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Larry Lessig's approach is fundamentally misguided: 1. It increases complexity and discourages participation in the election system - campaign finance regulatio

Larry Lessig's approach is fundamentally misguided: 1. It increases complexity and discourages participation in the election system - campaign finance regulations are anti-free speech. 2. It treats the symptom, not the problem. The symptom is that people will spend a lot to get people important to them into office. The problem is that the government controls so much money and so many things, that it is in your best interest to try influence it so that 1. the money comes to you and 2. the laws and regulations favor you. 3. The centralization of power at the Federal level exacerbates this problem, since there is one main body that you are trying to influence instead of lots of smaller ones.

xorcist 12y ago
It's not immediately clear what your answer to number 2 is, except less power for the government. Is it to let these people who spend this money govern directly instead?
- dantheman 12y ago
  There are many approaches: 1. Reducing the scope of government 2. Push governance down instead of centralizing, do more at the local and state level 3. Develop quasi independent institutions to carry out certain tasks and allow competition between them.
  - c0ur7n3y 12y ago
    Those are great ideas. You can't accomplish any of those things until campaign finance reform is enacted.
jval 12y ago
1. Is money really speech? If so then there's a lot of laws that need to be overturned. Not to mention you can't hold 'free speech' up as a sword to swat away anything that affects speech (libel? slander? copyright violations?). The idea of a constitutionally protected right to free speech is to stop the government from silencing debate. But limiting people from handing money to members of congress isn't stopping your ability to voice your opinion at all, it's just limiting your ability to influence your member of congress by donating more money than the next guy. If anything it increases freedom of speech - it allows all people to voice their views in a marketplace of ideas where the amount of money in their bank accounts is irrelevant, and they are assessed on the merits of their arguments alone. The current situation allows every person to speak, but one person to hold a megaphone. 2. The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist. There will always be powerful people, and hopefully there will always be government, and it will always be in your interests to influence those powerful people so that they can help you out. So in any system where there is a government, there needs to be a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that representatives act in the interests of the public (which is the idea behind representative democracy) rather than the interests of their private funders. 3. Yes, of course it does, but again, that is just a symptom of checks and balances failing. In a system where there is a perfect representative democracy and a strong constitution, the people will never vote for a federal government larger than it needs to be. In the system we have now, the federal government swells in size no matter which party is in government (just depends whether it is the public service, or the military that grows). Private interests fuel this effect and governments wave their hands to make it look like cuts are being made, but they're not. Lessig has nailed the arguments around why campaign finance reform is necessary - whether he's going to be successful is in question but I think most legal experts can see that the system is broken, with money being the core of the problem.
- dantheman 12y ago
  1. Can Oprah, or any famous person, support/campaign for a candidate? How is her cashing on her celebrity any different than a person funding an advertisement? And the current laws to a large extent support the idea money=speech. Lessig's group couldn't even follow the campaign laws that already exist (http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2014/11/20/fec-complaint-mayday-pac-violated-campaign-finance-laws/ http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2014/11/20/fec-complaint-mayd...) 2. The problem I've identified is that the federal government has grown too large and does too many things. This is the problem, powerful people will be powerful and have an influence on society - through fame, money, etc. 3. Reducing the scope of the government could easily be accomplished if the commerce clause was read in a different way. If granting new power to the federal government required constitutional amendments then it would be better -- prohibition required an amendment, why don't modern drug laws? Additionally, returning the selection of senators to the state government instead of a popular vote would also be be an improvement. I don't think he has nailed the arguments, I think he fundamentally simplifies and distorts the case. Money is a symptom, the problem is the size/scope/breadth of action.
  - praptak 12y ago
    > How is her cashing on her celebrity any different than a person funding an advertisement? 1. Popularity is naturally limited - you can only be so popular. 2. Laws made by Congress have negligible influence on Ophra's popularity. Not so with money. Corporations fund laws that make them more money which they can fund laws with. In general it's the old fallacy of equating people's natural variance in ability - limited, not susceptible to positive feedback loop with the money/power inequality - practically unlimited, strongly reinforced by a positive feedback loop.
  - fpgeek 12y ago
    It's worth noting that the group accusing Lessig's SuperPAC of violating FEC disclosure rules is a well-known opponent of exactly those rules: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/103204564762/on-the-center-for-competitive-politics-complaint http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/103204564762/on-the-center-for... I guess you're more trusting, but, personally, when someone is opposed to a rule, I'd take their claims about what the rule actually requires with many grains of salt.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
