Evidence? A former FEC chairman authored a study that suggests that’s not true:
Every systemic study conducted of legislative voting behavior has concluded that campaign contributions have little or no effect on that behavior.
This quote stood out to me:
Professor Frank Sorauf of the University of Minnesota, the nation’s foremost commentator on campaign finance, points out, “Very few aspects of American politics better fit the metaphor of Plato’s cave than the realities of American campaign finance.” What most political scientists and other experts know as reality is vastly different from the “grotesque images projected onto the wall of the cave.”
You may wish to find one of the many studies published after 1995 that have shown the many ways in which campaign contributions have shaped policy (from simple things like purchasing access, or shaping political viewpoints of candidates, to the flat out corruption of lobbyists writing bills that set policy). There are a plethora of them trivially discoverable that a casual search will easily find. Alternately, you could just research the specific example I already offered. Sadly, since I now see that you are a libertarian (and someone who cites a GOP FEC Chair as a source), I’m afraid we can’t have a discussion. Nothing personal, but every discussion previously attempted with a libertarian has been identical to one with an actual Marxist where a naive idealized pure ideology that cannot fail can explain all, and overrides any concern with facts, data, or the messy complexity of reality.
I got a quote that he found it “sinful and tyrannical”, but there’s all sorts of reasons why I shouldn’t trust the moral reasoning of Jefferson on this subject to apply today. Among them, that he owned slaves and therefore probably isn’t a very good moral authority on anything.
(Yes, yes, I know…I’m not supposed to judge people in the past by modern mores. But by the same token, we probably shouldn’t hold up people in the past as moral exemplars and use them to make arguments from authority for our pet policy prescriptions, especially when they pretty clearly weren’t very good moral exemplars in the first place.)
And an election which features candidates who aren’t from the two major parties would benefit you as well. It is arbitrary to assert that the person is being funded as opposed to the election.
So from this perspective, it is not a candidate who is comparable to a road, but the whole election, and the candidates are more like the contractors who build the roads. Contractors who build roads, after all, benefit from the building of those roads disproportionately to all those who actually use the roads, just as the candidates are supposedly disproportionately beneficiaries of our hypothetical campaign finance scheme.
This is a bit nonsensical – obviously candidates try to get into office for other people’s ends as well – this sentence seems to suggest there’s no such thing as a constituency. But regardless, elections are run for the good of the public even if campaigns are not.
In this case, we are regulating campaigns – which, not being run for the good of the public, seem like perhaps not such a bad target for regulation if you aren’t ideologically opposed to any regulation whatsoever – to improve elections, which are run for the good of the public.
But perhaps more interestingly, you and every other taxpayer in the US are already forced to pay to support other people’s opinions. “Yes, but I don’t agree with it,” you say. OK, what serious actions have you taken to overturn this clearly “sinful and tyrannical” state of affairs? After all, tyranny is pretty serious.
What if you could, through a relatively minor and forgiveable lapse of your determination not to fund anyone’s opinion, support a viable candidate whose platform is to end the monopolistic status of the big three TV networks and defund public radio and public television? Surely, the fact that these institutions suck up millions of tax dollars to support people’s opinions makes it a moral imperative to find a way to stop it. And we know from the fact that Jefferson owned slaves that he wasn’t opposed to making a bit of a compromise on matters of principle for the sake of convenience.
So what about campaign finance regulation for the purpose of giving people the chance to vote for libertarian candidates. I know I’d prefer a state of affairs in which libertarian candidate had a fighting chance.
You’ve found a way to do so? How?
Don’t give me a list of policies and laws to repeal. Tell me about how you’re going to get candidates elected who will actually repeal them in the numbers necessary.
And Stephen Levitt thinks it has no effect – my policy is to always bet against the Freakonomics guys (“everything you know is wrong” narratives are usually wrong).
Before you decide, though, try to bear in mind what every free market guy should already know: advertising really, really works!
In a nutshell…holy shit yes money buys access and influences the political process that follows once a candidate is elected.
This point really should not be in dispute. One shouldn’t argue against it based upon examples of money not WINNING elections (like Jeb Bush), which is only a small part of the problem (the greater part is that the contributions buy future access to and control over the candidate that regular citizens do not have, especially if the candidate expects to have a second election).
Nor should one have held that opinion up until now, it’s not hard information to acquire…but happy to educate!
I don’t want public money to promote the opinions of any individual candidate, I want public money to inform the public of who is running for office so they can make educated decisions about who to vote for. Doing so through a centralized body wouldn’t work because everyone would claim the centralized body was biased (although other countries do have non-partisan publicly funded analysis of election platforms), so allow each candidate to run their own campaign seems the most workable solution. Above, I compared it to a hurricane - the government lets us know hurricanes are coming, it seems reasonable that they would let the public know that Clinton might be the next president.
You’ve got my name attached to one of @goodpasture’s quotes in your post. It’s because I was quoting that poster’s text in my own post, not because I wrote it originally.
Repeated? If you can find an example of just world fallacy in action, I’ll be glad to eat those words, but I explicitly rejected the assumption that outcomes are based on merit earlier in the thread.
If the study had been one page saying, “I’m a former FEC Chair and I think X,” you’d have a point, but that wasn’t the argument he was making. It’s unreasonable to disregard the claims of experts with a demonstrated depth of knowledge.
Evidence?
