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If you want to take the money out of politics, then let's take money out of government. No amount of campaign finance reform is going to take money's corrupting influence out of politics. Campaign finance reform is like treating cancer in a patient by giving her morphine. She can't feel the pain, but is it going to cure her? Absolutely not. The real issue is that government controls so much money that everyone wants a piece of the action.
A lot of the same folks that are bothered by campaign finance corruption are also bothered by the fact that big business stiffs the little guy by paying low wages, providing crappy health care, and by generally trying to make the board of directors rich by stepping on the employees and consumers. But why should the federal government sit on higher moral ground? Why don't we think of government as stepping on the little guy to make the guys up top rich and powerful? We should.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the federal government takes in around 2 trillion dollars each year in tax revenue. According to Fortune, the wealthiest company in American only makes only about 10-15% of that amount. If you add to that the fact that government also has the power to arrest you if you break the law and punish or kill you if you threaten it or one of it's officers, government has much more abuse-able power than even the most powerful corporation. This power is where the corruption lies, not in the use of money to manipulate it's officers.
Fortunately, neither corporations nor government yield their power in a vacuum. "We the People" are able to set limits on what those entities are permitted to do. We vote for the politicians that drive the government. We freely express our opinions about what we think about members of the government. We choose to buy products or not to buy products or to buy stock or not to buy stock or to work for a company or not work for a company based upon our opinion of that company. All of these give each one of us a small amount of power and as trends and fads take hold of "We the People," we wield the power.
In this way, being able to send money to politicians is a boon to We the People. This certainly means that some will hold more power than others based upon the fact that some have more than others. However, those who have more only have it because either We the People gave it to them by buying their products or our ancestors bought their ancestors. There are exceptions, but that's all they are, exceptions, not the norm. To me, trying to restrict the use of money in politics is giving the government the power to keep We the People away from affecting their power. "It's another control in the system," to quote The Matrix Reloaded. It gives the government power to tell We the People that we can't have as much power to have our say. It gives the government more freedom to let the elected politicians stay in power more easily with even less accountability.
No, the real solution to this problem isn't to restrict what We the People get to have influence over. The real solution is to take away that which the government has influence over. If we reduce the amount of money they are allowed to spend, we reduce the incentive for big donors to influence politicians to get their hands on it. Lower taxes and reduce the size of the bureaucracy. Get rid of programs that can be handled competitively or by charity.
Then, when problems arise the power of capitalism helps make sure that the money isn't abused. A corporation that abuses it's employees, it's stockholders, and it's consumers will have a difficult time competing. Similarly, a charity that wastes its money will have a difficult time finding donors.
My recommended solution is far from perfect. In fact, my solution isn't a specific plan as a philosophy. There will be abuses in any system, but if we create a system that works against itself and helps us carry out any punishment directly by just making different choices, we can insure that the abuses take care of themselves. It works in self-policing on-line communities. I think a self-policing real-world community can take care of itself as well.
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Comments:
Removing the ability of a corporation to donate to a campaign is not removing We the People's influence over our politicians.
That's not my point. The point is that government controls more money than anyone else. If large corporations are evil because they're large and employ lots of people and abuse those people, then government is an order-of-magnitude worse. I'm for reducing the magnitude of that problem: shrink government.
On the other hand, since corporations have rights and responsibilities as legal entities, they should also be able to influence politicians.
But that is not the problem with corporations involvement in politics. Their involvement means that they have a larger voice than the people of the country and that their interests will get the front seat with the most powerful politicians in washington because corporations keep the political machine spinning under the current system.
Corps have rights thanks to a crappy supreme court decision, however their social responsibility is dwindling due to their influence in washington.
Who do you think corporations are? Magic entities that run themselves? No, they are run by people. Giving power to the corporations give power to the stockholders of that corporation.
As for responsibilities, I see the opposite happening. Corporiations have more and more rules to follow related to medical, financial, and safety responsibilities every year. With events like Enron and other corporate corruption, we're seeing more and more regulations on how a public company can balance it's books and how it has to release that information. With each loss of proviate data by hacking or misplaced hard drives, we see more and more compliance laws for disclosure of information and privacy policies. Where is their responsibility decreasing?
Corporations are run by people who already have rights in our society. There is no need for the corporations to have rights as well.
As for social responsibility, new laws that protect stock holders are hardly requiring corporations to have social responsibility. All those laws do is protect the group of people you seek to empower even more via giving person-hood to a corporations.
http://yalepress.yale.edu/YupBooks/book.asp?isbn=0300090234
I suggest you go to the library and give that book a read.
Dude. I don't think it would work that way.
heh.. I think he is very naive. We have laze-fare capitalism back in the late 19th century... we wound up with abusive monopolies that over charged and a gigantic disparity between the rich and the poor.
oh... not to mention environmental disasters, overworked employees, no workplace safety or life insurance for workers... the list goes on and on. Society cannot be run as a free market.
Well, I was about to launch a 2nd Dan rebuttal, but then I had second thoughts. We shouldn't slam a newbie too hard :)
Zostay, welcome to. I hope you have fun. Sorry for referring to you in 3rd person, and as a "newbie". I'm sure you will like it in here. It can be a bit tough sometimes, but that's the lay of the land, the age of information, all that.
Glad to see you write exclusives. You made it to my watchlist with the 1st article I read by you.
Claus... the prolific seeder, writer and watcher.
Hey... by the way, I just wrote a new article inspired by your Next American Civil War article, BMS. Did you notice?
I saw the headline but have not read it yet. It is 3 AM here :-)
Claus says:
Okay, how would it work instead? If you're going to disagree, at least give a response that I can answer.
Well, looking ahead, the much bigger problem now is the disparity between the big corporations and the small ones. Each new corporate responsibility added the books makes it much harder for mom-and-pop startups to begin and stay in business. However, the same laws have very little impact on a large corporation, "Ah, we can just hire another specialist to handle compliance on that new one."
I never argued for laze-fare, I argued for smaller government. Some regulation on commerce is very important and I am not going to indicate otherwise. My point is about corrupt politics and the fact that corrupt politicians are awfully tempting if a big company can pad the pockets of the politicians and see that returned ten-fold, then the corruption temptation will continue. If we can reduce the return-on-investment by limiting what that politician is capable of handing out in return, corporations will seek to invest their money elsewhere.
I gave the disclaimer at the end that it wasn't a perfect system, other problems will arrise. However, trying to address the amount of money that a corporation can spend has no effect. Look at the McCain-Feingold Act, it just provided a different set of organizations to funnel the money through. The money hasn't stopped, it just changed directions and now there's a whole extra layer of complexity to the system.
Furthermore, if you take corporations and individual giving abilities away from politics rather than addressing the source of the problem (big government), only the ultra rich will be able to get started in politics. Currently, you have to be, at least, well-connected, and it doesn't hurt to be moderately wealthy so you can host parties and such, to get into national office (it is a popularity contest after all). If we continue down this path, only the "old-money" of the Kerry-Heinz and Bush families will be able to get into politics at all.
Oh, no worries. I wouldn't have bothered to post if I hadn't expected it. Besides, I appreciate tough criticism as it helps refine my arguments and, hopefully, helps deflate my big head a bit. As for being called a "newbie," I haven't been called that in a long while, but it probably won't be the last time and I've been called much worse.
Cheers.
So, you want to reduce the constitutional powers of congress rather than stopping corporations from giving congressmen money?