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"If you're worried about a candidate advertising a lot, that's pretty much a vote of no-confidence in your fellow Americans' ability to weigh options and vote r

"If you're worried about a candidate advertising a lot, that's pretty much a vote of no-confidence in your fellow Americans' ability to weigh options and vote rationally." One's ability to weigh options is predicated on the fact that people have awareness of the options and their implications in the first place. People don't have perfect knowledge even before millions of advertising dollars flood the market with misinformation about the options themselves, let alone the implications for same. If you're truly interested in maintaining the integrity of our democracy and our discourse, it's hard to imagine why you'd be in favor of more unrestricted money. The fact is that vanishingly few people are wealthy enough to participate in this flavor of democracy, let alone make any sense of it. "Isn't this in itself a repudiation of democracy?" It's a strange sort of democracy you have here, where some voices are obviously more equal than others. "This isn't going to be rehashing the Glass-Steagall myth, is it? See, e.g., [1]" Wow. The future more than a little pwned this guy. What about the billions of dollars BoA and JP Morgan took from the gov't? How about WaMu? And in what universe CDOs, et al, not risky investments? My understanding about Glass-Steagall isn't so much that it directly led to the crisis, although for all I know maybe there's some intricacy there that I'm missing. Rather it allowed banks to use depositors' money to play Wall Street, and during the financial/housing bubble over the last decade or so, this meant you could become fantastically rich. So you make money, you buy up other banks, and you become progressively closer to "too big to fail." AIUI, more and smaller banks -> more resilience, more diffuse risk rather than big, big chunks of concentrated risk in a few, critical places.

CWuestefeld 15y ago
It's a strange sort of democracy you have here, where some voices are obviously more equal than others. My definition of democracy is that everyone gets an equal vote. I don't see where it relates to who can advocate with how loud a voice. You haven't addressed my question about where, in the spectrum of single speaker to small groups up through corporations, the right to invest money in political speech ought to be curtailed. So you make money, you buy up other banks, and you become progressively closer to "too big to fail." ... more and smaller banks -> more resilience, more diffuse risk rather than big, big chunks of concentrated risk I appreciate your reply here. It's thoughtful, and you're the first one I've encountered that has actually tried to put some meat behind the standard talking point. So in my book, you've got an upvote for engaging in a principled debate, even if I disagree with you. The thing is, G-S did not prevent banks from becoming too big to fail. It prevented them from diversifying. So if G-S were still in place, there's no reason to believe that the banks would have been any smaller. It just would have ensured that the banks didn't have sufficient diversifying to ride out any problems. If you look at my citation above, you'll see that this is exactly what happened. There were giant non-diversified banks that were failing, while those that did diversify, thanks to Gramm-Leach-Bliley, were able to weather the storm.
- gjm11 15y ago
  > My definition of democracy is that everyone gets an equal vote. So how does it come about that you interpret support for restrictions on political campaigning as an attack on democracy? You can't have it both ways: either democracy is just about giving everyone one vote, in which case nothing wpietri [EDITED to add: or wonderzombie] said can possibly be taken to be at all opposed to it; or it's concerned more broadly with enabling and/or trusting people to vote rationally in the light of the best available information, in which case it's obviously not undemocratic (though it might turn out to be wrong) to want to regulate possible sources of misinformation. > You haven't addressed my question about where [...] the right to invest money in political speech ought to be curtailed. Your implicit argument seems to be this: If you can't point to an obviously correct place to draw the line, then no line should be drawn anywhere. I think this argument is hopelessly wrong; there are thousands of cases where you have a continuum with something obviously reasonable at one end, something obviously unacceptable at another, and no obviously correct place to draw a line. However, here is one proposal that seems reasonable to me: Individuals and corporations can both invest money in political speech, but the amount any individual or any individual corporation is allowed to put in is limited to (some credible estimate of) the largest amount a not-entirely-crazy person on a roughly-median income would be prepared to put in. (The problem with letting corporations run political advertisements isn't that there's something especially evil about corporations; it's that corporations have a colossal amount of money and a great deal to gain or lose from political outcomes, and that their interests are not obviously well aligned with those of the general public. If IBM or General Motors or ExxonMobil can only spend $5k/year on politics, they can't do much harm.)
  - CWuestefeld 15y ago
    So how does it come about that you interpret support for restrictions on political campaigning as an attack on democracy? If you believe that the additional political speech that greater donations would allow, would break the democratic process, then you have little faith in the ability of voters to weigh the facts and cast a rational vote. If you don't think that voters can do this, then it seems to me that you don't believe that democracy can really work. I'm not saying that the people who want to limit political contributions are opposed to democracy. I'm saying that it reveals that they have little confidence that democracy can work. Your implicit argument seems to be this: If you can't point to an obviously correct place to draw the line, then no line should be drawn anywhere. No. I'm saying that for such restrictions to be implementable, there must be a line defined somewhere. If you want to make a rule, you've got to add something to it that still allows me, or me and my buddies, or whatever, to still make political contributions. Secondarily, I'm hoping that expressing that distinction might reveal more about what these people are trying to accomplish (or not accomplish, as the case might be). Sort of a black box test. Individuals and corporations can both invest money in political speech, but the amount any individual or any individual corporation is allowed to put in is limited to (some credible estimate of) the largest amount a not-entirely-crazy person So you're prohibiting me from pooling money with friends in order to send a message of our own. Is that your intent?

