An exercise in finding common ground: Campaign Finance
[Note: I started writing this post long before a friend of a friend jokingly suggested "Positive TV", and I am finishing it long afterwards, but I think it is in the same spirit! Somebody took at least one relevant domain and is trying to do something with it, but I can't tell what the inspiration for it was, and I don't feel like checking for anyone trying to do the same thing.]
There was a time back in the Bush era when the Republicans had gone so egregiously over the line on so many things that even pox-on-you-all small-l libertarians like me were willing to say "okay, through great effort one party has managed to be more evil than the other for a while. Huh." And people threw around the word "liberaltarian" a lot, referring more or less to an alliance of convenience given the realities of American politics at the time. Now that Obama has had time to disappoint people, it's inevitable that you hear it less often.[1]
The biggest issues I have with Obama tend to be things along the lines of civil rights, which is sometimes an area the left and libertarians can agree on -- things like wiretapping, failure to implement FOIA reforms, failing to close or reform Guantanamo, not prosecuting crimes from the Bush administration, invoking state secrecy left and right, and various military interventions, for example. Some of these things are just difficult to implement (Guantanamo), some are straightforward policy disagreements (level of intervention in foreign policy, decision not to prosecute former administration officials), and some are just unknowns (I have no idea why the Obama administration is so secretive). Some people are disappointed about the structural change in balance of power -- between the executive and the other branches -- not swinging back, or not swinging back far enough, after Bush. You get the idea.
Now, in a sane world, by my (and many other people's) reckoning, politics would involve trying to find areas of agreement and working on them first, rather than cynical, gridlock-promoting exploitation of areas of disagreement.[2] That's a bit much to ask from government nowadays, but whatever. Finding areas of agreement is probably hard for most Americans. Aside from lack of experience in consensus decision-making, one reason for this is probably political ignorance with respect to the beliefs of others.[3] Another is that you don't just need people with consensus-finding skills, but you need them to not react to highly-polarized people with "OMG why do you even open your mouth, go away."
Back just before I started writing this, whenever that was, someone in a private journal entry mentioned campaign finance. That seemed like a good example topic, since I genuinely disagree with a lot of people about it, it involves a lot of conflicting policy goals, it's big enough that areas of agreement must exist, and for whatever reason it seems to make people particularly prone to simply inventing the beliefs of others (mostly out of laziness, I think).
So the exercise I've undertaken here is to come up with statements that are more or less about campaign finance, and that almost all of you will agree with, even though we actually do disagree about a lot of other things. It would be nice if this were participatory! Please feel free to add more points of common ground, or to let me know if you think I have miscategorized a statement. A point of common ground doesn't have to be profound or complicated, nor does it matter why anyone agrees with it -- the goal is just to incrementally uncover as much area of agreement as possible. Some of my points are purposefully minor, because I believe incremental progress adds up.
I am starting with some assumptions about who all is reading this: I expect that I'd consider about 2/3 of you to be left-wing, about 1/4 to be small-l libertarian, and a handful of you to be "damn you all, most of my life has nothing to do with government anyway" types. I also expect most of my left wing readers have some geek-specific breaks with left-wing politics -- e.g. over intellectual property or the moral legitimacy of certain types of censorship. So, I don't think it's worth using a poll to categorize anybody, because I don't think any of you are "pure" leftists or progressives (not that I care about your ideological purity; I don't).
Obviously, there are good reasons why I have sat on this for so long. :P
For the purposes of avoiding train wrecks, I tentatively suggest (but will not enforce via moderation) that you restrict comments to the topic of finding common ground about campaign finance, or of finding common ground in general, and leave wide-ranging discussion of other things to your own LJs (e.g. arguing about all the nuances of the One True Progressive/Conservative/Whatever Ideology).
Here are some things I expect everyone reading this agrees on:
Making things harder on disfavored or disempowered groups, or simply on everyone other than you, is not a legitimate purpose of campaign finance regulations.
All things being equal, you should avoid structuring campaign finance regulations in ways that make the wealthy and sophisticated better able to comply with them.
All things being equal, campaign finance regulations should not actively deter political involvement, at least by individuals and potential candidates.
An agency should always consider whether its efforts would be better spent making regulations which are difficult to violate, rather than making things difficult for violators.
