Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Campaign Finance Reform

  • Because Government Money Means More Freedom

    Why do these folks want the government to pay for their convictions?

  • Free Speech and Savings Possible

    … at one blow. Eliminate these. I have never been able to understand how controls on the money people use in order to speak could be considered consistent with free speech. In fact, it’s a way to control speech.

    So we could eliminate regulations, reduce the federal budget, make it easier to get into campaigning by getting rid of complicated language, and eliminate the headaches of people who have to figure out a “good” limit on contributions when there is no such thing.

    Oh, and by the way, I considered Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire one of my most useful RSS feeds.

  • More on Campaign Finance

    While deploring the hypocrisy of Obama’s switch on the issue (though still preferring him to McCain), I will be very happy if his action is the death-knell of public campaign financing as suggested in this NYT article (via MSNBC).

  • Public Financing, Integrity, and Mixed Emotions

    Barack Obama has opted out of public financing for his presidential campaign.

    I greet this event with mixed emotions. On the one hand, Obama said that he would accept public financing and the limits that go with it. He is a supporter (or so he says) of public financing. Thus there is a question of integrity. It is simple political tactics–one might say politics as usual rather than “change.” On the other hand, I regard public campaign financing as a very bad idea, and I hope its time is passing. Obama’s action, I hope, will help underline the problems.

    I view public financing as an effort to limit free speech. I know the arguments in favor, in particular the idea that “ordinary” people get more say when you limit the contributions of the rich. But I simply don’t think that is a function that government can or should perform, and I think the history of campaign finance “reform” amply demonstrates that. In effect we have taken the power from those who have money, and given it to those who know how to manipulate the legal system.

    So while Obama has broken a promise, I hope that some good will come of it. The best good, in my view, would be complete elimination of public financing of elections, and also the end of the choking of free speech by attempting to regulate the money. Of course, that is way too optimistic, but I too can dream, can’t I?

  • Campaign Finance, Enforceability, and Free Speech

    It has become fairly well established in current law, as I understand it, that election financing can be regulated quite substantially without violating free speech. Some of the boundary areas are not so well defined, and regulation of those who are not connected organizationally to any candidate has been held unconstitutional in at least some cases.

    Recently, a liberal blogger filed a complaint against Fred Thompson for conducting activities that were inappropriate for an undeclared candidate. (HT: First Read [MSNBC].)

    Now I’m not a supporter of Fred Thompson for president. I think it is vanishingly unlikely that I will vote for him. Nonetheless, I think that campaign finance reform is an area where we have taken a situation that was problematic, and made it much worse through legislation. Having politicians bought and paid for by various special interests, whether they are corporations, unions, or large special interest organizations is something that should concern us all.

    That, and reducing the cost of elections, is the impetus behind campaign finance reform. We are told that if we keep individual contributions small and limit total expenditure, we will somehow make elections better. Well, it hasn’t happened. What we now have is a kind of game between the politicians to see who can get the biggest boost not allowed to his opponent from the existing laws. And those laws are not very clear, precise, or logical. What exactly is the difference between testing the waters and campaigning, anyhow? Sure the law tries to give criteria, but frankly those criteria look to me like an invitation to lengthy debate and possibly litigation, which is, in fact, what has happened in many cases.

    I doubt that any amount of campaign finance reform is going to work, short of the voters deciding to hold politicians accountable for what they say and what they do. I know, I’ve said that about just about everything that we try to do about politicians. But it seems to me that there is nothing that could not be resolved through responsible voting, and at the same time there is no solution to corruption in elections if we do not have responsible voting citizens. All we have done through campaign finance reform and term limits is spread the corruption around and put different labels on it.

    There are those who are saying simply that this is the law, and Fred Thompson ought to obey it. But is Fred Thompson truly testing the waters, or is he a real candidate? A great deal of the accusations against him stem from his collecting too much money–something that indicates popularity, and his position near the lead. But he has not, in fact, done all those things the other candidates have, and I don’t think we can make assumptions about the result.

    Do we generally care if it’s just the law? I’m guessing that some of the folks who think that the election laws are “just the law” and we should live with them don’t take the same approach to immigration. There the laws are broken and need to be fixed, and we shouldn’t criminalize the people who are living within them. Now you may think these are unfair comparisons, but I have a specific point on which I think they are parallel. We each have some area of the law which we think is so messed up that even honest people doing their best to live lawfully find themselves entangled.

    When a law results in otherwise honest people becoming lawbreakers, we should at least reexamine it to see if it’s doing what it should be doing. I think this has happened in the case of immigration. There are areas where workers are unavailable legally, and so people have gotten calloused about hiring them illegally. At a certain point enforcement, while attractive, is unlikely to be successful within a reasonable expenditure of resources. Reform of the law is necessary, and one of the aims of reform must be enforceability.

    Similarly I think our election laws have gotten way off course. We are now entrusting a government that can’t be trusted to count ballots properly with monitoring finances and keeping them honest. I think that too much of the energy of a campaign now goes into satisfying legal proprieties. At the same time there are interesting loopholes. A person can spend as much of his own money as he desires, creating an opening favoring incredibly rich candidates.

    Perhaps disclosure should be the law, thus allowing the voters to see where a candidate is getting his money. But without responsible voters–the ultimate enforcement in this case–that isn’t going to do much good.

    I would say finally that the line between actually campaigning for office, political commentary, and political advocacy is a dangerous one. Personally, despite what the courts have ruled, I think we took a dangerous step when we first regulated speech even in elections. But when we step even further over that line, it becomes even more dangerous. Even though some of the nastiest material in an election comes from third parties, often folks we can’t be sure are unconnected to a candidate, I think that speech must be protected. Again, responsible reading and listening is the key.

  • 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.