CWuestefeld 15y ago

It's a strange sort of democracy you have here, where some voices are obviously more equal than others. My definition of democracy is that everyone gets an equal vote. I don't see where it relates to who can advocate with how loud a voice. You haven't addressed my question about where, in the spectrum of single speaker to small groups up through corporations, the right to invest money in political speech ought to be curtailed. So you make money, you buy up other banks, and you become progressively closer to "too big to fail." ... more and smaller banks -> more resilience, more diffuse risk rather than big, big chunks of concentrated risk I appreciate your reply here. It's thoughtful, and you're the first one I've encountered that has actually tried to put some meat behind the standard talking point. So in my book, you've got an upvote for engaging in a principled debate, even if I disagree with you. The thing is, G-S did not prevent banks from becoming too big to fail. It prevented them from diversifying. So if G-S were still in place, there's no reason to believe that the banks would have been any smaller. It just would have ensured that the banks didn't have sufficient diversifying to ride out any problems. If you look at my citation above, you'll see that this is exactly what happened. There were giant non-diversified banks that were failing, while those that did diversify, thanks to Gramm-Leach-Bliley, were able to weather the storm.

gjm11 15y ago
> My definition of democracy is that everyone gets an equal vote. So how does it come about that you interpret support for restrictions on political campaigning as an attack on democracy? You can't have it both ways: either democracy is just about giving everyone one vote, in which case nothing wpietri [EDITED to add: or wonderzombie] said can possibly be taken to be at all opposed to it; or it's concerned more broadly with enabling and/or trusting people to vote rationally in the light of the best available information, in which case it's obviously not undemocratic (though it might turn out to be wrong) to want to regulate possible sources of misinformation. > You haven't addressed my question about where [...] the right to invest money in political speech ought to be curtailed. Your implicit argument seems to be this: If you can't point to an obviously correct place to draw the line, then no line should be drawn anywhere. I think this argument is hopelessly wrong; there are thousands of cases where you have a continuum with something obviously reasonable at one end, something obviously unacceptable at another, and no obviously correct place to draw a line. However, here is one proposal that seems reasonable to me: Individuals and corporations can both invest money in political speech, but the amount any individual or any individual corporation is allowed to put in is limited to (some credible estimate of) the largest amount a not-entirely-crazy person on a roughly-median income would be prepared to put in. (The problem with letting corporations run political advertisements isn't that there's something especially evil about corporations; it's that corporations have a colossal amount of money and a great deal to gain or lose from political outcomes, and that their interests are not obviously well aligned with those of the general public. If IBM or General Motors or ExxonMobil can only spend $5k/year on politics, they can't do much harm.)
- CWuestefeld 15y ago
  So how does it come about that you interpret support for restrictions on political campaigning as an attack on democracy? If you believe that the additional political speech that greater donations would allow, would break the democratic process, then you have little faith in the ability of voters to weigh the facts and cast a rational vote. If you don't think that voters can do this, then it seems to me that you don't believe that democracy can really work. I'm not saying that the people who want to limit political contributions are opposed to democracy. I'm saying that it reveals that they have little confidence that democracy can work. Your implicit argument seems to be this: If you can't point to an obviously correct place to draw the line, then no line should be drawn anywhere. No. I'm saying that for such restrictions to be implementable, there must be a line defined somewhere. If you want to make a rule, you've got to add something to it that still allows me, or me and my buddies, or whatever, to still make political contributions. Secondarily, I'm hoping that expressing that distinction might reveal more about what these people are trying to accomplish (or not accomplish, as the case might be). Sort of a black box test. Individuals and corporations can both invest money in political speech, but the amount any individual or any individual corporation is allowed to put in is limited to (some credible estimate of) the largest amount a not-entirely-crazy person So you're prohibiting me from pooling money with friends in order to send a message of our own. Is that your intent?