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Always look on the bright side Fox News asks the question: “Will Obama’s $604M Haul Kill Off Public Financing?” Ask any Libertarian and I am sure the answer you will hear is: “I certainly hope so!”.
No Libertarian presidential candidate has ever accepted stolen funds for their campaign. Perhaps the attempts to regulate political speech have simply reached the point at which even a Socialist Democrat recognizes they are better off not accepting State controlled financing.
If the Republicans stay out of the trough as well four years now, perhaps we will at least get the State out of campaign financing.
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I wouldn’t hold my breath:
http://reason.tv/video/show/531.html
Obama’s funding is still public funding — problem is it is Chinese public funding.
(Otherwise, why would the Big O refuse to release the names of his hundreds of thousands of willing US citizen small contributors?)
(Otherwise, why would the Big O refuse to release the names of his hundreds of thousands of willing US citizen small contributors?)
Apart from the statist assumption that failure to disclose is definite evidence of malfeasance, I am wondering why should he disclose at all?
It might be nice to know just who is buying the presidency.
Precisely. The only sort of campaign finance “reform” I could support would be elimination of all contribution limitations but immediate disclosure of the identities of all contributors. All politicians are “bought”; we should have the right to know by whom.
In the new climate of open-ness, registration with the State means you will get nasty phone calls from ideologic leftists; perhaps threats to get you fired and all sorts of underhanded peraonal attacks.
If you were a Republican working in a Union shop, what do you think your life would be like when your Komisar, er Union Boss, gets hold of the information that you have made improper use of your wages by donating money to the ‘wrong Party’?
Or if you are a shopkeeper in Berkeley and you end up with protestors outside your shop passing out flyers condemning you as a warmongering right wing fascist for donating to ‘the wrong party’?
This is not happening to Libertarians (yet) but for those of you who are Republicans, this is not a theoretical issue. People have indeed been held up for public punishment for incorrect thought.
Ballots should be secret and donations should likewise be a private matter. How I use my money is my own damn business, not the world’s.
“How I use my money is my own damn business, not the world’s.”
But if I choose to use my own money to influence national politics, then that does become everyone else’s business.
As Laird says, let any citizen contribute any amount, with immediate full disclosure.
As an aside, the Big O was all for tax-payer financing when he thought he might need the money, and then abandoned the commitment when he found the spigot to unlimited anonymous contributions. What does that tell us about relying on any other “commitment” Barry has made?
Alice:
So does voting. Should that be made public too? I usually support Laird’s position on this, but Dale’s comment made me rethink this.
The courts have allowed exceptions to reporting requirements, generally for communistic parties, to keep their members from being harassed. This sort of thing might survive even an Obama Presidency.
“So does voting. Should that be made public too?”
Thought-provoking point, Alisa. When I cast my vote, it is my vote & my vote alone — private business. My vote does not influence anyone else’s vote per se, although it does obviously affect the result of the election.
On the other hand, when I make a financial contribution to someone’s election campaign, I am deliberately trying to influence the way that other people vote. So those other people are entitled to know that I am trying to influence their vote. My financial contribution is public business.
If someone — say a “perfumed prince” from the Pentagon with a subsequent uninspiring track record in the State Department — publicly endorses a candidate, says that he is going to vote for his candidate, that is an effort by said perfumed prince to influence the way other people vote. And his “vote” is of course fully public — as it must be, since the perfumed prince has made it public business.
There is nothing inconsistent about saying that my vote is private (unless I choose to disclose it), and also saying that my political contributions are not private.
I usually find myself in agreement with Dale (and Alisa), but not here; I’ve stated my position and I stick to it. However, there is one proviso: The quid pro quo of disclosing the identities of all contributors, however small, is that there be no limit on the amount of contributions. George Soros is already buying elections and politicians; if some other wealthy guy wants to contribute $10 million (or whatever) to someone’s campaign that is (or at least, should be, if the Supreme Court were other than a bunch of toadies) his Constitutional right.
Signing McCain-Feingold is yet another of George Bush’s unforgiveable sins. At the time, he said (I’m paraphrasing) that he thought it was unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court would make that decision. Guess what, George? You took an oath to uphold the Constitution, too, which gives you not only the power but the obligation to veto crap like this. It is indeed sweet irony that McCain is now being hoist by this eponymous petard. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Alice, this is irrelevant. One has the right to influence the votes of others, either publicly or in private, as long as it is done prior to the actual casting of the ballot. What seems to bother most people who support the so-called campaign finance reform, is not the fact that some people influence the way other people vote, but the fact that this influence is being applied through the use of money. That is nonsense, as a person has every right to use their money to support people and ideas of their choosing, just as they have the right to use any other resource at their disposal, such as their mouth, their pen, their access to the internet, their car (to get to political meetings) or their home (to host them). So lets indeed put voting aside, and go back to Dale’s scenario, modifying it somewhat: if I want to convince people to vote for a certain candidate, using any means other than monetary contributions, should I be required to do so openly?
