Why libertarians should care about campaign finance reform
For your edification, here's another work in progress. As some of you might recall, I used to volunteer a little for the California Clean Money Campaign. This is an issue where I'm still trying to figure out the best solution, and an issue where I am in opposition to most libertarians, who are in opposition to any spending limits because that would be a restriction on your freedom to transact.
Anyway, while interning at the Cato Institute, I had the honor of Roger Pilon giving us interns a seminar on Constitutional Law. After all, many of us libertarians believe the Founders intended for government to be much smaller than it is now, and the Interstate Commerce Clause in particular has been stretched ridiculously (the Gonzales v. Raich Supreme Court decision on medical marijuana is a prime example). During the question and answer afterwards, I asked him about campaign finance. I made the main point below, but in the back and forth, I think I got a bit repetitive. And since I hate it when others monopolize a discussion, I soon dropped it.
This David Weigel column on John Edwards at Reason Magazine repeats the point that I've often heard, which is that the solution to campaign finance is a smaller government with fewer favors to give. In response, I wrote this comment, which fleshes out my thinking on the topic:I know I'm the rare libertarian who considers campaign finance reform to be a pet topic, but I don't think the answer to our campaign finance problems is a smaller government. I think one of the effects of our campaign finance problems is the big government that we have. When corporations lobby, they usually don't ask for less government, but ask for more government that tilts the market in their favor. Think tariffs, subsidies, tax-deductions, etc. Public-choice economists call this rent-seeking.
And no, money is not speech. If it were, bribery would be legal. That's spending money to get your message to a politician, after all. I made that point to Roger Pilon at Cato, and he acknowledged that money wasn't speech, but was used to buy speech, and said that bribery was handled by a politician's oath of office. I didn't find that convincing. You can argue that you are using your bribe to buy the politician's speech, as they will be arguing your point in their speeches and on the legislature floor.
Plus, this just highlights that rules matter. That oath could easily include not accepting lobbyist money. The reason we don't allow bribes is to prevent corruption. Democracy is most representative when it honors the principle of one person, one vote. If you allow bribery, you make a mockery out of the whole voting process, because one vote plus a bribe matters a lot more than a vote without one.
But if you think about it, allowing campaign contributions has pretty much same effect as allowing bribes. One vote plus a $3,000 campaign contribution matters a lot more than a vote without one. Furthermore, money is obviously fungible. If you give poor people food stamps to prevent them from buying drugs, they can merely decrease their spending on food and use the savings to buy those drugs. Likewise, if you give a candidate a campaign contribution, they can decrease their own personal spending on their campaign.
I am not sure what the solution is that doesn't exacerbate incumbent strength or allows crackpots to spend public campaign funds or narrows the field to mostly just rich white guys (well... never mind). But I think libertarians are fooling themselves if they think the solution is smaller government. Government gets bigger for a lot of reasons, and campaign contributions is one of them.
I have to admit that I overstated the fungible part of it, because that's only true of the contributions up to what the candidate would have spent. But whether those first contributions ought to be allowed is, in my mind, still up for debate.
Now, the discourse there up to then was not of very high quality, involving a lot of personal attacks (I imagine this is a reason that Cato has chosen not to open comments on their blogs -- I made my case for open comments to several policy people there, and almost all of them agreed with me but said the decision came from higher up). So my comment got only one response, which acknowledged my point on bribes but said that contributions also look like political speech (noting that making a posterboard sign still costs money), and argued that maybe a compromise solution would be disclosure. This was my response:My point about bribes is not that campaign contributions should be illegal. It's that if you agree that bribery should be illegal, this means that money is not speech. Which makes sense on the face of it. What is protected is not the posterboard sign, but your right to say whatever you want ON that sign. Whether you are allowed to use a sign or a television ad is not a First Amendment issue, and thus is up for debate. Yes, whatever line we draw will seem arbitrary, but so is the line we have now between bribes and campaign contributions. Drawing lines is inevitable when seeking to strike a balance between liberty and democracy.
Once we realize that the "money is speech" line is dogmatic and untrue, then we can look for pragmatic solutions. Disclosure would be a start, but while necessary, hardly seems sufficient to do anything about rent-seeking. What we want is a solution where what you say is more important than how much you can spend to broadcast it. Look at the Internet and the blogosphere. Libertarian ideas are far more prevalent there than they are in the rest of public discourse. This is what happens when the strength of your ideas is given prominent importance. Now imagine a political landscape that mirrored that.
To get there, you need some sort of campaign finance reform, whether it be limits or public campaign financing (I'm rather fond of the Clean Money, Clean Elections proposal) or something else that the libertarian movement could come up with if they stopped ignoring the problem and looked for solutions.
Because the people who want big government have a lot more money than people who want small government. This means that the libertarian movement is doomed to remain a fringe player in our political landscape as long as money plays the role that it does.
To flesh out the point on why disclosure is not sufficient, note that we already know exactly who benefits from, say, the steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies. The root of the problem is not lack of knowledge, it's that these policies have concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. The steel tariffs help the steel producers greatly and hurt everybody else a little bit. Therefore, the steel producers have a strong incentive to lobby for the tariffs and nobody has a strong incentive to oppose them. Cato beat that point into our intern heads over the summer, but told us little about how to prevent such policies. Of course, I personally think campaign finance reform is the best bet.
I also had the pleasure of meeting David Weigel briefly at a couple of events. I didn't talk politics with him, mostly just the usual get-to-know-you chit chat. He's an associate editor at Reason, which I would read from time to time, mostly when somebody I read would link them. But I've been reading them more regularly since then, and have been thinking that maybe my skills might be a better fit at Reason than Cato. Assuming he doesn't hate me now.