The question of whether a government regime of speech regulation is or is not user-friendly -- comprehensible, easy to comply with -- is not precisely the same question as whether the particular regulations are good or bad ones.
All things being equal, it is better to have regulations that are user-friendly, even if they do constitute objectionable censorship.
All things being equal, simple regulations are preferable to complex ones.
It is not necessarily the case that a regulation is fairer simply because it makes work for lawyers, accountants, or anybody else.
All things being equal, it is better if regulations related to advertising expenditures are media neutral. That is, you should have a good reason if you have different rules for TV, newspapers, or the internet.
More generally, campaign finance regulations should avoid distorting the market for goods and services (and, perhaps, especially those not inherently related to political campaigning). For example, you should have a good reason for rules that actively create a preference for Joe's bumper sticker company over Mary's yard sign business, or for requiring information to be reported to the government in Microsoft's proprietary formats.
The finances of entities making independent expenditures are at least marginally less worrisome than those of political parties and candidates (ask, if you had regulate one and only one of these, which would you pick).
The campaign expenditures of US citizens (or entities controlled by US citizens) in US elections are at least marginally less worrisome than those of non-citizens.
Same as above, but with state elections and in-state vs. out-of-state money.
The belief that there is nothing special about the corporate form that should lead to special campaign finance regulations for corporations does not imply disbelief in more mundane problems of corporate governance which the issue of political contributions incidentally happens to highlight. That is, you can oppose campaign finance laws that target corporations specifically while still supporting massive overhauls of corporate law that might achieve the exact same effects.
All things being equal, avoiding the appearance of corruption is a worthwhile goal.
When the debate over the wisdom of some regulation turns on whether some empirically testable thing is true, having some data about that thing is better than not having data about it, and actually looking at that data is better than ignoring it entirely.
If campaign finance regulations cause information to be reported to the government, that information should not be withheld from the public arbitrarily.
It is best if regulations don't exacerbate a situation in which elected politicians tend to primarily be talented at getting elected.
There are at least some election-related things beyond running the polls which it is okay to spend taxpayer money on. For example, if done well and efficiently, maybe we could all agree it is okay for election officials to make voter guides on flyers or websites with blurbs for and against referenda. So public financing can be seen as a fact-specific line-drawing problem rather than an epic moral struggle.
Some undesirable aspects of political campaigns (e.g. name-calling and other lack of civility) are not appropriate targets for government intervention. (Remember, your reason for agreement doesn't matter in this exercise -- e.g. maybe we don't want to trample on civil rights, or maybe there is nothing helpful government can do). Again, the appropriate scope of government intervention does not have to be an epic, black-or-white issue.
Disagreement over whether or not the government in particular should address a given problem does not imply disagreement over the existence or nature of the problem, nor does it imply disagreement that somebody ought to do something about the problem.
Now, here are some statements that, so far as I know, libertarians mostly agree with, but that might be more controversial on the American left (and probably also the right). Can they be whittled down or reformulated so that even leftists without the "geek exceptions" can find common ground? Am I wrong about them being controversial on the left? Reminder: The fact that I think something might be controversial doesn't mean I think any specific person agrees or disagrees with it, or that you can't claim to be whatever you claim to be just because you agree or disagree with it.
Marginally more controversial items:
If you have a choice between eliminating the incentives that drive an undesirable amount of money into politics, and simply stopping the flow of money, you should at least consider manipulating the incentives instead of the money.
Reporting requirements that involve disclosing the identities of contributors, petition-signers, membership and contact lists -- or anything of the sort -- should not be enacted with the purpose of facilitating any sort of illegal harassment of anybody.
If you have some reason to believe a disclosure regulation of the sort described above might contribute to illegal reprisals, that evidence should be an actual factor taken into account when contemplating the wisdom of the rule.
More controversially, just because you think only non-criminal reprisals will be taken against those whose identities are disclosed doesn't mean you shouldn't consider the advantages of protecting privacy.
Criminal law should be used as a tool of last resort when trying to regulate campaign finance.
If you must criminalize failure to comply with campaign finance regulations, strict liability is an inappropriate standard for culpability. Campaign finance is not so important that anyone involved in it should be able to commit a felony or misdemeanor purely by accident. (Where strict liability means that the crime isn't defined in terms of your mental state at all. Sometimes this is equivalent to saying that it is relevant whether something happened or not, but not why it happened.)