Laird, you seem to be ignoring the very important point Dale made in his last comment.
Dale, you have not explained to us why we should let Saudi princes and
SovietRussian thugs secretly buy our elections.All voter’s act of voting is (and should be) a matter of public record, not the content of the vote, but the existence of it. We do not allow Saudi princes and
SovietRussian thugs and their minions to vote in our elections.As long as we allow the substantial number of idiots who believe what they see on the TV (and think ‘platitude’ and ‘plan’ are synonyms) to vote (anybody got a plan for that?), we need to know who is buying their votes.
I’m with Laird on this. No limits, total disclosure. I have no time for the plan that our elections’ outcomes should be a clandestine budget item on some fascist Islamic oil state’s budget. Or a Venezuelan one’s either. Disclosing the source will nullify that much more safely than anything else I can think of. Do we really want to subject campaign spots to some official ‘truth’ test? What alternatives are there?
I make no secret of my contempt for democratic supremacism but it is functionally what we have and there can be no doubt that money buys a lot of votes. I grew up in Chicago and the suburbs in a Republican family. The bullying started to my recollection already by 2nd grade when my Chicago public school class was told to show hands for either Johnson or Goldwater. But even so, I would rather be intimidated by domestic bullies than outbid by foreign ones. We could allow every single American donor to be intimidated and it still wouldn’t equal the tiniest part of China’s ‘defense’ budget. Of course, they have never tried to buy a presidential election, or have they?
While I think campaign funding should be restricted to US citizens, I don’t really see any way to do more than drive it underground so it is probably better to not stipulate citizenship. But criminalizing campaign funds laundering (using a public ‘shell’ donor to conceal the real source of the funds) would be of some use.
“One has the right to influence the votes of others, either publicly or in private, as long as it is done prior to the actual casting of the ballot.”
Now I am confused, Alisa. How can I influence the votes of others “in private” except by anonymous financial contributions? (Let’s ignore my attempts to influence the votes of others after the actual casting of the ballot).
If I try to influence how another person votes non-financially (short of slipping them a Vulcan mind-meld), then at least one other person knows what I tried to do. It is no longer “private” — at least it is no longer in my control. But I have no problem with my effort to influence the votes of others through public acts like discussion & knocking-on-doors being in the public domain.
The issue is really about using money anonymously to influence other people’s votes. For the record, I am with Mid on this one — “No limits, total disclosure”; although I would have added, “immediate publicly-accessible disclosure through the internet”.
Alice: good point (and Mid too). I am back to square one…:-)
Mid is right.
Over the years there has been a vague tendency for the Dems to Pal up with our Labour and the Republicans with the Tories and I consider it unseemly.
That’s just unseemly. The antics of the likes or Iran and China and Russia and Chavez are positively nasty.
Jesse Jackson (who seems back inside Obama’s tent pissing out) has hinted that the Obamanon would throw Israel under the bus. Now who d’ya reckon might be getting that as a quid pro quo?Could it be a certain loon in Tehran? A load of wahabbi nutcases in Riyadh?
Hostile foreign powers tinkering in other people’s elections is in my book verging towards an act of war. And for those who accept the cash it is pretty damn close to treason.
The point about political donations isn’t so much about the influence it buys over the electorate, as over the candidate. That’s why donations should be a matter of public record, we need to know who thinks he is buying the power to influence the candidate.
Yes I agree no limits but total disclosure.
Donations to political parties are not the same as voting, which should be a secret between the voter and the ballot box.
I want to know exactly who is backing whom, and presumably wishing some future favour in return.
I was listening to the mayo show the other week, which was coming from Chicago.
One guest on the show was a University of Chicago proffessor of Economics (sorry cant rember the name).
He had a book to plug, cant remember the name of that either, but it was full of what I would call Pop Economic theories.
One was why Real Estate agents rip you off (doh!), but another of his theories was that the person who collects and spends the most money in an election, almost always wins.
But not by the mere fact of attracting the most money.
He reconed that the person who the folk with the money to donate, make the choice to back, is percieved to be the likely winner or the best canditate, and thus attracts the most backers.
So it is not just the money in his book.
Did I explain that right? I hope so.
RAB, sounds like you’re describing “Freakonomics,” by Steven D. Levitt (an economics professor at the Univ. of Chicago). It is an interesting book, and on a superficial reading some of his ideas seem to make sense. However, I would recommend another book, “Freedomnomics,” written in response to it by John R. Lott, which offers some contrary ideas.