Big Money in Politics

[zoogs]

 

So no proposal... dodge, duck, dip, dodge!

 

My proposal is that we shouldn't waste our time trying to come up with elaborate rules to cut out something that's going to happen no matter what.

We absolutely definitely should not make it a system where we have to give money to all looney politicians equally, and I'm curious how I'm currently supporting David Duke, as you stated above.

 

 

As to my proposal re: addressing the underlying problem of changing incentives around who we get into politics, I've written about that many times in other threads. I'll sum up: we should pay our politicians a lot more to do a lot less.

 

 

I agree with this. I mean, in principle, I like ZRod's idea -- but as cm has been pointing out, how do you filter things out? How do you stop a zillion terrible parties from forming and claiming a slice of that megaphone pie? There's something arguably "fair", but also problematic, about let's say the schmuck who challenged Paul Ryan's seat in Wisconsin getting the same resources (from the public, no less) as a serious politician.

 

So there's really no neat way to do this. Not that I agree with just paying politicians a lot more and expecting them to suddenly stop behaving like politicians. Nor do I agree that what we have now is fine, particularly at the local level. It just seems like an ill that we have to combat, and not something we can simply legislate away entirely.

 

All that said, please do overturn Citizens United.

[cm husker]

I'm fine with overturning CU because I don't think society should be prohibited from regulating corporate spending because we created corporations in the first place.

 

That said, how do we regulate after it's overturned? Should unions be restricted in spending member dollars on campaigning for pro-union positions? Are we basically saying that each individual member could do that same campaigning, but they can't do it in coordination? That seems unfair.

 

Same applies to shareholders in a company; why can't they work in coordination, through their corporation, to obtain the legislation they want?

 

This is why I think the underlying issue is: does it make sense to have a government that can be used as a weapon through legislation to achieve a private interest result (i.e., a special interest goal)?

 

To my thinking, no, that is inappropriate, and the only way to reduce it is to reduce the power of the legislature in private social and economic life.