Solving the problem of the influence of money in politics is a lofty goal. It’s the purpose of MayDay.us. It’s a key effort of Public Citizen and Democracy Matters. The status quo solutions for the problem are to limit campaign financing by the wealthy and to support campaign financing by the masses.

What’s the problem? One way of looking at it is that money decides elections, and elections are supposed to be decided by voters. Another way is by analyzing public policy in America, and seeing that America is much more of an oligarchy than a democracy.

The Cato Institute makes some good points in its blog about why campaign finance reform never works:

…every House incumbent who spent less than $500,000 won compared with only 3% of challengers who spent that little. However challengers who spent between $500,000 and $1 million won 40% of the time while challengers who spent more than $1 million won five of six races.

In an election, the incumbent has the advantage. He or she has name recognition and a large pre-existing contact list. The incumbent has a head start. They’re arguing that if you limit campaign financing, it’ll just help incumbents preserve their lead.

This isn’t completely true, though. It’s true if you limit campaign costs, the amount a campaign can spend. But it’s not true if you limit campaign contributions from individuals, or increase the number of donations from small donors.

If you limit the size of campaign contributions, the more popular campaign can amass more funds and win. This is why Represent.us (click on “A Real Solution to Corruption” on this page) proposes to give “voters an annual $100 tax rebate to be spent supporting the candidate or party of their choice”. Rather than limit campaign costs, they propose to empower voters. This might work. Note that it pumps billions of dollars into politics.

It’s complicated, though. If you limit campaign contributions, the wealthy can still contribute to PACs which could create their own organizations that go door-to-door as well as continue to pump out ads.

So we need to solve the problem of money in politics.

Consider, though, the analogy with the Drug War. Many of these solutions propose to limit the inflow of money into politics, just like the drug war tries to limit drugs into America.

As long as candidates need money and money wins elections, this war will continue.

Yes, if Congress were ethical, it would adopt these solutions. But these ethics are difficult because to many of them, the ends justify the means. Each one believes the country is served by he or she winning. For most, changing the system like this just adds risk to their ability to stay in power.

The Drug War hasn’t worked. In the next post, we’ll see a solution, both to America’s drug problems as well as to the corrupting influence of money in elections.