Good points.
But what are your suggestions for a better way to play it, given the strictures of human nature, the Constitutional right for companies to engage in political dialogue, and the enormous conflicts of elected or appointed government officials having a huge pot of tax money to dole out to those political parties they think should have it and not those they think shouldn't?
I see only two real approaches.
The first is full disclosure and openess, which we're working on but it's hard because those who have to pass the laws requiring full disclosure and openness are the same ones who will in many cases be embarrassed by full disclosure.
The second is the libertarian approach -- to limit the role of government so severely that there is no economic advantage in influencing politics -- that the government has no pork to throw around. Eliminate the personal and corporate income tax, for example, and you eliminate a huge amount of the benefit corporations think they get from their campaign contributions. Eliminate most federal regulation, and bang, there goes another huge incentive. Corporations and individuals will, for the most part, spend their money on what benefits them. If the government has no benefits it can hand out, either through spending or through laws, the money will vanish.
Oh, yes -- a third is to have people run for office only if they can afford to pay for their own campaigns from their own personal resources. This was the basic principle throughout much of history. I could be wrong, but I don't remember any mention of campaign contributions in the Athenian democracy, for example. But it's not too appealing to most people, I think, to limit the Presidency to candidates who happen to have a few hundred million spare dollars to spend on a campaign.
It's easy to bemoan what's wrong with the system. It's entirely another thing to come up with workable, constitutionally acceptable ways solve the problem. |
