Free Speech

Campaign Finance Reform^TM has been claimed to be the way to keep all that dirty money out of politics.

But it severely limits free speech.  More than that, it limits the exact type of free speech that founders intended the First Amendment to protect: political speech.

One of the problems with speaking has always been making sure others hear you.  In the days of the founding fathers, this meant coming up with money (yourself or through a generous benefactor) for a printing press or the right to use someone else's.  These days, since buying an entire newspaper or tv network is cost-prohibitive, it tends to mean advertisements. 

And, if you think about it, it is only fair.  A journalist can write a scathing editorial for a nationally syndicated column and not run afoul of Campaign Finance Reform^TM; however an individual, commitee of concerned citizens, the candidate himself, or others whose paths have not led them to become journalists cannot purchase an ad in the same space without being subject to a multitude of restrictions.  Just because a person's talents are more suited to becoming an accountant than a writer is no reason to deny him his only chance at making his opinions public.

And what's so dirty about donated money anyway?  The system we have set up makes it imperative that the candidate be able to fund much of the start-up costs of a campaign on his own...that means it should surprise no one that both candidates for president have a great deal of personal wealth.

This is bad on a local level too.  Incumbents have an advantage, simply because voters have heard of them before (and the re-election rate in the House is in the high 90s). A challenger must spend a great deal of money just to get voters to know who he is.  And limits on donations means that he must be independently wealthy...

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But maybe I'm over-reacting.  After all, groups like MoveOn.org and other 527s are accepting the challenge and taking advantage of the new laws: no loss of money in the campaigns and the money is harder to track besides...