[Originally posted February 10, 2006]
I’ve been reading the book Why Not? by Ian Ayres & Barry Nalebuff. They brought up a really good idea, in light of all the scandals we’ve had recently in politics. So the basic problem is that it costs a lot of money to run a campaign, especially for a federal office. People who donate a lot of money tend to get favors. We’ve seen this with the recent Duke Cunnigham and Tom Delay prosecutions.
My initial idea was to just limit all campaign financing to public funds. So there’d be a fixed amount that each candidate is alloted and they could not spend more than that. There are some concerns with limiting free speech. Plus no one in goverment would vote for that proposal because of their self interest. Well what if we instead require that all donations be anonymous. The candidates would not be allowed to know who contributed money to their campaign. If we have a central trust fund through which all donations must be processed then we could just earmark each donation for a candidate. Some people have said, “Couldn’t someone just tell the candidate that they contributed on a certain day so they can look for the spike in the contribution?” Granted they could, but if there were lots of contributions then the spike would be less evident. We could also allow people to make contributions and then decide up to a week or two later that they want their money back. If we require the trust to write a check back to the contributor then the contributor still has a canceled check which they can wave around claiming that they contributed. This allows everyone to basically say the contributed without necessarily doing so and negating the benefit. The whole point of this is that no one could ever prove that you didn’t contribute.
I really think this is a capital idea. Now how do we go about and get our elected officials to vote for it. It’s obviously not in their favor, but hopefully they see that this is the best way to nip the problem in the bud. They can keep their earmarks, but we can eliminate political favors. While we’re at it, why don’t we require that all political advertising done by third parties (not the candidates) be completely anonymous as well. They only way to find out the producer of the commercial is if they get a court order based on defamation or derogatory remarks?
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