(November 21, 2014 at 8:59 pm)Heywood Wrote: You cannot give all the candidates equal amount of money. You can only give the candidates you select an equal amount of money. If you are going to give everyone who runs for president 100 million dollars...I will be running for president too and so will a lot of other people. A rule requiring so many signatures to be a valid candidate requires that campaigns be privately financed because to go out and get signatures...requires a campaign. Publicly financed campaigns simply will not work unless the government first picks the candidates.....and that is going to be abused.
In the Internet age, acquiring signatures for a petition is not an especially difficult or expensive activity. There can even be publicly-funded facilitators to help candidates.
And, even if it's not a perfect solution, it gets a lot more people involved, introduces a lot more potential candidates, and does more than anything else could to break the two-party duopoly everybody hates.
Quote:Your understanding of a corporation is wrong. Corporations do not spend corporate profits, they spend money. Corporations do not have to make money to have money to spend. Corporations often retain some or all of the money that make as retained earnings. Retained earnings are supposed to be used for the benefit of the corporation. The reason you dislike corporations spending money on campaigns is because you feel they benefit too much from that spending. This is evidence that it is true that corporations benefit from donating money to campaigns. Your claim that corporate profits are not supposed to be used for campaigns is just wrong on so many levels. It really just amounts to you don't like the way people spend money when they assemble together as a corporation and want to legislate the actions of others to conform with your will.
My claim is not that corporate profits should not be used to fund campaigns. My claim is that no private money of any kind should be funding, or influencing, a political campaign. That puts everybody on an even level. Otherwise, our political system is nothing but a sham.
Quote:There is plenty of money from businesses and labor unions and other non profits that pour into an election already....so that their messages can be heard......yet there is no market place where I can buy up or sell votes. Your claim that the logical result of money equaling speech is the buying or selling of votes simply does not follow in the real world. It is a hallow claim.
There is no market because it's not legal to set up such a market. That doesn't make the claimed result illogical. Corporations have much more money than any other entity to spend on influencing politics. Policy of almost every sort is dictated largely by the whim of moneyed influences. Selling votes outright is just the honest way of accomplishing what they already accomplish. Either way, the system is currently designed so that your value is equal to your net worth. This is clearly the way you like it, for some reason. So, why not just sell votes?
Or, better yet, why not just drop the pretense of government for the people and turn over the apparatus of government to an executive board? We can call it America, LLC. We can even still call it a 'democracy' and allow select shareholders to vote on board members. It would be a conservative paradise.