Because @nemomeno fused it as an excuse to dismiss the man’s argument without engaging with it.
I didn’t say “BELIEVE ME BECAUSE THOMAS JEFFERSON,” I said only that Jefferson articulated the principle very, very well: if the freedoms of speech and association are sacrosanct, forcing people to fund candidates whose views they find abhorrent is immoral.
(BTW, you can condemn the founders’ view of slavery based on the mores of their time, too: Robert Carter, Jefferson’s neighbor, simply released his 500 slaves from bondage while Jefferson was diddling Sally Hemings down the road. Jefferson’s moral repugnance in this aspect doesn’t negate his literary skill, any more than Gertrude Stein’s collaboration with Vichy negates hers.)
No, I wouldn’t support a candidate whose platform called for the end of government-subsidized political opinion if he accepted a government subsidy to disseminate his political opinions.
You’ve found a way to institute a publicly financed election system? How?
Don’t give me a list of different ways it could be instituted or idealized forms it could take. Tell me how you’re going to get candidates elected who will actually pass these laws (and, incidentally, how you’re going to get around the Supreme Court).
Or, y’know, we could continue discussing this as a matter of morals and principles instead of demanding blueprints and action plans of each other.
I never said that; @Marktech asserted that the status quo amounted to “legalized bribery”, a.k.a. quid pro quo. The study I cited disputes that (and there are others).
You cited four studies (two of which are behind paywalls — if you can offer excerpts or provide copies in PDF, I’ll happily read them), but they don’t quite address the point I was making to Marktech.
The Duke study admits that quid pro quo is “likely to be relatively rare”; the Stanford study underlines that its findings only show “an appearance of corruption — the key word being appearance” and that “‘smoking gun’ evidence of corruption is beyond [its] scope”.
The Atlantic Wire piece that @wysinwyg cites concludes that spending more money correlates to receiving more votes, but, as the author of the piece repeatedly stresses, correlation does not equal causation.
Trying to distinguish between funding an election and funding a campaign is a distinction without a difference. Elections are won by he who persuades the most people to vote for him; campaigns are the mechanisms of persuasion.
Even a dispassionate “inform the public” rationale would necessitate using my money to do so, which means I would be paying my political opponent to tell me about his policies, in order to persuade me to vote for him. This is forcing me, against my will, to support political opinions I do not agree with.
And where does this money come from? Does it materialize out of thin air?
Yes, you’re right that I attacked you. I’m exhausted and in a crap mood, so I’ll probably do it again. Please don’t read ahead if that kind of thing upsets you. After your response to my first reply, I offered an exhortation to do research, and declined a discussion since you not only were asking for evidence I’d already provided an example of, but also cited a person who is literally the least reliable and most biased source conceivable on the topic (a 20 year old report from an FEC chair, WTF), and on top of that I noted that you are the type of person I’ve had enough fruitless “debates” with in the past that there was no hope for a meaningful discussion (a judgment that keeps getting reinforced). That was definitely grouchy, but not an ad hominem, since neither exhorting someone to be familiar with readily available information (after providing some that was ignored), nor bowing out of a discussion are a syllogism. I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, I’d say you’re not worth discussing this issue with. I did skip out on one burden of proof, but since you’d already shown you were willing to ignore proof, I saw no responsibility to carry on with that.
Let’s suppose all the recent research on the topic is very consistent in overturning the earlier scholarship that said there was no effect. Do you really think Cato would publish something about that? I don’t really need evidence that Cato is biased. They are a think tank. Bias is their purpose.
That is consistent with disputing a source due to bias, which is not a fallacy.
No one said you had to use a Cato publication as a source. You could have picked something less obviously biased.
If you remove most of the dependent clauses, you end up with a stirring condemnation of his primary source of income:
“To compel a man…is sin and tyranny.”
Sure, but some people are capable of reconsidering their philosophical commitments.
I don’t subscribe to the sort of rigid, rationalistic moral ideology that is required to cleanly separate “morals and principles” on one hand and “action plans” on the other.
For that matter, I don’t adhere to a rigid, rationalistic moral ideology at all. I try to constantly remember that I do not have a simple and obvious system to determine right from wrong, good from bad, or just from unjust. And as a result, I do not only consider the intent of my actions, but their actual effects on other people – and observe the same for others as well.
Only if you circumscribe yourself to an extremely narrow, simple-minded interpretation of what it means to “benefit” you.
As if the particular legislation she took advantage of was the only possible.
As is trying to distinguish between funding a road or funding an election. From one point of view. From another point of view, it is a distinction with a very important difference, as you yourself argue.
Likewise, funding an election vs. funding a campaign is a distinction without a difference – from one point of view. From another point of view, there is a huge difference.
No, elections are won by the person who received the most votes. It’s entirely logically possible for a candidate to win without attempting to engage in any persuasion at all. The reason why that seems implausible is one of many reasons why a certain rigid, rationalistic, economics-focused moral philosophy is unworkable.
So there you go, a distinction with a difference.
You only have “political opponents” if you’re running. Otherwise, everyone who is running is an option, and moreover they’re likely open to influence through persuasion and public opinion. As we all know, a market with more players is more efficient. With more options, it’s easier to find compromises, and it’s easier to find more innovative solutions. All these things benefit you – if you don’t adopt an extremely narrow, simple-minded interpretation of the concept of “benefit”.
I suppose you think it comes from the sweat off your brow?
