| > Dollars represent disproportional ability to influence who has power. People with a lot of money already possess both, which is why I am perfectly content with people who have money to spend their own money. > Attempts to nudge candidates ability to win are antithetical to our value of egalitarianism. In that case, would you also support prohibiting people from spending their private time or using their public speech to influence election outcomes? No more volunteers, only paid workers funded by the State? The influence of dollars alone on the outcome of an election is already overvalued. Michael Bloomberg already engaged in the grandest experiment to prove that money really can’t buy political office and depending on your point of view here, either succeeded fantastically in that goal or failed miserably in his own goal in what was fundamentally an own goal. It’s also utterly naïve to think that by attempting to resource constrain elections by funneling money through the State to redistribute to campaigns that you will succeed in capping the real economy around election campaigns and prevent the State from giving the ultimate incumbent advantage and using its own official functions to influence the outcome of elections. More than likely you would just be hiding most of the activity around a campaign inside the State itself. The game doesn’t change just because you’re spending public or private money: your goal is to get people to fill out their ballots and submit them in your favor. What changes is whether it is private individuals, from small dollar donors to billionaires deciding how to spend their money (as is their right in all areas of life!) or the State deciding how they are going to spend other peoples money for them, which you know, speaking of, that is a mockery of decency. > Let's just close up shop and vote with dollars like we shop for shoes. So let’s not and say we didn’t. The cost of converting dollars into real votes is high and plateaus. The actual spending is an entire economy supporting the salaries of campaign staff and paying contractors and advertising firms which I am okay with. I’m even okay with putting additional constraints on who can raise money and in the case of local elections, Senate and House seats, from where locking out foreigners and interstate donations entirely changing the shape of that entire economy (provided an appropriate Constitutional amendment is agreed upon and passed), but not one red cent should be coming from a local, State or the Federal Treasury. That’s money to support the functions of the State and the excess should go back to its rightful owners instead. |