While the media corporations are throwing buckets of cash at our lawmakers, the best that wealthy VC firms ($13B wealthy!) can come up with is a strongly-worded letter? Am I just misinformed, or being overly cynical?

Legislators like money, but they like votes more.

I'm sure the VC industry has its own lobbyists, but those as always have to work behind the scenes to avoid being accused of buying politicians.

Then I remember why corruption isn't good for business.

1) A corrupt rent seeking company that depends on the government makes huge profits and has lobbying as a necessary expense in this process. Companies in competitive industries would have a hard time matching those money levels even if the industry itself was larger and created more jobs.

2) The corruption of the current US government is not simply on the level of buying people but rather based on the "revolving door" - congress people become lobbyists become industry executives become regulators etc. This system, again, benefits the most concentrated, rent-seeking companies/industries which depend on the government long-term (defense, health, etc, etc). These have the lifetime jobs available and have been milking this approach for ... a lifetime.

So a government up for bid is definitely a bad government, no escaping it.

What makes you think that they haven't? Seriously - look at how the the govt incentives for "green energy" line up with VC investments. Which way do you think that the causality runs?

WRT "internet openness", VCs don't capture as much of the benefit from buying legislators so they don't bother.

VCs try very hard to be rational about money.

(Yes, they already take management fees, but lobbying would have to be paid out of these fees, not on top of it).

The omissions speak more loudly than the inclusions.

This does not look like a politically influential list to me:

  Andreessen Horowitz
  AOL Ventures
  Avalon Ventures
  Benchmark Capital
  Betaworks
  Court Square Ventures
  Draper Richards
  EDventure Holdings
  First Mark Capital
  First Round Capital
  Floodgate
  Flybridge Capital Partners
  Founder Collective
  Foundry Group
  Greycroft Partners
  Greylock Partners
  IA Ventures
  Index Ventures
  Khosla Ventures
  Lerer Ventures
  North Bridge
  OATV
  Rand Capital
  RRE Ventures
  Softbank Capital
  Spark Capital
  SV Angel
  True Ventures
  Union Square Ventures
  Venrock

  if (freedom.outlawed())
      assert !outlaw == !free

Why is it that we cannot hold lawmakers accountable for shit?

For example it could be a 2 step process where for laws that could be very important and they think the public might want to weigh in on the matter, they could vote whether the law should be voted by the public or not. And even then if say 60% of the public vote NO and are against the law, the politicians could still decide to pass the law, but obviously they could get a lot of bad press if its considered they didn't respect the people's wishes.

I think a mixt system like that or something similar, could be better than what we have today because then we wouldn't have politicians do everything regardless of what the public says, and it also not go to the extreme where you'd have a completely liquid democracy and all votes would be voted by the public.

I'd like to see a system that takes the best of both worlds. I don't know what the exact balance should be, but it could be debated and eventually we could come out with a realistic formula. For example it could be decided that if 51% says NO, then the public has the final decision. But we'd also have to consider a minimum number of voters to make sure the decision would be statistically correct for the whole population.