Campaign Financing

Should the U.S. follow the example of several other countries and make paid  campaign ads on TV Illegal?  What about spending any money at all on a campaign, referendum, or lobbyist? How would democracy fare if there were no campaign donations, no paid advertising, no paid campaign staff or paid petition gatherers? Only volunteers? Or strict limits on how much could be spent? How would this be enforced? How could a money-free campaign system still be corrupted?

If your representative in Congress or the Senate has to vote according to the will of his/her constituents, he/she has much less political power, which through Direct Democracy, is in the hands of the people. In this situation, there is no or very little political power for lobbyists to try to buy from your representative.

One Comment Add yours

  1. Peter Dent says:

    Election season is a menagerie of corruption, manipulation, and money. Lobbyists from big companies pay candidates in donation money to get laws passed that benefit their company. Advertisements for political parties are forced on you left and right, both portraying the other side as a Adolf Satan. Smaller third parties are drowned out in all this, and 3rd, 4th, 5th views on things are lost.

    Say there is a cap on the amount of money a campaign can receive.
    Set the cap at say, 1 million dollars. The campaign can spend this how they want (with restrictions outlined below). Setting the cap to a low number like this makes the playing field level for smaller third parties. Setting a limit on how much only a single person can donate, while also making it illegal for corporations to donate, would also help equalize the power of individual voter.

    As noted above, you would have to restrict how the money is spent. Several other countries restrict the use of paid advertisements (billboards, TV ads, radio ads, etc) in campaigns. Instead, only voluntary forms of promotion would be allowed. Yard signs, shirts, social media, and speeches are all voluntary forms of advertisement that the individual can choose to subject themselves to. Separate SUPERPACs would also fall under these restrictions.

    Similarly, only volunteers would be allowed to preform forms of speech such as Social media posting, celebrity endorsements, phone calls, door to door pitches. Members of the campaign who do not directly affect the voters may be paid like secretaries, campaign managers, etc.

    Methods like these would level the playing field and bring the money out of politics. Everyone would be exposed to more options in terms of candidates, and so perhaps we wouldn’t be stuck choosing between the lesser of two evils.

    Liked by 1 person

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