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ChristianKl comments on On saving the world - Less Wrong
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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.
And that's precisely the problem. The net affect of these regulations is to limit political influence to those who are sufficiently motivated. This is already the mechanism behind things like regulatory capture, these laws just make the effect worse.
While allowing to donate millions of dollars extends the political influence to the average person?
My point is that the barrier to entry to donate large amounts of money is lower than the barrier to elude regulations.
Possibly. But the point is how much political influence you get. Influencing politics with direct donations is much more efficient than eluding regulation.
No. Political influence tends to be zero sum, thus the fewer competing sources of influence there are, the more of it you have.
I don't think so. If nobody spends in political influencing, people will still vote for somebody.
Cash gives the person who writes the bill power. If a political party pays the money they got donated by a corporation for a polling firm to target ads than the polling firm serves the interests of the political party. If the person who writes the bill is a corporation who then donates the resulting data, the polling firm has interests to shape the data in the interests of the corporation.
The political party and politicians prefer receiving cash. The lobbyists on the other hand don't prefer to give cash. If you now come and pass a law that makes it harder for politicians to accept cash to use for political purposes you weaken the politicians and therefore strengthen the lobbyists.
Which is of course exactly how we get such laws in a society in which lobbyists hold a lot of political power and want more power. The only way to get around lobbyists increase their power is to actually give other political actors more power. That means public funding of elections.