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The alternatives are worse. The choices: 1. purchase it with their own money 2. purchase it with money from bribes 3. blackmail party insiders for the nomina
by tropo 7y ago
The alternatives are worse. The choices:
1. purchase it with their own money
2. purchase it with money from bribes
3. blackmail party insiders for the nomination and support
Using their own money is the cleanest and most honest way to do things.
- omegaworks 7y agoYou're forgetting 4. Convince millions to give just a little bit of time or effort because you spent your entire political career fighting for working people. Which, in my view, is even better.
- brightstep 7y agoYou're missing a key alternative here which is, you know, asking voters to donate
- tryitnow 7y agoNot really. So far the biggest fundraiser in the Democratic primary has been Bernie Sanders and he has raised most of his money from small money donors. So it's absolutely possible to raise money without using one's own money or taking bribes. And even if a candidate raises money from a 100 billionaires, that's better than one billionaire. The more people you raise money from the more likely it is that those people have conflicts with one another that can then balance one another out. A single billionaire financing their own campaign is just too much centralized power for my tastes, even if I trust that billionaire and generally like his policies. Power corrupts.
- jdkee 7y ago4. Fund federal elections with federal dollars.
- a_tractor 7y agoYou mean with tax-payer dollars? Through a federal government which is currently $21+ Trillion in debt running deficits of around a trillion dollars annually? Would this funding involve new taxes or borrowing since it is new spending, requiring either current or future taxpayers to finance the program? Meanwhile, small donor fundraising has become much easier and much more successful than in the past, and imho, the entire problem revolves completely around the amount of power that has been centralized and expanded to the Federal Government. Part of the whole idea behind, you know, the principle of limited government... is to limit the amount of power that could be bought in the first place and therefore limit the incentive to corrupt the process, but obviously that ship has sailed a long time ago... I would think that in a free society, people are not forced to give their money to support political activity they would otherwise not support. For me, it’s that simple. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”