The difference of course is that each person has one vote and, roughly, the same or a similar amount of time to donate to political campaigns. With money, of course, it is different. As a result, people with more money have a greater voice in the political process. This is undemocratic and unjust.

For this reason we need public financing. At the same time, we need to address your legitimate opposition to having your tax dollars finance candidates whose views you find abhorrent, as well as your opposition to limiting the right of rich people to donate as much money as they want to the campaigns that they support. The way around this is a proposal recently put forward by Yale law prof Bruce Ackerman. He wants to lift maximum donation caps on political campaigns. At the same time, he wants every registered voter to be given $50 or $100 a year in "Liberty dollars": taxpayer financed vouchers that could be donated to the candidate or candidates of their choice. Under such a system, candidates who who didn't want to spend their days dialing rich people for dollars, or who supported policies that not many rich people support, could spend it meeting with groups of regular voters and trying to get them to donate their "liberty dollars" vouchers. Ackerman has just written a book on this idea called Voting With Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance.

Another thinking-outside-the box neoliberal idea that is too creative, too unorthodox, too difficult to instantly pigeonhole as "liberal" or "conservative", and makes too much sense for most people to take seriously.

It's untrue that people have roughly the same amount of time to spend campaigning. Lazy bums and political 'activists' have vastly more time for it than those who work for a living.

And Bruce Ackerman's proposal to loot the public treasury to increase political spending will succeed in raising the inflation rate, but it would just enhance the power of the party of the moment - in Seattle the lefties, in red states the opposite. Nothing creative there.

Nowhere does his proposal affect the real problem - the unlimited power of the left-biased media to use slanted news coverage, selective omissions, and of course editorial cheerleading, to bathe the public in propaganda with no balance or right of response to mendacious attacks. Oh, not quite - George Nethercutt was allowed to BUY space to respond to the P-I's hatchet job last week.

Anyway, since time equals money, if the legislature is so stupid as to attempt to meddle in First Amendment rights by campaign limitations or public subsidies, limiting hours makes as much sense as limiting dollars.

"Markus Rose": The difference of course is that each person has ... roughly, the same or a similar amount of time to donate to political campaigns

This is only vacuously true in the sense that everybody has 24 hours in a day. But time is an economic good just as money is, (perhaps you've heard the phrase "time is money"?). In the real world, some people have more time on their hands than others -- housewives, retirees, public employees, the idle rich and the underemployed have more time than those who work for a living.

A lot of political activity consists of those who have a lot of spare time conspiring to confiscate the wealth of those who have little spare time because they are busy working. If it's fair to redistribute political money, it is only fair to redistribute political time.

Time is money, so I can't say much more right now, but...
Shark -- donations of money are much more important to political campaigns than donations of time.

Insufficiently Logical --
1) the idea that Ackerman's idea would lead to inflation is nonsensical: giving $50 a year to 100 million registered voters would cost $5 billion a year -- same amount we spend every five days in Iraq.
2)"the real problem - the unlimited power of the left-biased media to use slanted news coverage, selective omissions, and of course editorial cheerleading, to bathe the public in propaganda with no balance or right of response to mendacious attacks." I see. A Huge Problem with a capital P that leaves our way of life at risk. Particularly given the inclination of a majority of voters subjected to this "unlimited power" to elect politicians opposed to such propaganda (i.e. Republicans control Congress till January 2013, at least, the Executive Branch, most governorships, most state legislatures, etc...)

Hmmm.

So, if we spend $5B every five days in Iraq, then we're spending $1B per day? So the $87B will last, at most, 87 days?

Why hasn't more been made of this rather profligate spending, if this is indeed the case?

And where do you come up w/ the idea that the Republicans will control the Congress through 2013 at least? I suppose it's certainly POSSIBLE, but that is based on the assumption that the Dems fail to find anything to ignite voters for EITHER the House OR the Senate in any of the elections between now and 2012. That's more than a little pessimistic, don't you think? (Although their presidential candidates certainly would seem to fit that.)

And I do not believe that a majority of state legislature are currently Democratic.

Finally, all that money STILL requires volunteers to go and get out the vote (most importantly), to stuff envelopes, man phone banks, put up signs, etc. Indeed, Haley Barbour's victory in MS is being accredited, in large part, to a massive get-out-the-vote effort by GOP volunteers. Politics, so long as voting requires going to a polling place, will still require people and be manpower intensive.

Seattle, Seattle, Seattle.........

you aren't comforting the droves of people who check in here from other locales and quite frankly, as a resident of NYC, i'm feeling left out.......

And where do you come up w/ the idea that the Republicans will control the Congress through 2013 at least?

2013 is when the redistricting based on the 2010 census goes into effect. Until then, there are only a handful of Congressional seats every two years that are contested. Over 95% of House members are gerrymandered into districts in which 65% of the voters or more voted in the most recent Presidential election for the candidate belonging to same party as the incumbent Congressman. That's what's called a safe seat. The recent texas redraw will increase Republican gains as well.
In the Senate, 30 states in 2000 voted for Bush, 20 for Gore. Those 30 states are most likely to elect a republican senator as well.