More controversially, mere negligence should not be enough to implicate criminal law in this domain, either. (Where negligence means, more or less, that a reasonable person should have known better than to do what you did.)
Cripplingly large fines levied against individuals are also unwarranted in campaign finance regulation, especially when levied against anyone who acted in a good faith belief that they were, in fact, complying with the regulations in question.
If campaign finance regulations are set up in such a way that that only wealthy campaigns will never commit certain crimes or violations (e.g. because it costs a great deal of money to comply with them, but compliance is trivial if you can hire enough accountants or whatever), those regulations should be considered actively suspicious.[4]
If the federal government is to regulate financing and expenditure in state and local political campaigns, it is preferable that it have some plausibly federally-relevant reason for doing so.
Political campaigning is not inherently evil.
Political advertising is not inherently evil.
Sometimes voters learn true things from political advertising, and this can be beneficial to either the voters or society.
It is often advantageous for someone to not interfere with speech they disagree with.
All things being equal, censorship is undesirable. That is, it is a disfavored method for addressing problems which can be addressed multiple ways.
The fact that regulating speech is hard for government to do is not relevant to the morality of any actual regulations of speech.
All things being equal, it is good to allow people to be involved in political processes that affect them, even when their involvement cannot change the outcomes of those processes. E.g. the fact that a single vote cannot change a given election does not make the right to vote meaningless, and the fact that a political candidate cannot win does not mean their speech is meaningless (and thus it is not morally acceptable to go out of your way to suppress that vote or that speech merely because the candidate cannot win).
Here are some miscellaneous items where I don't claim to know who agrees with them, but that seem reasonable to me:
Yet more items:
The fact that the government does something you don't want it to, or fails to do something you want it to, does not inherently mean the sky is falling.
Sometimes the overall extent of government intervention in a given area is more important than fussing over any particular aspect of it.
Political parties are a means to various ends; perpetuating their existence should not become an end in itself.
Other countries have a wide variety of campaign finance regulations, and probably have a wide variety of outcomes. This doesn't have to be a source of desperately important facts that Prove Something in order for us to learn from the ways other places do things.
Notes:
[1] There are things like the "Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog" that were supposed to push in that direction (it would take a lot of time to see if that blog has lived up to its billing at the time of launch, though). A search for "liberaltarian" gets various blog entries, at least (optimistic example", pessimistic example). Further searching will probably only irritate me.
[2] Gridlock is of course attractive if it's gridlock between factions you dislike.
[3] It is trendy for people on the left to have it in for libertarians. Unfortunately, and to my irritation, I don't think sanity can be restored easily -- too many people on all sides of the issue regularly exploit it for their own ends. Reasonable people may disagree in good faith with my analysis here, but this is how I see things:
Consider the case of the more-or-less libertarian (or even just centrist) blogger or other activist who gets called "conservative" by someone on the left, (usually completely fairly, relatively speaking, because to someone on the left, they are, in fact, less to the left). Those bloggers could try to have some sort of nuanced response to this. Or, they could ask themselves "how can I exploit this so that I appear to have conservative credentials and can then influence conservatives who would not otherwise think of me as one of them?" The exact same thing works in reverse, I'm sure. I realize that this usually isn't a conscious process, and that taking on expedient political labels isn't unique to libertarians. I just notice it more when a bunch of geeky libertarian blog commenters purport to be conservatives, when in reality not one of them has the foggiest idea what real-life conservatives (or liberals!) actually believe. It's hard to prove whether vague left-wing hostility just exacerbates this effect; I happen to believe it does.
At the end of the day, those on the left benefit enormously from disliking and misrepresenting libertarians, if only because they get to claim they don't just have it in for Republicans -- and, in fact, dislike some groups even more. The right benefits because in the confusion they get to pretend crazy right-wingers like Ron Paul are actually libertarian (it might be either to brush them aside or to try to appeal to independent voters, but in the end everybody's doing it). Opportunistic bloggers and critics benefit from bogus credentials. And, best of all, since everyone can convince themselves now that everyone else is completely irrational, absolutely nobody has to learn how to talk to anybody else! Awesome!
