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For what it's worth, the Founding Fathers actually did do quite a bit of research into what kinds of "loopholes" had existed in earlier systems, particularly the one in England, and took steps to avoid them. For example, the Constitution mandates that a census be taken every ten years because, in England, there were "rotten boroughs" which had a member of Parliament even though they had a tiny population. Needless to say, it wasn't easy to get politicians in these districts to approve redistricting laws.
On the other hand, the Founding Fathers didn't anticipate gerrymandering, though.
In theory, the state governments were supposed to serve as a way to test improvements in parallel. I don't know if it ever worked out that way, though.
There certainly are problems with the U.S. Constitution as it stands (there's no reason for the Electoral College, and the U.S. Senate re-implements rotten boroughs because the largest state has 65 times the population of the smallest one) but it's worked tolerably well for over 200 years now.
To be equally fair, a lot of the more obvious exploits in the American system have been tried at one point or another; one of the clearer examples I can think of offhand is FDR's attempt to pack the US Supreme Court in 1937. Historically most of these have been shot down or rendered more or less toothless by other power centers in the government, although a similar (albeit somewhat unique) situation did contribute to the American Civil War.
There's a lot of bad things I could say about the American system, but the dynamic stability built in seems to have been quite a good plan.
"Avoid concentrating power, and try to pit power centers against each other whenever possible" seems to have been a fairly successful design heuristic for governments.
In this Brit's NSHO, the main problem with the US system is the lack of a limit on campaign spending.
You can't really limit campaign spending. If you forbid a billionaire from buying ads they can go ahead and buy themselves a TV channel or a newspaper. Of course not everyone can buy a newspaper, your limit shifts power to those people who are wealthy.
You can't create a situation in which nobody can spend money in a way to increase the likelihood that a particular politician gets elected. Money is just to useful for you to be able to pass a law that prevents it to be used to effect public opinion.
If you start with hard limits the money just takes a less obvious road.
On the other hand public funding of elections actually works. You actually need well funded parties that are funded through government money as actors if you don't want rich people to dominate the political system.
You can, since this has been done in the UK. And, yes, individuals are limited in how much of the media they can buy up too.
You can't cure every disease, but that is no argument for not building hospitals.
...and did you get a better government as a result?
We didn't get a choice between two conservative parties.
True, you appear to have a choice between three left wing parties.
Socially, maybe, that being where the votes are. However, you will be delighted to hear that the Conservatives are still sufficiently traditional to want to cut welfare to the poor and taxes to the rich.
And yet not traditional enough to see any problem with the UK's disastrous immigration policy. The BNP exists pretty much entirely because the "conservative" party is more concerned with not being called racists than with doing what the majority of their constituents have demanding for decades.
What disaster was that?
Yes, and the Democrats are left wing enough to try to expand the welfare state and raise taxes on the rich. I was using the same criterion you were.
How do you know that campaign spending is reduced? You don't know the alternative roads that the money travels when you don't allow the obvious roads. Just because you don't see the money flowing anymore doesn't mean that the invisible hand of the market doesn't direct the money to those opportunities where it produces political effects.
The loss of transparency of money flow is a big problem with spending limits.
Who cares whether individuals are limited when you have corporations? But even if you have antitrust laws that prevent a single corporation from controlling all media that doesn't mean that you can't have 10 corporations with similar agendas controlling all media.
Revealed preferences and margins. By spending on the 'obvious roads', entities reveal that those are the optimum roads for them and their first choice; by forcing them back onto secondary choices, they must in some way be worse off (for example, be paying more or getting less) else they would have been using those non-obvious roads in the first place; and then by supply & demand, less will be spent.
I don't think it's a question of paying more and getting less but of being less certain about the payout.
If you have a policy of giving high paying jobs to people who end their political career if they furthered the interests of your company, you aren't certain about the payoff of that spending.
On average it will motivate politicians to further your course but it's a gamble. It requires a relationship of trust between the politicians and the companies doing the hiring.
Only big actors can have those relationships. You might be right that total money spent goes down but that's not the thing we really care about. We care about the amount that policy get's influenced by special interests.
Politicla parties are aonoly allowed limited airtime on mass media: they may be able to spend money on other things, but they would be less effective.
If the giovt says you can only broadcast for five minutes a year, that isn't a free market.
Agian, not being able to do something perfectly is not a good reason not to do it at all.
Okay, then they don't hire an advertising company to produce advertising. I instead hire them to produce a documentary of my favorite political issue and then sell that documentary for a low price to a TV station that it doesn't run as advertising but as documentary.
You know that a lot of the players who produce documentaries that you see on TV also produce advertising for paying clients right?
Is that really an improvement of the political system is you get less political speech that's overtly labeled as being advertising?
There already a large amount of politics that is not labelled as advertising, whether in the forms of songs, moviesornewspaper articles. Since the UK system also limits overall spending by parties, what they are able to do by means other than overt advertising is a drop in the ocean.
Then the rich corporation who wants to influence a political party doesn't donate money but things brought by money.
You probably do succeed weaken political parties. If you are a lobbyist and want to influence politics to further the agenda of a corporation you want weak political parties.
If you look at the US it's a country of very weak parties. The head of the Republican and Democratic party don't have much political power. To have a career as a politician in Germany you mainly have to impress fellow members of your political party. To have a career as a politician in the US you mainly have to impress corporate donors who fund your campaign.
I prefer the incentives of the German system.
The way an American would phrase it is:
To have a career as a politician in Germany you mainly have to impress the party bosses. To have a career as a politician in the US you mainly have to impress your constituents.
Such as?
Which would still be constrained by donation limits, I suppose.
IIUC, there are no spending limits by corporations in the US system.
In fairness, we can't very well assume without evidence that this is true, either. We're probably best off with comparing results; are the laws of the UK notably friendlier or unfriendlier to wealthy individuals? What about monied businesses?
Note that friendliness in this sense doesn't necessarily mean deregulation; regulations tend to lower profits but also tend to raise barriers to entry. If a particular business institution is worried about disruption by emerging players, it may be rational for it to accept or even push for regulation. Trade barriers are an especially pure example.
Then you get into the question of what qualifies as a party for purposes of getting public money. I can see this degenerating into a system for keeping non-established parties out.
I think our German system works quite well in that regard. The main reason the pirate party didn't join the Bundestag is they were largely incompetent. Infighting weakened them. Snowden gave them the perfect topic but all they did do is being reactive and saying the establishment is bad instead of developing policy ideas with they could have pushed into reality.
The main problem with establishing a new party is getting competent people together who are willing to think deeply about public policy and who don't destroy each other through infighting.
I don't know that much about the German system, how is the public funding allocated among the political parties? Did the Pirate Party get public funding? What about say the AfD?
And while changing the American system would be incredibly difficult, democracies which formed later tended to use better-patched versions of the American system - there's a reason that most western European countries have more than two major parties, for instance.
Parties aren't a built-in feature of the American political system as such -- in fact, many of the people involved in setting it up were vociferous about their opposition to factionalism (and then proceeded more or less directly into some rather nasty factional conflict, because humans). The first-past-the-post decision system used in American federal elections is often cited as leading to a two-party system (Duverger's law), and indeed probably contributes to such a state, but it's not a hard rule; the UK for example uses FPTP voting in many contexts but isn't polarized to the extent of the US, though it's more polarized in turn than most continental systems.