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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (43819)	2/7/2002 9:09:45 AM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

You will NEVER take the money out of politics. The better way to play the game is to encourage people of character to enter the political arena and to discourage those who are likely to be influenced by campaign cash.... JLA

To: Lane3 who wrote (43819)	2/7/2002 11:20:08 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

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.

To: Lane3 who wrote (43819)	2/8/2002 4:12:48 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

There are three ways of dealing with this. The first is GOP partisan--to complain that Moore is partisan and that the Dems are just as bad or worse. The second is Dem partisan, to try to bring down the Administration in payback for the impeachment excesses. The third is to take a statesmanship approach--to look at the "game" and the Enron lessons to see if there's a better way to "play" it. I think that Enron is more of an issue of lax accounting then it is a campaign finance reform issue. If it is looked at as a campaign finance issue then I think it cuts both parties as they both received big contributions from Enron, but it doesn't appear that Enron received any unusual favors for its contributions. Turning more directly to the campaign finance issue, I'm not sure what type of improvement I would support except for more openness on contributions to parties and candidates. I would be opposed to many of the speech restrictions that are floated as campaign finance reform ideas. I am particularly opposed to attempts to outlaw issue advocacy statements near an election. I would consider that a direct and obvious violation of 1st amendment rights. Tim