praptak 12y ago
> campaign finance regulations are anti-free speech. It's not free speech if those with money can use it to drown out other voices in the public debate.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  Like the New York Times drowns out my neighborhood gazette? That's not a good reason to let Congress regulate the former.
Hermel 12y ago
These are excellent points. Whoever downvoted you probably stopped reading after point 1. Decentralization could help a lot. Switzerland, for example, has a very fine-grained system of political control, with only minimal power concentration in the capital. This increases political accountability as well as the costs of lobbyism. The reason why France needs such strong anti-lobbyism laws in the first place is because it has overly powerful politicians, which in turn attracts this kind of money. Dispersing power attacks the problem at its root cause.
- bsbechtel 12y ago
  I agree with both of you, although I'm not surprised you were downvoted. A few additional points: 1) Money has diminishing returns in elections. Once you have flooded the system with campaign ads, get-out-the-vote volunteers, analytics teams, etc, additional money eventually stops buying additional votes. 2) The wealthiest donors in our country donate the maximum to all candidates in an election. This is not buying an election, it's buying favors from whomever gets elected. There is a difference, and from what I understand of the type of campaign finance reform Mr. Lessig is advocating for, it fails to do anything to address this issue. 3) Democracy comes in all flavors, but IMHO the best is not the most democratic (gives the most people a voice), it's the one that distributes power most evenly across a population. I firmly agree it's the concentration of power, not the influence of money, that corrupts any system.
  - mikeyouse 12y ago
    #2 is demonstrably false. Corporations may donate equally to all parties since their donations are public record, but 'dark money' donors definitely do not.. https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/nonprof_summ.php?cycle=All&type=viewpt https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/nonprof_summ.php...
aggieben 12y ago
I completely agree. I would add that Lessig is spectacularly self-unaware as he goes about raising money for his cause. I have no idea how I got subscribed to the Rootstrikers mailing list, but I stay subscribed for the occasional lulz.
twoodfin 12y ago
This is exactly right: We have a $3T government running a $17T economy, and we're shocked and appalled that elections for that government involve spending on a par with what Americans spend on scented candles each year ($3.1B)? If every voting-age American spent $100 on electioneering, they'd be able to swamp the "special interests". I think it would be great, and so I'm in the tiny camp of people who think we need vastly more money in politics.
jparker165 12y ago
> campaign finance regulations are anti-free speech. Lessig has actually said that he supports the Citizens United decision for exactly this reason. I'll badly paraphrase from "Republic Lost": Lessig says we should exhaust tools to encourage broader campaign funding (and thus political speech) before we should do anything to limit speech. This clearly implies that there may come a point where limiting political speech is called-for, but I agree that we're not there yet.
aptwebapps 12y ago
1. What approach of Lessig's are you actually arguing against? To clarify: He was originally in favor of strong controls but realized that the free speech problems were too large. Now he favors supplemental approaches to enable candidates to compete without going after large donors. 2. But how will you reduce the government under the current system? Isn't campaign finance reform a necessary step? 3. Ditto number 2.
- dpatru 12y ago
  > But how will you reduce the government under the current system? Isn't campaign finance reform a necessary step? You reduce government by advocating for it. You promote ideas and candidates that will cut government income, control, and spending. The problem is that Government is too big and too powerful. Merely trying to make government function better, without intentionally cutting it, is like trying to make a severely obese man more comfortable by treating his diabetes, high blood pressure, joint problems, etc, but not restricting his caloric intake: it just makes the problem worse. In computer science, a common way to solve complex problems is just to reduce their size. You sort a big list by splitting it and recursively sorting the smaller lists. You could make the problems of the US government much more manageable by simply abolishing the Federal government and making the fifty states independent. There would still be problems with government, but the problems would be an order of magnitude smaller. Repeat this process until government is truly local.
  - aptwebapps 12y ago
    Lessig's contention is that you can't make significant changes to the government in it's current form. That's the whole point.
  - zaphar 12y ago
    Lessig's whole point is that you can't effectively advocate for it without money. That's the crux of the whole problem he highlights.
john_b 12y ago
This is all fine and I don't disagree with you, but how do you propose we fix the real problem (federal control over far too much) without first removing the endemic corruption favoring entrenched interests that our current campaign finance laws not only permit but encourage? Do you expect our current political class to vote for less power for themselves? Or for the corporate entities funding congressment to suggest to those congressmen that the regulations which protect them need to be lifted?
namlem 12y ago
You can't make the federal government too small without breaking up the union entirely. And even if you did, the regulatory powers would just fall to the states. Not that I'm opposed to breaking up the country into smaller countries, I'm just saying that government power is needed to act as a counterbalance to private power.

