Want Money Out of Politics? Eliminate Government Discrimination

In my work on government-granted privilege, I have repeatedly emphasized the surprising degree of harmony between left and right on this issue. Both abhor the tawdry nexus between corporate power, money, and politics. (As evidence that I am not the only one who sees such agreement, note that Occupy.com recently reprinted an article highlighting the Mercatus project). In an article from Friday, progressive blogger Ezra Klein seems to bolster this point: According to Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, only 0.26 percent of Americans give more than $200 to congressional campaigns. Only 0.05 percent give the maximum amount to any congressional candidate. Only 0.01 percent — 1 percent of 1 percent — give more than $10,000 in an election cycle. And in the current presidential election, 0.000063 percent of Americans — fewer than 200 of the country’s 310 million residents — have contributed 80 percent of all super-PAC donations. “This, senators, is corruption,” Lessig said Tuesday, in testimony before the Judiciary Committee. “Not ‘corruption’ in the criminal sense. I am not talking about bribery or quid pro quo influence peddling. It is instead ‘corruption’ in a sense that our Framers would certainly and easily have recognized: They architected a government that in this branch at least was to be, as Federalist 52 puts it, ‘dependent upon the People alone.’ You have evolved a government that is not dependent upon the People alone, but that is also dependent upon the Funders.” There is much in here with which I agree. Campaign spending begets access. Access begets privilege. And privilege, in my view, “misdirects resources, impedes genuine economic progress, breeds corruption, and undermines the legitimacy of both the government and the private sector.” The same article, however, also highlights the ways in which progressives and libertarians disagree about money, politics, and power. Klein quotes and quickly dismisses Cato scholar Ilya Shapiro. In his own testimony, Shapiro argues: To the extent that ‘money in politics’ is a problem, the solution isn’t to try to reduce the money — that’s a utopian goal — but to reduce the scope of political activity the money tries to influence. Shrink the size of government and its intrusions in people’s lives and you’ll shrink the amount people will spend trying to get their piece of the pie or, more likely, trying to avert ruinous public policies.  

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