MAYDAY: Larry Lessig launches a Superpac to get money out of US politics

boing
41

My point is simply this. To have certain jobs, in many states, you have to join the union. The union may spend money to influence elections and spend it on a side that you disagree with. That, to me, is wrong. The union can certainly endorse candidates, but they should not be able to spend the member’s money without their permission.

Now, if the union said "We are going to spend $4 of your dues to support a candidate. Which candidate would you like us to support, that would be fair, but would likely result in union money going to both sides of a race.

42

I disagree. The Common Good is certainly in the purview of the State, and sometimes the common good requires changing the incentives in the market. To wit: green energy. If green energy and energy independence are good things for the State, and yet the market does not encourage it, then the State has to step in and encourage it itself.

Likewise for all industries with externalities that aren’t immediately borne by the market. An oil company is polluting the waters? This needs to be regulated for the common good, because the market won’t do so. And yet this can (correctly) be called “tweaking regulations to benefit [or disadvantage] one industry”

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43

“Roads and bridges” was used metaphorically. Clearly I know the government does more than that. The point is that a great many of the things the government spends money on is as necessary for the Common Good as roads and bridges. Not everything, and we can sit and pick-and-choose which things are or aren’t, but at the end of the day the things that are important are going to lead to a pretty large purchasing power. That was my point.

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44

Hey, if you identify the things you are in favor of with “the Common Good”, by all means go for it. We’re all subject to that mental state, including me, and your vote counts as much as mine.

Just don’t kid yourself that there won’t be hundreds of millions spent to influence the decisions of legislators and bureaucrats, when there are billions riding upon those decisions. Virtuous, incorruptible political leaders are a species existing only in the imagination.

45

Here’s where Colbert’s SuperPAC money went, according to this article.

Hurricane Sandy relief
Yellow Ribbon Fund
Team Rubicon
Habitat for Humanity
Campaign Legal Center
Center for Responsive Politics

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46

Nope! It’s because you would rather be smug than make a difference, and people like that are rarely worth paying attention to.

Listen. Do you really want people to hear your point (which is actually solid!) and, perhaps, come to agree with it if they didn’t before? Then you need to present it in a way that doesn’t alienate everyone right from the start. If you don’t care about changing anything as long as you get to feel all badass and impress the people who already agree with you, then by all means continue being insulting and belligerent.

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47

You can do a lot worse with a windfall than donating it to a community support center, which is basically what a lot of churches are. It’s not all singing hymns and oppressing gay people, you know.

48

I’m not sure what you’re arguing against here, because we’re going off on a tangent, but we’re probably in agreement:

  1. The state needs to spend lots of money, though not everyone will agree what it should be spent on
  2. This makes politicians very attractive to corporate money

My point in my original comment was simply

  1. Government regulation exists to change the “simple economics” model – illegal purchases become more expensive, for example. So I’m saying laws do help – making it much harder to give money to candidates or politicians will make a difference and will remove some proportion of the money from politics (although won’t completely eliminate it, of course.)

I wish BBS/Markdown lists weren’t so annoying. I typed a “3” in front of list-item #3, but BBS changed it to a 1.

49

Boy, you sure talk a smooth game. Insulting people in the first sentence is a truly time-tested way to keep their minds open for what you have to say afterwards.

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50

I voted for Jill Stein in the last Presidential election. I still have her campaign bumper sticker on my car. The fact that she received 0.7% of the vote is not my “personal voting failure.”

The #1 thing I heard about her was “who the hell is Jill Stein?”
The #2 thing was “any vote for a third party is a waste because nobody can spend as much as the GOP and Dems.”

The Green Party’s spending on the 2012 campaign was approximately 0.00014% of the $7 billion total.

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51

I fail to see how point #2 is incorrect in this case.

52

“…but at the end of the day the things that are important are going to lead to a pretty large purchasing power.” Which is all the more reason to limit the power and scope of government as much as possible as the “better angels” required to justly lord over us with benevolent rule at the head of an all powerful state are not to be found amongst us.

53

I am not sure about you, but i have not been “oppressed” since I was in 3rd grade catechism class. That was a long time ago…41 years to be exact.

54

It’s… sort of not incorrect, and that is exactly the problem. Money is political power.

55

Regulation does help. Up here (Canada), we got through the 2008 meltdown quite well, at least as far as primary effects went, because our banks are regulated. (Couldn’t entirely avoid the knock-on effects of a slowdown in our customers’ economies, though.)

We don’t have quite the same money in politics problem either. (Our biggest problem is a first-past-the-post riding system that negates the popular vote to an extent. I think you share a similar problem with Congressional districts.) We regulate our election spending quite strictly, which means that most elections are limited to the 36-day minimum campaign length - elections move a lot more quickly.

I think in your country’s case, though, you badly need to do something to curtail the length of campaigning first. We had federal elections during your last two presidential campaigns, and they started long after yours, and finished well before yours.

I don’t think most politicians are venal, at least not initially. I think most of them are like our friend demrick6 here: they might have good ideas and good intentions, but they have the hubris to believe that only they have the answers and can accomplish what’s needed, so it is incumbent on them to do whatever it takes to attain power. (I’ll grant that they are usually much more glib than demrick6.) A long campaign costs un sacco di soldi, and the money has to come from somewhere, and, as long as that is the case, the pols will find that money somewhere (illegally, if you reform financing without taking measures to cut back the expenses that the pols must deploy, which are related to the length of time a campaign takes) and find themselves beholden to others. After a while, helping those others will seem natural (it sneaks up on them), and naturally enough, those others will look after the pol - look at the scratch-my-back deal that Chris Dodds struck with the RIAA.

Which brings up another reform that is needed: you need to put very strict limits on what pols can do when they are ousted or retire, said prohibitions to apply for a reasonably long period after political life (a decade should do). Most of the corruption in your country (and mine, for that matter) takes the form of high-paying work after political life, not outright bribe money during the pols’ term of office. By all means, leave them with good pensions - there should be some reward for public service - but remove the need to seek a financial patron at the beginning of a pol’s career, and the incentive to do so during his term of office.

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56

Yep, absolutely let the best be the enemy of the good.

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57

I would love it if instead of proposing a goal i.e. “get money out of politics”, one of these campaigns would propose an actual policy that could be examined and critiqued so we could get some sense of what the actual results in the real world might be.

58

Unfortunately, the “important things” are too important. Roads, bridges, an electrical grid, fire departments, regulations on e-coli in meat, on dumping pollution in rivers, living without fear of roving militias… these are not things that work by the free market alone.

The only countries that are libertarian paradises are third world countries like Somalia. I don’t think that’s a model we should follow.

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59

An Article V Convention of the States is likely to be one of the few peaceful ways out of this mess we are in. This federal leviathan is not going to reform itself.

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60

Your paragraph 1 is a series of tangential cliches that are individually and collectively not worth responding to.

“The only countries that are libertarian paradises are third world countries like Somalia.” Somalia is about as far removed from a “libertarian paradise” as one can get. Somalia operates, as much as it does operate at all, as an oppressive theocracy. Libertarian theocrats are rather interesting conceptually.

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