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TheAncientGeek comments on On saving the world - Less Wrong
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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.
Not completely. If I live in Berlin and want to be elected into the Bundestag for the SPD I want to get a high place of the SPD list allocated in the Berlin SPD party convention. The head of the SPD in Berlin is the person got head because they have a majority of the Berlin SPD behind them, but their power over the convention isn't absolute. It's like the power the Nancy Pelosi has over democratic US congressman.
Yes, constituents weighted by the amount of political donations that they can give.
Such as?
In the US straightforward things such as TV ads. In the US a lot of the political ads are payed for by Super PACs that aren't allowed to donate money to candidates or parties but which are allowed to buy advertising.
Apart from ads, modern political campaign usually depend on polling voters to target messages. A corporation can just pay a polling company to run a poll and then give the resulting data to the political party to be better able to target messages.
Of course in the moment the corporation pays the bills of the polling company instead of the political party the polling company suddenly gets interests to shape the poll to the liking of the corporation.
A politician can use more personal assistants if a lobbyist wants to serve as a personal assistant for free there often no reason for the politician to just send the lobbyist away.
The kid of the politician needs a job? The politician is probably grateful to a lobbyist who makes the necessary connections for the kid to get a good job. It's not easy to calculate how much it costs a corporation to arrange the job for the kid and how big a favor the corporation can ask later for having arranged the job but I don't see that it will likely be a much worse return on the money than a corporation donating money to a party to run TV ads.
You are being hypercritical.
Yes, there are loopholes that sufficiently motivated individuals can use to elude regulation to a certain extent, but this doesn't mean that they are as effective as just giving cash.
Cash is much more fungible than anything else.
Which would still be constrained by donation limits, I suppose.
IIUC, there are no spending limits by corporations in the US system.
No. If I hire a polling firm to gather data about the views hold by voters and hand the resulting data over to a politician that doesn't count against donation limits.
If you want to label those acts as donations that you to be limited you destroy a lot of free speech rights.
There are spending limits as far as corporations donating money to political parties go. Citizens United basically says that anyone can make a Super PAC and that Super PAC is allowed to buy TV ads. It doesn't say that you can just hand over the cash to a political party.
The US democratic party is currently chaired by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. If you would make a list of the most influential US politicans I doubt that Debbie Wasserman Schultz would make the top ten. The institution of the democratic party is just to weak that heading it gives you a lot of political power.
I don't want to say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has no political power at all but her power is miniscule compared to the head of a German political party.
That's because of differences in the electoral system. In the German system people vote for party lists, which the party heads choose, in the US system people vote directly for politicians; furthermore, each party's candidate is decided by another election, called a primary, this leaves a lot less for party officials to do.
If you publicly disclose the results, then you are helping everybody. If you disclose the results only to a politician, then you are making a donation, by any reasonable meaning of the term.
Is there more private funding of politics, per capita or per unit of gdp, in the US or in Germany? I don't have the data at hand, but I'll bet that in the US corporations and wealthy individuals spend more on politics rather than Germans do.
Moreover, the German electoral system is a mix of relative majority and propositional representation, whereas the US one is a mostly pure relative majority system.
Pure relative majority systems tends to produce a two parties with weak identities, with most political competition happening inside each party, and party chairpersons acting more as senior administrators and mediators rather than political leaders, while proportional representation favours political landscapes with multiple parties with strong identities and strong leaders.
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.