Anyway, while interning at the Cato Institute, I had the honor of Roger Pilon giving us interns a seminar on Constitutional Law. After all, many of us libertarians believe the Founders intended for government to be much smaller than it is now, and the Interstate Commerce Clause in particular has been stretched ridiculously (the Gonzales v. Raich Supreme Court decision on medical marijuana is a prime example). During the question and answer afterwards, I asked him about campaign finance. I made the main point below, but in the back and forth, I think I got a bit repetitive. And since I hate it when others monopolize a discussion, I soon dropped it.
This David Weigel column on John Edwards at Reason Magazine repeats the point that I've often heard, which is that the solution to campaign finance is a smaller government with fewer favors to give. In response, I wrote this comment, which fleshes out my thinking on the topic:I know I'm the rare libertarian who considers campaign finance reform to be a pet topic, but I don't think the answer to our campaign finance problems is a smaller government. I think one of the effects of our campaign finance problems is the big government that we have. When corporations lobby, they usually don't ask for less government, but ask for more government that tilts the market in their favor. Think tariffs, subsidies, tax-deductions, etc. Public-choice economists call this rent-seeking.
And no, money is not speech. If it were, bribery would be legal. That's spending money to get your message to a politician, after all. I made that point to Roger Pilon at Cato, and he acknowledged that money wasn't speech, but was used to buy speech, and said that bribery was handled by a politician's oath of office. I didn't find that convincing. You can argue that you are using your bribe to buy the politician's speech, as they will be arguing your point in their speeches and on the legislature floor.
Plus, this just highlights that rules matter. That oath could easily include not accepting lobbyist money. The reason we don't allow bribes is to prevent corruption. Democracy is most representative when it honors the principle of one person, one vote. If you allow bribery, you make a mockery out of the whole voting process, because one vote plus a bribe matters a lot more than a vote without one.
But if you think about it, allowing campaign contributions has pretty much same effect as allowing bribes. One vote plus a $3,000 campaign contribution matters a lot more than a vote without one. Furthermore, money is obviously fungible. If you give poor people food stamps to prevent them from buying drugs, they can merely decrease their spending on food and use the savings to buy those drugs. Likewise, if you give a candidate a campaign contribution, they can decrease their own personal spending on their campaign.
I am not sure what the solution is that doesn't exacerbate incumbent strength or allows crackpots to spend public campaign funds or narrows the field to mostly just rich white guys (well... never mind). But I think libertarians are fooling themselves if they think the solution is smaller government. Government gets bigger for a lot of reasons, and campaign contributions is one of them.
I have to admit that I overstated the fungible part of it, because that's only true of the contributions up to what the candidate would have spent. But whether those first contributions ought to be allowed is, in my mind, still up for debate.
Now, the discourse there up to then was not of very high quality, involving a lot of personal attacks (I imagine this is a reason that Cato has chosen not to open comments on their blogs -- I made my case for open comments to several policy people there, and almost all of them agreed with me but said the decision came from higher up). So my comment got only one response, which acknowledged my point on bribes but said that contributions also look like political speech (noting that making a posterboard sign still costs money), and argued that maybe a compromise solution would be disclosure. This was my response:My point about bribes is not that campaign contributions should be illegal. It's that if you agree that bribery should be illegal, this means that money is not speech. Which makes sense on the face of it. What is protected is not the posterboard sign, but your right to say whatever you want ON that sign. Whether you are allowed to use a sign or a television ad is not a First Amendment issue, and thus is up for debate. Yes, whatever line we draw will seem arbitrary, but so is the line we have now between bribes and campaign contributions. Drawing lines is inevitable when seeking to strike a balance between liberty and democracy.
Once we realize that the "money is speech" line is dogmatic and untrue, then we can look for pragmatic solutions. Disclosure would be a start, but while necessary, hardly seems sufficient to do anything about rent-seeking. What we want is a solution where what you say is more important than how much you can spend to broadcast it. Look at the Internet and the blogosphere. Libertarian ideas are far more prevalent there than they are in the rest of public discourse. This is what happens when the strength of your ideas is given prominent importance. Now imagine a political landscape that mirrored that.
To get there, you need some sort of campaign finance reform, whether it be limits or public campaign financing (I'm rather fond of the Clean Money, Clean Elections proposal) or something else that the libertarian movement could come up with if they stopped ignoring the problem and looked for solutions.
Because the people who want big government have a lot more money than people who want small government. This means that the libertarian movement is doomed to remain a fringe player in our political landscape as long as money plays the role that it does.
To flesh out the point on why disclosure is not sufficient, note that we already know exactly who benefits from, say, the steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies. The root of the problem is not lack of knowledge, it's that these policies have concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. The steel tariffs help the steel producers greatly and hurt everybody else a little bit. Therefore, the steel producers have a strong incentive to lobby for the tariffs and nobody has a strong incentive to oppose them. Cato beat that point into our intern heads over the summer, but told us little about how to prevent such policies. Of course, I personally think campaign finance reform is the best bet.
I also had the pleasure of meeting David Weigel briefly at a couple of events. I didn't talk politics with him, mostly just the usual get-to-know-you chit chat. He's an associate editor at Reason, which I would read from time to time, mostly when somebody I read would link them. But I've been reading them more regularly since then, and have been thinking that maybe my skills might be a better fit at Reason than Cato. Assuming he doesn't hate me now.