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6/26/04 "Clean Politics" "Campaign Finance Reform" has been played endlessly by the chattering classes before the public. Having swayed the larger number of people at the lower echelons of the economy to agree that their interests are being bought off by the smaller numbers of people at the higher echelons, politicians have begun to bow to the pressure and passed measures at the state and federal level in a supposed attempt to control the influence of "money" on politics. Liberals are especially eager to remove the influence of "money" on politics, but their motives are suspect. They focus on one element of political corruption and ignore another. As is predictable, of course, they focus on corruption that gives their opponents, the conservatives, an advantage, and ignore the corruption that gives them an advantage. Of course, they would not agree that what they engage in is corrupt, any more than the conservatives have agreed that accepting donations from the rich has corrupted them. But the theory of corruption as defined by the liberals in the case of rich donors is that these donors "buy influence" with the politicians to whom they donate. The effect, they argue, is that politicians are "in the back pocket" of the rich, passing laws or enacting policies to benefit them at the expense of the non-rich. Political corruption can then be defined as follows: Group A grants a Favor to Politician X, who acts in favor of Group A against other groups. Liberals engage in the same activity, but Group A can be "the poor", labor unions, minority groups, senior citizens, and other non-rich, non-corporate conglomerations of interests. These groups put together are generally more numerous (especially when you group them together) than the "rich" and thus they can grant the favor of collecting enough votes to carry a candidate to victory. The liberal politicians then work to enact laws that favor these groups at the expense of the rich, the corporations, etc. That fulfills the definition of corruption. Liberals do not see it that way, because they (capital-D Democrats) define democracy as a payoff to whatever constituencies they depend on for their votes. They don't see that their definition is hypocritical: when large numbers of people who don't belong to these groups band together to support laws or candidates not beneficial to those groups, they are against "democracy" and they attempt to use the courts to reverse the trend. It is not democracy they serve, not freedom, but simply the special interests of liberalism. There is no moral distinction between the way Democrats play the political game and the way the Republicans do. Both are guilty of playing to their constituencies, both take money from corporations and the rich. But in general, if we take the most cynical view, Republicans benefit from more donations, and they pay off their donors by supporting corporate and wealthy interests, and Democrats benefit from the popularity they win among larger numbers of potential voters by paying them off with government programs. The more charitable view is that Democrats really believe it benefits society when resources are taken from the rich and redistributed to the poor, and that Republicans think it is better to take the constraints off rich and poor alike and let the marketplace of products, goods, services and ideas select the more productive for greater rewards. Thus the poor and other groups who either don't trust the marketplace or aren't interested in depending on their own faculties for their success automatically gravitate to the Democrats whose beliefs will tend to support them through government expenditures, and the rich and corporate groups gravitate to Republicans whose beliefs will tend to make them free to succeed in the marketplace. If in the interests of controlling corruption, we attack one side of this political balance, we will be skewing the system toward pure democracy, which is an ugly game of demagoguery that has always resulted either in the fall of empire (the ancient, prototypical democracy of Athens) or in the rise of authoritarianism, tyranny, and fascism (ancient Rome, Communism, Mussolini and Hitler). That is not a road down which we want to travel very far. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
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