= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Alicorn comments on Politics as Charity - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (161)
I like this idea, but how do you verify that the donation would have gone to the political party? If I'm inclined to give $50 to a non-political-party charity, then there's incentive for me to claim it would go to the party I prefer in order to get one of my political opponents to divert money from the Bad Guys to another cause.
Agreed.
I would like to come up with aways to prevent gaming this sort of system. If we could get past this sort of hurdle, I would be interested in implementing a website facilitating this.
Perhaps the matched donors have to agree on a charity and an amount: you pay into the system, and if you get matched, then the non-political charity gets your money, and if you don't (after some waiting period), then the political charity does. This means you have to at least not mind the money going to the political charity, or be willing to gamble.
A thought: Charity popularity probably isn't evenly distributed between political parties. This could limit the ability of some charities to be matched, but it would allow (for example) a Republican who supports Planned Parenthood to have little or no risk of their donation defaulting to the GOP. A Republican who didn't want to donate to the Republican Party and did want to donate to Planned Parenthood would take very little risk, while one who wanted to donate to the NRA might have more trouble.
Charity itself isn't evenly distributed: Republicans give more dollars to charity, period. If everyone in the US signed up for this site, it would guarantee a Republican win. But, of course, not everyone will, so it may not be that bad.
Yes, that should reduce the gaming of the system. It involves more secrecy that in my original conception of the website (which would display graphs of the matching money available for different charities), but I don't think that can be helped.
It is probably impossible to become extremely confident about that, but past contributions to a party are a good predictor of future contributions, and I believe that Federal campaigns are required to disclose the names and amounts of any contributions to the Federal Election Commission, which publishes them.
Those published disclosures can be used to qualify a counterparty (a person one is considering making a deal with) and then to verify that the counterparty carried out his end of the deal.
The deal should be that a Republican promises to contribute X dollars less this election cycle than he did last cycle if a Democrat will do the same.
The deal reduces (direct) contributions to campaigns even without the requirement that the Republican and the Democrat agree on a charity to donate 2 * X dollars to. In particular, it reduces (direct) contributions even if the two "sides" of the deal just keep that money.
There are indirect ways to make contributions that do not require disclosure, however, and IIUC these indirect ways are heavily used because they allow individuals to get around the dollar limits on direct contributions. So that consideration brings back the idea that the $X each "side" saves in the deal should go to charity (but I see no need to require that each "side" donate their $X to the same charity, just that the donations can be verified) because it gives some assurance that the $X will not become indirect contributions to a political party, since the total amount an individual is willing to spend on altruism tend to stay relatively constant year over year. But that takes out of the stream of money going to campaigns and parties mostly altruistic money, leaving mostly unaffected the money that expects to profit from the contributions, which might have a bad effect on the political process.
Also, credible arguments have been made that past experience with the dollar-limit laws shows that it is futile to keep money out of politics because the people who make their living from that money have so much influence on the law-making process and because there is so much smart money that wants to contribute to candidates and to parties. Carl's analysis in the OP of the efficacy of "buying" a vote is evidence for that last point.
Providing there are roughly equal levels of cheating on both sides this sounds like a feature rather than a bug.
The problem is that if the potential participants expect this type of cheating, that their donations will be diverted by someone who would not have donated to their political opponents anyways, they will not want to participate.
Even if that is the case, they're still getting twice* the leverage they'd get elsewhere.
*Minus the small finder's fee.
I think you have to just eat this problem. The whole point of the system is that it allows a donation to do double duty as a political force and as a standard charitable donation. It will appeal to anyone who likes both, whichever one is more important to them.