Parts of the Left’s mockery industry are having a go at me this afternoon for a short segment I did on MSNBC this morning. The host, Stephanie Ruhle, asked me about Elizabeth Warren’s pledge not to do big-dollar donor events. I was not impressed. Then, this happened:

I argued that given the stakes involved in American politics — and the high degree of voter ignorance — that I wasn’t convinced that there was “too much money in politics.” Stephanie was surprised by my answer, and the Raw Story described her reaction with this amusing headline: “MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle drops some side-splitting mockery on conservative for his strange defense of money in politics.” Media Matters dutifully covered the moment, and a Kos diarist said that my argument was “astonishingly dishonest and moronic.”


Calling something moronic or dishonest doesn’t make it so, and I have some pretty compelling facts on my side. The 2018 Congressional campaign was the costliest in history, at an estimated price tag of $5 billion. In 2016, election spending for control of the presidency and Congress hit $6.5 billion. That’s an enormous sum, right? We’re spending way too much on, well, deciding the leadership of the free world, questions of war and peace, and the shape of our national health system, right? Well, if you believe that we should spend dramatically less on elections than we spend on pet food. Heck, we spend almost as much on pet grooming and boarding as we do on selecting the men and women who govern the world’s sole superpower.

As I argued in the segment, money buys direct access to voters. It allows candidates to share their message without media filtering. It allows them to become household names, to define themselves, and to tell their story. Of course — as Stephanie notes in response — much of modern candidate advertising is stupid and mendacious, but that’s because so many of our candidates are stupid and mendacious. But, fortunately, when you can gain direct access to voters, you at least have a chance of rebutting the worst claims without relying on media interest, fairness, or “fact checks.”



Moreover, the absence of money doesn’t necessarily mean the presence of integrity or a leveling of the playing field. Candidates have to become known somehow, and if that somehow in any way relies on the often-fickle access to cable news and their segmented audiences, then they’re only reaching a slice of the electorate. They have to penetrate the broader culture. One way to do that — in the absence of cash — is with existing fame, something that Donald Trump exploited to the hilt in 2016. In fact, his fame helped provide him with an immense earned-media advantage. If you’re a news producer, and you’re given the choice between hosting a relatively unknown Republican or one of America’s most famous people, which person would you choose? Do we really want to create and maintain political system that provides celebrities with even more built-in advantages?

Indeed, the argument against money in politics often isn’t so much against an argument against money itself but rather an argument against private money. Public financing schemes proliferate on the Left, placing the levers of political financing in the hands of elected political officials and often requiring members of the public subsidize views they detest. A “forced to fund” model is disrespectful of individual liberty, and it creates a whole host of political challenges in determining how money is allocated. Asking politicians to petition their government for money is hardly inherently preferable to asking them to petition citizens for necessary funds. In fact, the early quest for campaign cash often provides a nice test of a politician’s appeal.


Given the choice between government allocations and the free funding choices of a free people, I’ll take freedom. As for the amounts? We’re talking about spending money to communicate political arguments to a continent-sized democracy of more than 300 million souls. It can take hundreds of millions to market something as inconsequential as a single movie. Spending a few billion to decide who has the authority to spend trillions is hardly a national scandal. In fact, we could stand to spend more. Outside of the political subculture, Americans often hear too little from candidates and know too little about the people they support. Let the mockers mock. We need more speech, and more speech requires more money. I know that politics isn’t everything, but it’s at least as important as dog food.

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