xorcist 12y ago

It's not immediately clear what your answer to number 2 is, except less power for the government. Is it to let these people who spend this money govern directly instead?

dantheman 12y ago
There are many approaches: 1. Reducing the scope of government 2. Push governance down instead of centralizing, do more at the local and state level 3. Develop quasi independent institutions to carry out certain tasks and allow competition between them.
- c0ur7n3y 12y ago
  Those are great ideas. You can't accomplish any of those things until campaign finance reform is enacted.

jval 12y ago

1. Is money really speech? If so then there's a lot of laws that need to be overturned. Not to mention you can't hold 'free speech' up as a sword to swat away anything that affects speech (libel? slander? copyright violations?). The idea of a constitutionally protected right to free speech is to stop the government from silencing debate. But limiting people from handing money to members of congress isn't stopping your ability to voice your opinion at all, it's just limiting your ability to influence your member of congress by donating more money than the next guy. If anything it increases freedom of speech - it allows all people to voice their views in a marketplace of ideas where the amount of money in their bank accounts is irrelevant, and they are assessed on the merits of their arguments alone. The current situation allows every person to speak, but one person to hold a megaphone. 2. The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist. There will always be powerful people, and hopefully there will always be government, and it will always be in your interests to influence those powerful people so that they can help you out. So in any system where there is a government, there needs to be a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that representatives act in the interests of the public (which is the idea behind representative democracy) rather than the interests of their private funders. 3. Yes, of course it does, but again, that is just a symptom of checks and balances failing. In a system where there is a perfect representative democracy and a strong constitution, the people will never vote for a federal government larger than it needs to be. In the system we have now, the federal government swells in size no matter which party is in government (just depends whether it is the public service, or the military that grows). Private interests fuel this effect and governments wave their hands to make it look like cuts are being made, but they're not. Lessig has nailed the arguments around why campaign finance reform is necessary - whether he's going to be successful is in question but I think most legal experts can see that the system is broken, with money being the core of the problem.

dantheman 12y ago
1. Can Oprah, or any famous person, support/campaign for a candidate? How is her cashing on her celebrity any different than a person funding an advertisement? And the current laws to a large extent support the idea money=speech. Lessig's group couldn't even follow the campaign laws that already exist (http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2014/11/20/fec-complaint-mayday-pac-violated-campaign-finance-laws/ http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2014/11/20/fec-complaint-mayd...) 2. The problem I've identified is that the federal government has grown too large and does too many things. This is the problem, powerful people will be powerful and have an influence on society - through fame, money, etc. 3. Reducing the scope of the government could easily be accomplished if the commerce clause was read in a different way. If granting new power to the federal government required constitutional amendments then it would be better -- prohibition required an amendment, why don't modern drug laws? Additionally, returning the selection of senators to the state government instead of a popular vote would also be be an improvement. I don't think he has nailed the arguments, I think he fundamentally simplifies and distorts the case. Money is a symptom, the problem is the size/scope/breadth of action.
- praptak 12y ago
  > How is her cashing on her celebrity any different than a person funding an advertisement? 1. Popularity is naturally limited - you can only be so popular. 2. Laws made by Congress have negligible influence on Ophra's popularity. Not so with money. Corporations fund laws that make them more money which they can fund laws with. In general it's the old fallacy of equating people's natural variance in ability - limited, not susceptible to positive feedback loop with the money/power inequality - practically unlimited, strongly reinforced by a positive feedback loop.
- fpgeek 12y ago
  It's worth noting that the group accusing Lessig's SuperPAC of violating FEC disclosure rules is a well-known opponent of exactly those rules: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/103204564762/on-the-center-for-competitive-politics-complaint http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/103204564762/on-the-center-for... I guess you're more trusting, but, personally, when someone is opposed to a rule, I'd take their claims about what the rule actually requires with many grains of salt.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

praptak 12y ago

> campaign finance regulations are anti-free speech. It's not free speech if those with money can use it to drown out other voices in the public debate.

twoodfin 12y ago
Like the New York Times drowns out my neighborhood gazette? That's not a good reason to let Congress regulate the former.