Put briefly, tribalism creates screwy incentives. :P
[4] I've seen this called a "Baptists and bootleggers" problem (Baptists and bootleggers both want liquor sales on Sundays to be illegal, but for very different reasons).
There was a time back in the Bush era when the Republicans had gone so egregiously over the line on so many things that even pox-on-you-all small-l libertarians like me were willing to say "okay, through great effort one party has managed to be more evil than the other for a while. Huh." And people threw around the word "liberaltarian" a lot, referring more or less to an alliance of convenience given the realities of American politics at the time. Now that Obama has had time to disappoint people, it's inevitable that you hear it less often.[1]
The biggest issues I have with Obama tend to be things along the lines of civil rights, which is sometimes an area the left and libertarians can agree on -- things like wiretapping, failure to implement FOIA reforms, failing to close or reform Guantanamo, not prosecuting crimes from the Bush administration, invoking state secrecy left and right, and various military interventions, for example. Some of these things are just difficult to implement (Guantanamo), some are straightforward policy disagreements (level of intervention in foreign policy, decision not to prosecute former administration officials), and some are just unknowns (I have no idea why the Obama administration is so secretive). Some people are disappointed about the structural change in balance of power -- between the executive and the other branches -- not swinging back, or not swinging back far enough, after Bush. You get the idea.
Now, in a sane world, by my (and many other people's) reckoning, politics would involve trying to find areas of agreement and working on them first, rather than cynical, gridlock-promoting exploitation of areas of disagreement.[2] That's a bit much to ask from government nowadays, but whatever. Finding areas of agreement is probably hard for most Americans. Aside from lack of experience in consensus decision-making, one reason for this is probably political ignorance with respect to the beliefs of others.[3] Another is that you don't just need people with consensus-finding skills, but you need them to not react to highly-polarized people with "OMG why do you even open your mouth, go away."
Back just before I started writing this, whenever that was, someone in a private journal entry mentioned campaign finance. That seemed like a good example topic, since I genuinely disagree with a lot of people about it, it involves a lot of conflicting policy goals, it's big enough that areas of agreement must exist, and for whatever reason it seems to make people particularly prone to simply inventing the beliefs of others (mostly out of laziness, I think).
So the exercise I've undertaken here is to come up with statements that are more or less about campaign finance, and that almost all of you will agree with, even though we actually do disagree about a lot of other things. It would be nice if this were participatory! Please feel free to add more points of common ground, or to let me know if you think I have miscategorized a statement. A point of common ground doesn't have to be profound or complicated, nor does it matter why anyone agrees with it -- the goal is just to incrementally uncover as much area of agreement as possible. Some of my points are purposefully minor, because I believe incremental progress adds up.
I am starting with some assumptions about who all is reading this: I expect that I'd consider about 2/3 of you to be left-wing, about 1/4 to be small-l libertarian, and a handful of you to be "damn you all, most of my life has nothing to do with government anyway" types. I also expect most of my left wing readers have some geek-specific breaks with left-wing politics -- e.g. over intellectual property or the moral legitimacy of certain types of censorship. So, I don't think it's worth using a poll to categorize anybody, because I don't think any of you are "pure" leftists or progressives (not that I care about your ideological purity; I don't).
Obviously, there are good reasons why I have sat on this for so long. :P
For the purposes of avoiding train wrecks, I tentatively suggest (but will not enforce via moderation) that you restrict comments to the topic of finding common ground about campaign finance, or of finding common ground in general, and leave wide-ranging discussion of other things to your own LJs (e.g. arguing about all the nuances of the One True Progressive/Conservative/Whatever Ideology).
Here are some things I expect everyone reading this agrees on:
Making things harder on disfavored or disempowered groups, or simply on everyone other than you, is not a legitimate purpose of campaign finance regulations.
All things being equal, you should avoid structuring campaign finance regulations in ways that make the wealthy and sophisticated better able to comply with them.
All things being equal, campaign finance regulations should not actively deter political involvement, at least by individuals and potential candidates.
An agency should always consider whether its efforts would be better spent making regulations which are difficult to violate, rather than making things difficult for violators.
The question of whether a government regime of speech regulation is or is not user-friendly -- comprehensible, easy to comply with -- is not precisely the same question as whether the particular regulations are good or bad ones.
