pktechgirlbackup (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pktechgirlbackup) wrote2012-10-03 07:38 pm
pktechgirlbackup) wrote2012-10-03 07:38 pm
Why campaign finance reform is the wrong question
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.
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You are right when you say that removing money doesn't make the resources to be allocated go away, but all those resources can also be allocated to nonpolitical things. If those nonpolitical things still have money but the campaigns don't, the nonpolitical things will win out and the economy will allocate campaigns proportionately fewer resources.
The fewer resources a campaign has, the greater the proportion of their opportunities to appeal to voters consist of "legitimate" ones like appearing in debates and using publicly funded airtime. These should be both fairer across all candidates, less likely to end up with candidates owing people favors, and more likely to help people make informed decisions.
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Even ignoring campaign finance issues, I would just be happy if political ads couldn't just blatantly fabricate things. A commercial for dish soap can't say that it whitens your teeth without evidence of it doing that, but political ads can say all sorts of prima facie factual claims without any evidence whatsoever.
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Also, I agree 100% that factually inaccurate ads are terrible, but I believes any law that requires truth in political advertising will be used by incumbents to squash challengers.
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Okay, put it like this. IMO there are at least three arguments for campaign finance reform:
First, less reliance on money means the candidates owe fewer potentially corrupting obligations.
Second, less reliance on money means that non-rich people or large-organization-backed people have better chances.
Third, fewer TV ads means less ability to have misleading or negative ads that trick people into making bad choices.
You seem to be arguing that restricting the money supply to campaigns doesn't help these goals, because the candidates would replace money-backed persuasion methods (like paying TV companies) with influence-backed advertising methods (like asking favors from TV companies).
I'm arguing that's not really true. First, as dukhat pointed out, I think it's already illegal for candidates to get ads through influence. Second, because TV owners are mostly motivated through money, it would be much harder for candidates to flatter and persuade their way into huge amounts of TV time than it would be for them to pay their way into large amounts of TV time, especially since each political commercial costs the networks money they could get by using that time for paid commercials.
So even if there was a small amount of flattery and persuasion, overall the amount of advertising would drastically decrease, satisfying all three goals of the campaign finance reformers.
The less TV advertising there is, the more voters' opinions of the candidates depends on things like debates or public airtime. Those seem like better ways to expose people to real issues than TV ads do, so it would be a net positive.
Does that make more sense?