The Wrong Way to Repair the Election Process

Over the last couple of decades we have had two major movements designed to make our election process more responsive to the public and to try to make the American people less cynical. The first is campaign finance reform, and the second is term limits. It’s interesting that in both cases we propose to make the system freer by restricting it. Sometimes paradoxical approaches like that work. Neither of these is one of those cases.

Robert Samuelson has an excellent column on campaign finance reform on MSNBC. He points out that there is no evidence that campaign finance reform has actually improved anything. This could have been predicted without all the cost of doing studies.

From the time of the founding fathers we have realized that free speech was the best way to give ideas a hearing. Speech has always had its costs. I have to pay for the server on which this blog is hosted. Others who use free services only have to pay a cost in the time they take to produce the information. One of the major premises underlying campaign finance reform is that speech, particularly political speech, should not only be free, it should be paid for. In some countries, this is accomplished by providing time on publicly owned media, or by requiring the media to give certain amounts of time to certain candidates. Here, we have simply tried to keep down the spending–with essentially no success.

This lack of success is a good thing. It means that Americans don’t take well to being told they have to shut up. Why should I not be permitted to express my views on the election in the public media by buying ad space if I want to. What possible public interest is served by this?

The complaint is that major corporations buy elections. But with the multiple sources of information available today suggest to me that the only thing that would allow anyone to buy an election is the laziness and apathy of the voters. Surprise folks! Politicians will keep on doing the things you reward them for. If you re-elect them after they have done unethical things, they will believe you don’t care, for no better reason than that you have shown them you don’t care. If you re-elect them based on negative ads about their opponents, they will believe that negative ads work, again for no better reason than that they do work.

We can make law after law, but none of those laws will fix the basic problem if the American people don’t pay attention to the election, don’t use the sources of information available to them, and don’t get out and vote. It’s amazingly ironic that probably the most empowered people in the history of the world–potentially–sit around at home and whine about not being able to change things.

Heightened regulation of the flow of information is no way to fix and election, or rather, it will tend to provide a way to fix it (pun intended). What all these regulations do is reduce the power of the people and increase the power of lawyers and regulators. Let’s cast a vote for voter responsibility and empowerment. Limit terms–vote the guys out. Manage campaign money–give to the candidate of your choice. Manage campaign advertising–reward and punish the folks who lie in campaign ads.

It’s up to us.