Are you more likely to do something if someone you know asks you to do it? What if it’s someone you’ve worked closely with in the past? Someone who paid for your last lunch or lent you money in a time of need?

I don’t know about you, but I would certainly be more compelled to lend a hand to someone who has done the same for me in the past.

It is no foreign concept to return a favor, but it can lead down a dark road in the political sphere.

Obviously, this isn’t a one-to-one comparison. You probably wouldn’t feel as indebted to someone for buying you lunch as a politician would to someone who helped them gain their position or someone who has donated thousands — if not millions — of dollars to their campaign.

When their careers are over in the legislature, many politicians start work in the lobbying business.

Don’t believe that? Here are some numbers from just a couple of hot-button sectors and their lobbying expenditures: the defense sector accounts for $125 million in lobbying expenditures, with about 72% of their lobbyists being “revolvers,” or former politicians and government employees. The health sector spends about $725 million on lobbying and has a revolver rate of about 53%.

That’s just naming a few. I could go on, but I imagine that paragraph contained enough boring numbers to make my point. These industries spend a lot of money in the political sphere, which is worrisome to anyone that disagrees with profiting off of the suffering of others.

Maybe we shouldn’t allow corporate conglomerates to throw millions into politics and hire former politicians to butter up their old buddies. Just a thought.

“No one person should have greater influence than any other,” said Duff Conacher, the co-founder of Democracy Watch, which has been working to promote true democracy (which they describe as democracy uncorrupted by big money and corporate lobbying) in Canada for 30 years. “One person, one vote.”

Conacher argued one shouldn’t be able to use excess capital or prior relationships to gain more say in the political process. Doing so, he said, is an attack on democracy itself.

While Democracy Watch is primarily focused on Canadian issues, there is still plenty we could learn from them here in the U.S.

How do we stop our democracy from being manipulated by corruption and greed? To Conacher, the answer is fairly simple.

“The only way to stop big money is to stop big money donations,” Conacher said.

The median Canadian voter in 2020, according to Conacher, made a political donation of 75 Canadian dollars. Allowing donations above and beyond this number grants a greater political voice to those who can afford it, he said.

The general populace will never be able to compete with these large groups with vast amounts of capital. They shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they please at the expense of the rest of us.

In Canada, Lobbying Commissioner Nancy Bélanger is proposing a change in regulation that would reduce the amount of time required for someone to lobby a politician after working for their campaign from four years to one or two.

This, of course, is a bad idea. No one should ever be allowed to lobby someone they helped get elected, Conacher said.

You have to be kidding yourself to think that, just because some time passes, people forget how they got to where they are. Not to mention who might’ve pulled some strings to get them there in the first place.

If we want our system to work, we need to limit conflict of interest as much as possible. Those who are responsible for the function of our country and representing those who occupy it should be held to a higher standard than they are — a much higher standard.

That is a standard that should be strived for in the U.S. as well. Our democracy (or democratic republic, I’m sure someone is itching to point out) shouldn’t be subject to deep pockets and owed favors.

Hopefully more is done in the U.S. to restrict the power lobbyists and special interest groups have over our politicians.

Or not, and we can all just keep letting them run our country. We can grow complacent with medicine we can’t afford and wars that only serve oil tycoons and weapons manufacturers. If we haven’t already.