Hermel 12y ago

These are excellent points. Whoever downvoted you probably stopped reading after point 1. Decentralization could help a lot. Switzerland, for example, has a very fine-grained system of political control, with only minimal power concentration in the capital. This increases political accountability as well as the costs of lobbyism. The reason why France needs such strong anti-lobbyism laws in the first place is because it has overly powerful politicians, which in turn attracts this kind of money. Dispersing power attacks the problem at its root cause.

bsbechtel 12y ago
I agree with both of you, although I'm not surprised you were downvoted. A few additional points: 1) Money has diminishing returns in elections. Once you have flooded the system with campaign ads, get-out-the-vote volunteers, analytics teams, etc, additional money eventually stops buying additional votes. 2) The wealthiest donors in our country donate the maximum to all candidates in an election. This is not buying an election, it's buying favors from whomever gets elected. There is a difference, and from what I understand of the type of campaign finance reform Mr. Lessig is advocating for, it fails to do anything to address this issue. 3) Democracy comes in all flavors, but IMHO the best is not the most democratic (gives the most people a voice), it's the one that distributes power most evenly across a population. I firmly agree it's the concentration of power, not the influence of money, that corrupts any system.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  #2 is demonstrably false. Corporations may donate equally to all parties since their donations are public record, but 'dark money' donors definitely do not.. https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/nonprof_summ.php?cycle=All&type=viewpt https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/nonprof_summ.php...

aggieben 12y ago

I completely agree. I would add that Lessig is spectacularly self-unaware as he goes about raising money for his cause. I have no idea how I got subscribed to the Rootstrikers mailing list, but I stay subscribed for the occasional lulz.

twoodfin 12y ago

This is exactly right: We have a $3T government running a $17T economy, and we're shocked and appalled that elections for that government involve spending on a par with what Americans spend on scented candles each year ($3.1B)? If every voting-age American spent $100 on electioneering, they'd be able to swamp the "special interests". I think it would be great, and so I'm in the tiny camp of people who think we need vastly more money in politics.

jparker165 12y ago

> campaign finance regulations are anti-free speech. Lessig has actually said that he supports the Citizens United decision for exactly this reason. I'll badly paraphrase from "Republic Lost": Lessig says we should exhaust tools to encourage broader campaign funding (and thus political speech) before we should do anything to limit speech. This clearly implies that there may come a point where limiting political speech is called-for, but I agree that we're not there yet.

aptwebapps 12y ago

1. What approach of Lessig's are you actually arguing against? To clarify: He was originally in favor of strong controls but realized that the free speech problems were too large. Now he favors supplemental approaches to enable candidates to compete without going after large donors. 2. But how will you reduce the government under the current system? Isn't campaign finance reform a necessary step? 3. Ditto number 2.

dpatru 12y ago
> But how will you reduce the government under the current system? Isn't campaign finance reform a necessary step? You reduce government by advocating for it. You promote ideas and candidates that will cut government income, control, and spending. The problem is that Government is too big and too powerful. Merely trying to make government function better, without intentionally cutting it, is like trying to make a severely obese man more comfortable by treating his diabetes, high blood pressure, joint problems, etc, but not restricting his caloric intake: it just makes the problem worse. In computer science, a common way to solve complex problems is just to reduce their size. You sort a big list by splitting it and recursively sorting the smaller lists. You could make the problems of the US government much more manageable by simply abolishing the Federal government and making the fifty states independent. There would still be problems with government, but the problems would be an order of magnitude smaller. Repeat this process until government is truly local.
- aptwebapps 12y ago
  Lessig's contention is that you can't make significant changes to the government in it's current form. That's the whole point.
- zaphar 12y ago
  Lessig's whole point is that you can't effectively advocate for it without money. That's the crux of the whole problem he highlights.

john_b 12y ago

This is all fine and I don't disagree with you, but how do you propose we fix the real problem (federal control over far too much) without first removing the endemic corruption favoring entrenched interests that our current campaign finance laws not only permit but encourage? Do you expect our current political class to vote for less power for themselves? Or for the corporate entities funding congressment to suggest to those congressmen that the regulations which protect them need to be lifted?

namlem 12y ago

You can't make the federal government too small without breaking up the union entirely. And even if you did, the regulatory powers would just fall to the states. Not that I'm opposed to breaking up the country into smaller countries, I'm just saying that government power is needed to act as a counterbalance to private power.