[jval]

1. Is money really speech? If so then there's a lot of laws that need to be overturned. Not to mention you can't hold 'free speech' up as a sword to swat away anything that affects speech (libel? slander? copyright violations?). The idea of a constitutionally protected right to free speech is to stop the government from silencing debate. But limiting people from handing money to members of congress isn't stopping your ability to voice your opinion at all, it's just limiting your ability to influence your member of congress by donating more money than the next guy. If anything it increases freedom of speech - it allows all people to voice their views in a marketplace of ideas where the amount of money in their bank accounts is irrelevant, and they are assessed on the merits of their arguments alone. The current situation allows every person to speak, but one person to hold a megaphone.

2. The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist. There will always be powerful people, and hopefully there will always be government, and it will always be in your interests to influence those powerful people so that they can help you out. So in any system where there is a government, there needs to be a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that representatives act in the interests of the public (which is the idea behind representative democracy) rather than the interests of their private funders.

3. Yes, of course it does, but again, that is just a symptom of checks and balances failing. In a system where there is a perfect representative democracy and a strong constitution, the people will never vote for a federal government larger than it needs to be. In the system we have now, the federal government swells in size no matter which party is in government (just depends whether it is the public service, or the military that grows). Private interests fuel this effect and governments wave their hands to make it look like cuts are being made, but they're not.

Lessig has nailed the arguments around why campaign finance reform is necessary - whether he's going to be successful is in question but I think most legal experts can see that the system is broken, with money being the core of the problem.

[dantheman]

1. Can Oprah, or any famous person, support/campaign for a candidate? How is her cashing on her celebrity any different than a person funding an advertisement? And the current laws to a large extent support the idea money=speech. Lessig's group couldn't even follow the campaign laws that already exist (http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2014/11/20/fec-complaint-mayd...)

2. The problem I've identified is that the federal government has grown too large and does too many things. This is the problem, powerful people will be powerful and have an influence on society - through fame, money, etc.

3. Reducing the scope of the government could easily be accomplished if the commerce clause was read in a different way. If granting new power to the federal government required constitutional amendments then it would be better -- prohibition required an amendment, why don't modern drug laws? Additionally, returning the selection of senators to the state government instead of a popular vote would also be be an improvement.

I don't think he has nailed the arguments, I think he fundamentally simplifies and distorts the case. Money is a symptom, the problem is the size/scope/breadth of action.

[vec]

> This is the problem, powerful people will be powerful and have an influence on society - through fame, money, etc.

Absolutely, but that's exactly why the government needs to be large and do lots of things. Take minimum wage for example. Assume that tomorrow the government revoked the power to control wages. What happens next?

Fast food chains and big box stores would push their wages as low as the market will bear. Some employees will quit, but a lot will stay because working 80 hours a week and living in abject poverty is still better than literally starving. There's still a minimum wage, it's just now being set by corporate entities that don't (and shouldn't) have any motivations beyond their own company's self interest.

Or maybe the employees unionize. They get organized and set terms for as high a wage as they can extract from the employers. The employee's quality of life goes up, but the business owners now have no recourse but to pay the demanded wages or close. And the new employment contracts start including clauses about mandatory union membership (including dues). Again, a minimum wage is being set by someone, just not someone who has (or should have) any interest in the larger economic repercussions.

The power exists, and it's going to be wielded by somebody somewhere. The government, at least, is ostensibly motivated by the best interests of the populace at large. That interest is, of course, frustrated as often as its honored in the real world. Still, I don't see how taking power from an institution that only intermittently pursues my best interests and handing it to an institution that never does is in any way an improvement.

[praptak]

> How is her cashing on her celebrity any different than a person funding an advertisement?

1. Popularity is naturally limited - you can only be so popular.

2. Laws made by Congress have negligible influence on Ophra's popularity. Not so with money. Corporations fund laws that make them more money which they can fund laws with.

In general it's the old fallacy of equating people's natural variance in ability - limited, not susceptible to positive feedback loop with the money/power inequality - practically unlimited, strongly reinforced by a positive feedback loop.

[fpgeek]

It's worth noting that the group accusing Lessig's SuperPAC of violating FEC disclosure rules is a well-known opponent of exactly those rules: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/103204564762/on-the-center-for...

I guess you're more trusting, but, personally, when someone is opposed to a rule, I'd take their claims about what the rule actually requires with many grains of salt.

[warfangle]

I hear/read your first argument quite a bit. It's a fantastic piece of social engineering, because it both reduces and reinforces a fundamental cognitive dissonance: Bribes are used to coerce; politicians shouldn't be corrupt and accept bribes; politicians accept vast amounts of campaign money. To ease this dissonance, equating campaign/PAC contributions to celebrity endorsement is amazingly well suited: how could Oprah possibly have that much sway over, say, a piece of federal pork for a dioxin spewing chemical company?

The basic difference, of course, is that social capital is very much different than monetary capital. One is used to buy things, and the other is used to boost signals. One can be taken away by the same individuals who gave it in the first place; the other is taken away at a publicly specified rate, but can be given away freely or traded for goods and services.

Oprah can use her celebrity voice to endorse one or ten or one hundred candidates. There are diminishing returns, of course: how much of a signal boost would it be if Oprah endorsed just everyone? The only time she loses her influence is if she spends too much of it in the same category too quickly, or if the signal she chooses to boost is disagreed with by those who lend her credence and give her the social capital in the first place.

As a signal multiplier, its function is fundamentally different than the signal multiplier of money.

When money is spent, if enough money is available, it can be used to endorse one or ten or one hundred candidates with none of the same diminishing returns. It does not lose its effectiveness if it is spent too quickly on too many different things. If this were about a companies publicly endorsing candidates (and by doing so, putting their brand's reputation on the line) it would be one thing. But this is about companies (or individuals) being able to disproportionately influence policy without risking their own reputation by being associated with the crafting of that policy.

2. If you want to curtail the size of the federal government, one thing you might be interested in is campaign finance reform - so your elected politicians aren't as interested in doing favors for <AARP|Dow Chemical|The Teamsters|Focus on the Family|Goldman Sachs> and are more interested in the plight of their actual constituents.

3. It could be, but you're dreaming if that would ever happen with the number of favors owed the private sector by congress.

He's nailed the arguments, but I don't think new law is ever going to fix it.

The only way to fix it is by making money irrelevant to re-election.

(edit: let me put it in a different way than all that stuff about cognitive dissonance and social capital. You ask what the difference is between an Oprah endorsement and a campaign contribution; I'll ask you: what is the difference between a Facebook status update that gets shared 1,000 times and a Facebook status update the author of which pays for it to show up on 1,000 timelines?)

[Hermel]

> The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist.

The problem is the unnecessary concentration of power in the hands of very few politicians. The key to solving this problem lies less in reducing government powers, but in distributing it better. By the principle of subsidiarity, regulation should always happen at the lowest possible level. At first sight, it sounds inefficient to have slightly different laws that govern the same things in every state. But there is a lot of value in diversity, as it allows for direct comparisons and thereby the system as a whole to evolve much more naturally. Also, it allows for fine-tuning of regulation to local situations.