All things being equal, it is better to have regulations that are user-friendly, even if they do constitute objectionable censorship.
All things being equal, simple regulations are preferable to complex ones.
It is not necessarily the case that a regulation is fairer simply because it makes work for lawyers, accountants, or anybody else.
All things being equal, it is better if regulations related to advertising expenditures are media neutral. That is, you should have a good reason if you have different rules for TV, newspapers, or the internet.
More generally, campaign finance regulations should avoid distorting the market for goods and services (and, perhaps, especially those not inherently related to political campaigning). For example, you should have a good reason for rules that actively create a preference for Joe's bumper sticker company over Mary's yard sign business, or for requiring information to be reported to the government in Microsoft's proprietary formats.
The finances of entities making independent expenditures are at least marginally less worrisome than those of political parties and candidates (ask, if you had regulate one and only one of these, which would you pick).
The campaign expenditures of US citizens (or entities controlled by US citizens) in US elections are at least marginally less worrisome than those of non-citizens.
Same as above, but with state elections and in-state vs. out-of-state money.
The belief that there is nothing special about the corporate form that should lead to special campaign finance regulations for corporations does not imply disbelief in more mundane problems of corporate governance which the issue of political contributions incidentally happens to highlight. That is, you can oppose campaign finance laws that target corporations specifically while still supporting massive overhauls of corporate law that might achieve the exact same effects.
All things being equal, avoiding the appearance of corruption is a worthwhile goal.
When the debate over the wisdom of some regulation turns on whether some empirically testable thing is true, having some data about that thing is better than not having data about it, and actually looking at that data is better than ignoring it entirely.
If campaign finance regulations cause information to be reported to the government, that information should not be withheld from the public arbitrarily.
It is best if regulations don't exacerbate a situation in which elected politicians tend to primarily be talented at getting elected.
There are at least some election-related things beyond running the polls which it is okay to spend taxpayer money on. For example, if done well and efficiently, maybe we could all agree it is okay for election officials to make voter guides on flyers or websites with blurbs for and against referenda. So public financing can be seen as a fact-specific line-drawing problem rather than an epic moral struggle.
Some undesirable aspects of political campaigns (e.g. name-calling and other lack of civility) are not appropriate targets for government intervention. (Remember, your reason for agreement doesn't matter in this exercise -- e.g. maybe we don't want to trample on civil rights, or maybe there is nothing helpful government can do). Again, the appropriate scope of government intervention does not have to be an epic, black-or-white issue.
Disagreement over whether or not the government in particular should address a given problem does not imply disagreement over the existence or nature of the problem, nor does it imply disagreement that somebody ought to do something about the problem.
Now, here are some statements that, so far as I know, libertarians mostly agree with, but that might be more controversial on the American left (and probably also the right). Can they be whittled down or reformulated so that even leftists without the "geek exceptions" can find common ground? Am I wrong about them being controversial on the left? Reminder: The fact that I think something might be controversial doesn't mean I think any specific person agrees or disagrees with it, or that you can't claim to be whatever you claim to be just because you agree or disagree with it.
Marginally more controversial items:
If you have a choice between eliminating the incentives that drive an undesirable amount of money into politics, and simply stopping the flow of money, you should at least consider manipulating the incentives instead of the money.
Reporting requirements that involve disclosing the identities of contributors, petition-signers, membership and contact lists -- or anything of the sort -- should not be enacted with the purpose of facilitating any sort of illegal harassment of anybody.
If you have some reason to believe a disclosure regulation of the sort described above might contribute to illegal reprisals, that evidence should be an actual factor taken into account when contemplating the wisdom of the rule.
More controversially, just because you think only non-criminal reprisals will be taken against those whose identities are disclosed doesn't mean you shouldn't consider the advantages of protecting privacy.
Criminal law should be used as a tool of last resort when trying to regulate campaign finance.
If you must criminalize failure to comply with campaign finance regulations, strict liability is an inappropriate standard for culpability. Campaign finance is not so important that anyone involved in it should be able to commit a felony or misdemeanor purely by accident. (Where strict liability means that the crime isn't defined in terms of your mental state at all. Sometimes this is equivalent to saying that it is relevant whether something happened or not, but not why it happened.)
