= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on On saving the world - 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 (166)
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.