18 ms·
I always found it annoying that campaign finance laws are so inconsistent: why do they seriously restrict people with lots of extra money, but not those with lo
by byrneseyeview 18y ago
I always found it annoying that campaign finance laws are so inconsistent: why do they seriously restrict people with lots of extra money, but not those with lots of extra time or influence?
- olefoo 18y agoBecause it's much harder to translate the product of crime into influence or time.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago1) Uh, really? You think Obama or McCain would accept tens of thousands of dollars from the Gottis, if only McCain Feingold were repealed? 2) So what? Crime is already, by definition, illegal. If there is some benefit to committing a crime, shouldn't we create laws against the crime, rather than laws against the benefit. I mean, money from crime can also translate into money for nice cars, so restricting the sale of nice cars would discourage crime. But it would be silly.
- olefoo 18y agowould you agree or disagree with the statement "might makes right."
- byrneseyeview 18y agoI would disagree. This sounds like a red herring -- I'm trying to point out that the current campaign finance laws are a bad way to combat corruption, not arguing that corruption is okay.
- vaksel 18y agoI'd be more annoyed with 529s. I can only spend $2300 per candidate, but then I can turn around and dump as much as I want into nothing but smear campaigns.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoNo, no, the "Do you have five minutes for Barack Obama?" clipboard-wielders are incredibly obnoxious. That's another problem: if the average campaign knows that time is cheaper than money, they waste time relative to money. And the only effective way to overspend time in politics is to spend other people's time, too. We would have fewer street hasslers, push-pollsters, banner-wavers, etc. if we just treated time the way we treat money, and limited everyone to ten hours of thinking about politics per election cycle.
- vaksel 18y agoJust tell them you already support him and they'll go away. I had one of those guys going door to door asking for donations, so I just told them I donated $2,300 to Obama already and they left me alone. I got rid of them within 1 minute, and they didn't feel awkward by trying to persuade someone to give when they don't want to. I actually don't plan to vote this election, my state will go Democrat no matter what, so if I do go to throw my vote away, I'll just throw it to Liberterians.
- pg 18y agoBecause money's the most liquid medium; the medium of exchange, in fact.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoThen it's a lazy hack. Every law has a message, and apparently the message of this one is "It is perfectly okay to support a candidate as much as possible, so long as you use the second through nth most liquid medium, and not the very most liquid medium." There are just so many negative externalities, here. Imagine a lawyer who can do something society thinks is worth $500 per hour. By lunchtime, he's earned enough money to make the maximum donation to Obama; thereafter, his next best bet is to do the kind of volunteer work worth about $10 an hour. He's running at 2% efficiency so we can feel like our political system is less corrupt!
- pg 18y agoWhether it's a hack is not something you can decide a priori. It depends how much more liquid it is than other mediums.