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Money is not a real thing.
It's okay. Inches and minutes aren't real things either. What they are are ways of measuring things. Inches measure how long something is in one physical dimension, minutes measure time. We use them because it makes comparison easier. But it's easy to see how an inch of vegetable is equal to an inch of desk. Money is tricksy because it has a physical form and what it measures is more abstract, but fundamentally, money is a measure of how much a society wants a thing, relative to how rare it is, modified by how much people want things made by the people who want the thing in question.
It's not a perfect metric of this. Information asymmetric can distort it, different people have different preferences, and humans aren't great at math. But it is pretty fucking useful. Before money, you either made what you wanted, or bartered what you had for what you wanted, which required someone else with, roughly, a valuation of the two things involved that was the inverse of yours (i.e. they want A more than B, you want B more than A). This is tricky to find, and time consuming, and while it's hard to measure without money, value is lost in that friction. So when money comes along and lets you improve your position as long as there is someone who values what you're trying to sell more than you value it, and someone else who values what you want less than you do, it's a great boon for everyone.
So money is an easy way to keep track of who has more and nicer stuff. But if money went away, the amount of stuff would not actually change. England has much tighter restrictions on campaign funding than America does. But money isn't a spell component for conjuring votes, it is used to buy things like time on the TV. Removing money doesn't make time on the TV less important, it just means it's being allocated some other way- like, for example, the whims of the station owner, who will be heavily influenced by their personal politics and the candidate's support of the media. I think this is strictly worse than being determined by money, because, however hard it is to make money when you don't have any (and it is very hard), it is harder to make friends with influence when you don't have any.
Which is not to take campaign reform off the table entirely. It is simply to argue that looking at it as a problem of money is a false trail.
It's okay. Inches and minutes aren't real things either. What they are are ways of measuring things. Inches measure how long something is in one physical dimension, minutes measure time. We use them because it makes comparison easier. But it's easy to see how an inch of vegetable is equal to an inch of desk. Money is tricksy because it has a physical form and what it measures is more abstract, but fundamentally, money is a measure of how much a society wants a thing, relative to how rare it is, modified by how much people want things made by the people who want the thing in question.
It's not a perfect metric of this. Information asymmetric can distort it, different people have different preferences, and humans aren't great at math. But it is pretty fucking useful. Before money, you either made what you wanted, or bartered what you had for what you wanted, which required someone else with, roughly, a valuation of the two things involved that was the inverse of yours (i.e. they want A more than B, you want B more than A). This is tricky to find, and time consuming, and while it's hard to measure without money, value is lost in that friction. So when money comes along and lets you improve your position as long as there is someone who values what you're trying to sell more than you value it, and someone else who values what you want less than you do, it's a great boon for everyone.
So money is an easy way to keep track of who has more and nicer stuff. But if money went away, the amount of stuff would not actually change. England has much tighter restrictions on campaign funding than America does. But money isn't a spell component for conjuring votes, it is used to buy things like time on the TV. Removing money doesn't make time on the TV less important, it just means it's being allocated some other way- like, for example, the whims of the station owner, who will be heavily influenced by their personal politics and the candidate's support of the media. I think this is strictly worse than being determined by money, because, however hard it is to make money when you don't have any (and it is very hard), it is harder to make friends with influence when you don't have any.
Which is not to take campaign reform off the table entirely. It is simply to argue that looking at it as a problem of money is a false trail.
