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Re: Ethical Standards: Rich People & Large Companies Donating to Political Parties January 26, 2020, 10:29:03 PM Merited by Quickseller (2) #12 Quote from: KonstantinosM on January 25, 2020, 01:23:31 PM Public funding of election campaigns with an individual cap and also zero allowances for corporations and businesses to make donations.



Corporate interests always use the excuse that a corporation is out to make money when they're caught doing shady shit. Well, if that's true then they shouldn't be allowed to participate in politics, since they're only interested in a fundamentally corrupt tit-for-tat sort of transaction with the politicians and the political parties involved.



Public funding, would ensure everyone gets some exposure.



An individual limit would ensure that the rich don't get amplified too much.





The most important thing in my view would be paying citizens to attend the most important elections.



If everyone got $100 to vote then the turnouts would be huge. That money is money that would go straight back to the economy thus it would regenerate a decent amount of taxes and economic activity (since the recipients would largely be working poor).



Well the current issue with public funding is that it would only work in theory and in a vacuum of everything else. Because even if you remove the wealthy and corporations from donating directly to campaigns, you're still left with them being able to air their own advertisements for a campaign. This is why SUPER PACS are present right now.



To explain this simply: There are funding restrictions on the amount of money that people and corporations can give directly to a campaign, but it wont stop them from spending their own money to buy billboards, release tv ads, radio ads, and so on and so forth stating that they support that candidate.



So even with public funding, some will get exposure, but others will get a ton more exposure depending on who supports them (and who has money) Money isn't always a determinant in showing who will win, but it does ensure that the two party system is stable. Clinton outspend Trump 2:1, but the two of them were both interested in ensuring that the status quo stays the same and that the rich continue to be richer.



Quote from: theymos on January 26, 2020, 07:22:41 PM If you strictly limit campaign financing, then it just supports different types of influence. If powerful interests want to influence government, they're going to do it no matter what. (It's not as if they're going to break laws very often: they'll just find alternative ways to exert influence.)



If for example every campaign was required to be 100% publicly financed, then it would be difficult for anyone to stand out, and this would greatly benefit the established parties and incumbents, even in >2-party systems. Since most voters wouldn't know much about any of the candidates, or wouldn't be able to distinguish between them, they would usually just vote for their favorite party. Upsets would occasionally happen, but not frequently enough to make a difference. Powerful interests would move more toward cozying up to the parties themselves. For example, a CEO might be active within the Republican party, and when a Republican president needs unemployment to go down, he'd ask the CEO to avoid layoffs; subsequently, there'd be an implicit expectation that someone in the Republican party would repay this in terms of more favorable policies in the future. Or a billionaire under investigation for something or other while a Democratic president is in office would "just happen" to donate $50 million each to Planned Parenthood and the Brady Campaign (ie. ideologically Democrat organizations). This kind of thing happens a lot even now, and happened even more in the past when campaign financing laws were more strict. The boost to incumbency and party strength might actually make influence more streamlined, since politicians would have to worry less about being primaried, and would therefore have to care less about satisfying their base. Though honestly I don't think that campaign finance laws have that much effect on anything: powerful interests will find ways to influence things regardless.



Democracy is just inherently not a good way for decisions to be made. In the specific case of government, where citizenship is more-or-less involuntary, maybe democracy is on average better than very top-down/entrenched political systems. The US Framers' original intention (now mostly lost) of having three separate power bases -- president=monarchy, Senate/Supreme-Court=aristocracy, and House=democracy -- was probably also a good idea to improve things a bit. But the real solution is to limit the role of government as much as possible so that its inevitably terrible & corrupt decisions don't have as much impact.

It'd be interesting if you could pay $1000/vote to the Treasury in order to get additional votes, without limit. Obviously profit-motivated actors are only going to do this if they can extract more value from their votes than they're paying, but this already happens now with PACs, lobbying, etc. Even before Citizens United, you had groups such as the sugar lobby which spend money to get policies enacted which clearly help them at everyone else's expense (in the case of the sugar lobby, tariffs and price fixing). Paying for votes directly would at least have the money spent to achieve these bad policies going somewhere a bit more useful than toward lobbyists and political ads. Instead of paying for extra votes via the Treasury, you could also allow people to sell their votes, and this'd end up as almost a UBI-type welfare system!



(That isn't really a serious proposal, since I think it'd probably be worse than the status quo, though it would be interesting.)



This is pretty much what I'm saying. There was always money in politics, and there will probably always be money in politics. People hate that and it is terrible, though if you ban one forum lawsuits will ensue and people will move to another form of influencing.



Lobbying has and always will be legal. You either pay for the legislative changes when the person is still in office (through donations to their campaign, super pacs, etc) or through offering them a job once they're done with being in politics. Why do you think so many politicians end up working for big corporations that they have no qualifications for -- it's because they ensured that they took care of that company while they were in office, and they're being rewarded for it now.



Theymos is without a doubt right when he talks about making government less powerful, as it ensures that certain people (either politicians) or bureaucrats or whatever are able to make such large decisions that can change the fate of corporations. If you look at the role of government over the entire history of the US, you'd find that the government is the only entity which hasn't stopped growing in their role in your everyday life throughout this time.



Our current system sucks, but I honestly don't know how to fix it and I don't think any current ideas can fix it. We're kinda stuck at the moment.

Well the current issue with public funding is that it would only work in theory and in a vacuum of everything else. Because even if you remove the wealthy and corporations from donating directly to campaigns, you're still left with them being able to air their own advertisements for a campaign. This is why SUPER PACS are present right now.To explain this simply: There are funding restrictions on the amount of money that people and corporations can give directly to a campaign, but it wont stop them from spending their own money to buy billboards, release tv ads, radio ads, and so on and so forth stating that they support that candidate.So even with public funding, some will get exposure, but others will get a ton more exposure depending on who supports them (and who has money) Money isn't always a determinant in showing who will win, but it does ensure that the two party system is stable. Clinton outspend Trump 2:1, but the two of them were both interested in ensuring that the status quo stays the same and that the rich continue to be richer.This is pretty much what I'm saying. There was always money in politics, and there will probably always be money in politics. People hate that and it is terrible, though if you ban one forum lawsuits will ensue and people will move to another form of influencing.Lobbying has and always will be legal. You either pay for the legislative changes when the person is still in office (through donations to their campaign, super pacs, etc) or through offering them a job once they're done with being in politics. Why do you think so many politicians end up working for big corporations that they have no qualifications for -- it's because they ensured that they took care of that company while they were in office, and they're being rewarded for it now.Theymos is without a doubt right when he talks about making government less powerful, as it ensures that certain people (either politicians) or bureaucrats or whatever are able to make such large decisions that can change the fate of corporations. If you look at the role of government over the entire history of the US, you'd find that the government is the only entity which hasn't stopped growing in their role in your everyday life throughout this time.Our current system sucks, but I honestly don't know how to fix it and I don't think any current ideas can fix it. We're kinda stuck at the moment.