Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (588060)	9/29/2010 5:46:13 PM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574589

The best way to reduce the role of money in politics is to reduce the role of politics on money. Yeah right...more likely that cows evolve wings. Public financing? Its going to be expensive if you are going to finance any challenger to a large enough extent to be competitive in terms of money with those who have a lot. If you don't do that, than you can either impose a universal fairly low level of financing (in which case it doesn't plausibly do much good), or you can make judgment calls about what's fair (in which case the person or group making those judgment calls is effecting the outcome of the election. Also it means you are making people pay for political views they abhor. Not just "mainstream views" they hate (like Ted's money going to support Republicans, or mine going to Obama), but also extreme views, communists, fascists, etc. If you exclude the extreme views than your having the government funding mechanism intervene in the election. OTOH if you give them an equal share that's also an intervention, its not like they would have raised as much as the other candidates without public funding. Public funding is problematic all the way around. I am not sure Kaufman intended to say that it should be public financing in the forced sense, through levies that is. At least I didn't read it that way... Al