"Those 30 states are most likely to elect a republican senator as well."

From your mouth to God's ear.

Markus Rose: As someone who just served as a hopscotching poll-watcher in several inner city precincts in Indianapolis, I can tell you that while money is very important, volunteers are priceless.

I'll give credit where it's due: the Dems get-out-the-vote machinery is impressive and was humming, with a minimum of six drivers for each polling place, picking up registered Dems at home and bringing them to the ballot. The precinct committee people are unpaid volunteers. The Dems had 910 of them out there. Etc. All without a single dime of direct payout. The Republicans were out-organized and out-volunteered big time, and paid the price by losing control of the city-county council.

Many Democrats who spent less than even their Libertarian counterparts won races handily in Indy, while ironically, the Democrat who spent more than any other council candidate by 3-to-1, lost to a Republican who went door-to-door and spent next to nothing. Volunteers and candidate hustle mattered here.

Markus: Why should unpopular campaigns be funded as well as popular ones?

I don't see why it's "fair" or "democratic" for campaigns that don't convince people to want to support them to get funding from the Public Pocket simply because they are campaigns.

Seems to me that all that would do is waste public funds and make fringe parties more powerful. Why should we want either of those, particularly?

(Also, 5 billion a week in Iraq? Got a source for that? I can't fathom how even the DoD could be burning through money at that kind of rate, sustained, just in Iraq. Note that the US military budget for ALL of 2004 is just about (a href="http://www.cdi.org/budget/2004/">380 billion (Yeah, they're Peaceniks. Which is why I trust their numbers to not be too LOW...). We'd have to spend pretty much every cent of that in Iraq, if this 5 billion a week figure was accurate and kept up (and I see no reason why it would not, as the US military is not engaged in much in Iraq that is likely to significantly change, cost-wise, in the near future...)

Sigvald: "Why should unpopular campaigns be funded as well as popular ones? I don't see why it's "fair" or "democratic" for campaigns that don't convince people to want to support them to get funding from the Public Pocket simply because they are campaigns."

I agree. Perhaps the major virtue of Ackerman's plan as opposed to other public funding schemes is that a candidate unable to convince any voters to donate their "liberty dollar" vouchers to his campaign (as opposed to another campaign, or to no campaign) would receive nothing.

"Seems to me that all that would do is waste public funds and make fringe parties more powerful. Why should we want either of those, particularly?"

Public funds are only "wasted" if they accomplish no purpose. The purpose served here is a great one: dramatically increase the number of individuals responsible for funding political speech in this country, in order to reduce the disproportionate power and influence today wielded by the very tiny number of individuals and the special interest groups like corporations and unions who presently are responsible for such funding.

Regarding extremism, people should be able to donate to whomever they want to -- it's a free country and it's their tax money!!! I suppose extremists might receive a small amount of funding. And non-extremist campaigns and mainstream parties would receive much more.

I'm not sure if anything has changed in the intervening months, but the article "$1 Billion a Week. And that’s on the low side. So much for a ‘self-sustaining’ reconstruction. Parsing the real cost for U.S. taxpayers" by Christopher Dickey was published in the July 21, 2003 issue of that commie pinko rag Newsweek. It should be available here: http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorintelligence/1billion.html

Cato has done very good work demonstrating that Maine's "clean election" system has not produced more competitive races:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-456es.html

This is only vacuously true in the sense that everybody has 24 hours in a day. But time is an economic good just as money is, (perhaps you've heard the phrase "time is money"?). In the real world, some people have more time on their hands than others -- housewives, retirees, public employees, the idle rich and the underemployed have more time than those who work for a living.

Additionally, different individuals have different productivity even if they have the same amount of time to spend.

But because time is money, can't its value to a campaign be roughly quantified by estimating how much it would cost to replace a volunteer on an hourly basis with a paid employee? Therefore we are realistically looking at $10-$12 bucks an hour or so. So when Aunt Glady volunteers for one hundred hours on the local mayors race, this is worth about a thousand bucks, the same amount that the head of the local chamber of commerce gives when the candidate calls him up.

But is dwarfed by the $200,000,000 just handed to the left-liberal-biased NPR for its oh-so-impartial news selections and spins. So remind me again why Federal taxes are diverted to this bastion of political correctitude?

Just to piss you off. think of it as affirmative action for liberal radio broadcasters shut out of talk radio by the vast wingnut conspiracy.

I see that the above comment from "liberal hose beast" was posted from an IP address at the U.S. House of Representatives. I assume it was written by a congressional aide on his or her lunch break.

Was the writer a Democrat who resents the fact that more people choose to listen to conservative broadcasters than to liberal ones, or a Republican who has a terrific sense of irony?

Either way, it's pretty funny.

A Democrat impersonating a Republican mimicking an unfortunately not uncommon liberal hosebeast.

NPR is insufferable. PRI is much better. PBS is solid.

If radio spectrum was auctioned off at fair market values instead of practically given away, funding from general tax revenues wouldn't be necessary in the first place!