Campaign finance reform is pretty simple
January 25, 2010 – 1:34 am by JohnMany of my friends and millions of people in the blogosphere/social-mediasphere have expressed their outrage and indignation at the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations can spend as much as they want to promote or oppose whatever political candidates or causes that they want. One of my friends said she was saddened and angered by it, and another described it as a “sad, sad day for democracy.”
To understand why corporations, unions, and lobbyists spend such vast sums of money on political contributions is to understand how campaign finance “corruption” could be done away with in a clear, easy, and fair way. The reason they spend so much is because they get so much in return! With every political campaign and every election, a huge amount of money is at stake for every business—and most individuals, for that matter—and especially for the largest corporations, whose success and riches depend upon the corporate-political establishment. They spend so much money because there is the potential to get so much in return. The fact that large corporations donate money to opposing candidates and their parties is proof of this: it isn’t ideology, it is just good business.
My liberal friends and seemingly the majority, or a large minority, of Americans interested in politics are neither outraged nor saddened at the affront to individualism and self-governance that our current fascist-corporatist political-economic system represents. The mob elects legislators and bureaucrats who rule over everyone, whether we voted for them or not and whether their plans are in our best interest or not. They take people’s money and do whatever they want with it without our consent, and they’ve proven their ineptitude at spending our money in every way and at every turn. Obviously very few people are upset about this, beyond occasionally booting out incumbents who didn’t redistribute enough wealth. But now people get outraged because corporations can donate and spend as much money (part of which is our confiscated money) as they want to influence how their/our money is spent and how the conduct of business is governed in this country, whereas before, corporations could only spend a limited amount for such purposes.
First of all, those people have picked an awfully odd point to become saddened or outraged. If they thought about this issue from a principled angle, they would have been outraged long before the dollar amount for political donations/promotions was uncapped. But, most importantly, if you want to end the undue influence that corporations have on politics, get politics out of business! If politicians didn’t have the power to govern so many aspects of our lives, including the economy, then corporations, unions, and lobbyists would have no chance to engage in rent-seeking. As P.J. O’Rourke quipped, “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” In summary, achieving a state of less democracy, with its idiotic wealth redistribution and its monopolistic enforcement of mob-rule, would greatly reduce the influence that corporations have on politicians because politicians would have less influence on everything.