More controversially, mere negligence should not be enough to implicate criminal law in this domain, either. (Where negligence means, more or less, that a reasonable person should have known better than to do what you did.)
Cripplingly large fines levied against individuals are also unwarranted in campaign finance regulation, especially when levied against anyone who acted in a good faith belief that they were, in fact, complying with the regulations in question.
If campaign finance regulations are set up in such a way that that only wealthy campaigns will never commit certain crimes or violations (e.g. because it costs a great deal of money to comply with them, but compliance is trivial if you can hire enough accountants or whatever), those regulations should be considered actively suspicious.[4]
If the federal government is to regulate financing and expenditure in state and local political campaigns, it is preferable that it have some plausibly federally-relevant reason for doing so.
Political campaigning is not inherently evil.
Political advertising is not inherently evil.
Sometimes voters learn true things from political advertising, and this can be beneficial to either the voters or society.
It is often advantageous for someone to not interfere with speech they disagree with.
All things being equal, censorship is undesirable. That is, it is a disfavored method for addressing problems which can be addressed multiple ways.
The fact that regulating speech is hard for government to do is not relevant to the morality of any actual regulations of speech.
All things being equal, it is good to allow people to be involved in political processes that affect them, even when their involvement cannot change the outcomes of those processes. E.g. the fact that a single vote cannot change a given election does not make the right to vote meaningless, and the fact that a political candidate cannot win does not mean their speech is meaningless (and thus it is not morally acceptable to go out of your way to suppress that vote or that speech merely because the candidate cannot win).
Here are some miscellaneous items where I don't claim to know who agrees with them, but that seem reasonable to me:
Yet more items:
The fact that the government does something you don't want it to, or fails to do something you want it to, does not inherently mean the sky is falling.
Sometimes the overall extent of government intervention in a given area is more important than fussing over any particular aspect of it.
Political parties are a means to various ends; perpetuating their existence should not become an end in itself.
Other countries have a wide variety of campaign finance regulations, and probably have a wide variety of outcomes. This doesn't have to be a source of desperately important facts that Prove Something in order for us to learn from the ways other places do things.
Notes:
[1] There are things like the "Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog" that were supposed to push in that direction (it would take a lot of time to see if that blog has lived up to its billing at the time of launch, though). A search for "liberaltarian" gets various blog entries, at least (optimistic example", pessimistic example). Further searching will probably only irritate me.
[2] Gridlock is of course attractive if it's gridlock between factions you dislike.
[3] It is trendy for people on the left to have it in for libertarians. Unfortunately, and to my irritation, I don't think sanity can be restored easily -- too many people on all sides of the issue regularly exploit it for their own ends. Reasonable people may disagree in good faith with my analysis here, but this is how I see things:
Consider the case of the more-or-less libertarian (or even just centrist) blogger or other activist who gets called "conservative" by someone on the left, (usually completely fairly, relatively speaking, because to someone on the left, they are, in fact, less to the left). Those bloggers could try to have some sort of nuanced response to this. Or, they could ask themselves "how can I exploit this so that I appear to have conservative credentials and can then influence conservatives who would not otherwise think of me as one of them?" The exact same thing works in reverse, I'm sure. I realize that this usually isn't a conscious process, and that taking on expedient political labels isn't unique to libertarians. I just notice it more when a bunch of geeky libertarian blog commenters purport to be conservatives, when in reality not one of them has the foggiest idea what real-life conservatives (or liberals!) actually believe. It's hard to prove whether vague left-wing hostility just exacerbates this effect; I happen to believe it does.
At the end of the day, those on the left benefit enormously from disliking and misrepresenting libertarians, if only because they get to claim they don't just have it in for Republicans -- and, in fact, dislike some groups even more. The right benefits because in the confusion they get to pretend crazy right-wingers like Ron Paul are actually libertarian (it might be either to brush them aside or to try to appeal to independent voters, but in the end everybody's doing it). Opportunistic bloggers and critics benefit from bogus credentials. And, best of all, since everyone can convince themselves now that everyone else is completely irrational, absolutely nobody has to learn how to talk to anybody else! Awesome!
Put briefly, tribalism creates screwy incentives. :P
[4] I've seen this called a "Baptists and bootleggers" problem (Baptists and bootleggers both want liquor sales on Sundays to be illegal, but for very different reasons).