very noble mission. The mission of most corporations and industry groups is to make money for their shareholders. That is not an evil mission: those shareholders are often the participants of retirements funds. But in many cases there are wealthy shareholders who are greedy. It is a problem, but it is not all evil — only some of it is evil.

The fact that your organization has an internal democratic process does not make it better than a corporation. I am not a member of your organization, and so its voting process does not include me. I don’t know what the mission of your organization is, but it might, or might not, align with my own values.

The fact is, the organization is a group of people who have a collective agenda, operating apart from our government, acting to influence my government.

That’s not democracy.

I am not criticizing your organization. It might have a very benevolent intent. It might be doing great things. If so, please keep doing that! — we need as much of that as we can get, as there are many organizations that are doing bad things.

But we should all remember that “good” and “bad” is always from our perspective.

I personally am a strong advocate for humans settling Mars. Not everyone supports that. I am happy that private companies are attempting it, because I don’t think it would be fair to make everyone else pay for the effort. I don’t think, for example, that any group should lobby our government to convince it to pay for Mars exploration. Such an organization would not be lobbying to make itself richer, but it would have a special interest. And by making campaign contributions to politicians, it would be corrupting our democratic system.

The problem with advocacy organizations is that they each have a single mission, and they advocate for that mission only, using a zero-sum logic. Humans can do tradeoffs: “Well, I think that we should save the goo-goo frog, but that company wants to build a solar farm on that land, and that would, overall, be more positive for the world even if we lose the goo-goo frog, so I agree in this instance to relax the environmental protection for the goo-goo frog in order to allow the solar farm to be built.”

But an organization that advocates for saving endangered species would oppose that relaxation, even if the net benefit for humans and the environment would be positive. They would demonstrate and do all they could to block the solar farm.

European politics varies greatly from one country to another — just as it would in the US if most government happened at the state level. Some would be really corrupt, others less so. Many believe that the Brexit referendum was manipulated. They now have Boris Johnson shutting down Parliament. Italy has had a-lot of corruption problems in its government. In France the yellow vests claim that the government is corrupt. Belgium is rumored to have the world’s richest people who are secretly pulling the strings behind everything. I am not that up on European politics, but humans are humans. Europe is notorious for nepotism and maintaining the status quo — letting established businesses operate and preventing startups from intruding on established business domains.

But I do agree with you 100% about money in politics. Money is what corrupts politics: if money played a small role in elections, then lobbyists would have nothing to offer. The US is suffering because of the unrestrained spending on political campaigns. The political advertising targets the 80th percentile of the population and below, because that is who can be reached with sound bite ads. And that is why the dialog is so base.