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December 11, 2003

Keeping Money out of Politics

I noted the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws yesterday. The consensus around the blogosphere seems to be that this is a bad thing, which I am certainly in agreement with. The Court seems to have decided that keeping corruption and the appearance of corruption out of the political process is more important than upholding the First Amendment, an interesting thesis since the First Amendment is actually in the Constitution, while there is nothing that I can find about the Court's requirements to prevent corruption, but the Supreme Court has shown little interest in upholding the Constitution for many years now, so I should hardly be surprised. But will the new laws keep money out of politics?

Even the law's defenders don't think so. Even the Court doesn't think so, in fact, as the majority noted that Congress will have to make new laws in order to suppress the influence of money on politics. Meanwhile the general consensus in the press seems to be that money will find its way into politics regardless of what the laws say, and I'm in complete agreement with that belief.

Why do I think money will always find its way into politics? Because politics has done so much to find its way into money. If you're a businessman in America today, you'd be a fool not to pay very close attention to the regulatory environment Congress has created. Thanks to the myriad tax laws and regulatory structures laid over the economy in the 20th century, success in business depends as much on proper navigation of government rules as it does on creating and marketing good products. And since government can help to decide who the winners and losers in the economy will be, why would anyone be surprised when companies decide it would be easier to pay off Congress to create laws that will help their company at the expense of others rather than trying to improve their products in the hopes they can outsmart their competitors? Let's face it: it's one hell of a lot easier to just convince the government to declare your toughest competitor a monopoly than to beat them in the open market. A government decree is virtually impossible to beat, while market forces will always lead to uncertainty. What's the better investment?

So getting money out of politics really isn't that hard, if we really wanted to; just get politics out of money. If the government were to get out of the business of determining winners and losers and let the market (i.e., the people) make those decisions, that would do more to drain the swamp than a hundred McCain-Feingolds. Better yet, it would also go much further to protect our Constitutional rights, an outcome I consider decidedly more important than eliminating the appearance of impropriety from government.

As an aside, I should note that I am not proposing that government eliminate all regulation of the economy; I believe that government does have an important role to play in the economy. It's just that it has overstepped that role by several orders of magnitude over the past century.