It's a strange sort of democracy you have here, where some voices are obviously more equal than others.
My definition of democracy is that everyone gets an equal vote. I don't see where it relates to who can advocate with how loud a voice.
You haven't addressed my question about where, in the spectrum of single speaker to small groups up through corporations, the right to invest money in political speech ought to be curtailed.
So you make money, you buy up other banks, and you become progressively closer to "too big to fail." ... more and smaller banks -> more resilience, more diffuse risk rather than big, big chunks of concentrated risk
I appreciate your reply here. It's thoughtful, and you're the first one I've encountered that has actually tried to put some meat behind the standard talking point. So in my book, you've got an upvote for engaging in a principled debate, even if I disagree with you.
The thing is, G-S did not prevent banks from becoming too big to fail. It prevented them from diversifying. So if G-S were still in place, there's no reason to believe that the banks would have been any smaller. It just would have ensured that the banks didn't have sufficient diversifying to ride out any problems. If you look at my citation above, you'll see that this is exactly what happened. There were giant non-diversified banks that were failing, while those that did diversify, thanks to Gramm-Leach-Bliley, were able to weather the storm.
> My definition of democracy is that everyone gets an equal vote.
So how does it come about that you interpret support for restrictions on political campaigning as an attack on democracy? You can't have it both ways: either democracy is just about giving everyone one vote, in which case nothing wpietri [EDITED to add: or wonderzombie] said can possibly be taken to be at all opposed to it; or it's concerned more broadly with enabling and/or trusting people to vote rationally in the light of the best available information, in which case it's obviously not undemocratic (though it might turn out to be wrong) to want to regulate possible sources of misinformation.
> You haven't addressed my question about where [...] the right to invest money in political speech ought to be curtailed.
Your implicit argument seems to be this: If you can't point to an obviously correct place to draw the line, then no line should be drawn anywhere. I think this argument is hopelessly wrong; there are thousands of cases where you have a continuum with something obviously reasonable at one end, something obviously unacceptable at another, and no obviously correct place to draw a line.
However, here is one proposal that seems reasonable to me: Individuals and corporations can both invest money in political speech, but the amount any individual or any individual corporation is allowed to put in is limited to (some credible estimate of) the largest amount a not-entirely-crazy person on a roughly-median income would be prepared to put in. (The problem with letting corporations run political advertisements isn't that there's something especially evil about corporations; it's that corporations have a colossal amount of money and a great deal to gain or lose from political outcomes, and that their interests are not obviously well aligned with those of the general public. If IBM or General Motors or ExxonMobil can only spend $5k/year on politics, they can't do much harm.)
I would put the limitations in the other direction; in fact, I would say that one reasonably obvious place to draw the line is that in order to contribute money to a political campaign, you have to be a registered voter. That would immediately shut down corporate contributions completely. If a group of individuals all want to contribute to the same politician's campaign, great! They can each make their individual contributions. But it seems to me that the biggest source of corruption in the whole process is the idea that any entities other than individual voters can be part of the process. Government is supposed to represent actual human beings, not legal fictions.
So how does it come about that you interpret support for restrictions on political campaigning as an attack on democracy?
If you believe that the additional political speech that greater donations would allow, would break the democratic process, then you have little faith in the ability of voters to weigh the facts and cast a rational vote. If you don't think that voters can do this, then it seems to me that you don't believe that democracy can really work.
I'm not saying that the people who want to limit political contributions are opposed to democracy. I'm saying that it reveals that they have little confidence that democracy can work.
Your implicit argument seems to be this: If you can't point to an obviously correct place to draw the line, then no line should be drawn anywhere.
No. I'm saying that for such restrictions to be implementable, there must be a line defined somewhere. If you want to make a rule, you've got to add something to it that still allows me, or me and my buddies, or whatever, to still make political contributions.
Secondarily, I'm hoping that expressing that distinction might reveal more about what these people are trying to accomplish (or not accomplish, as the case might be). Sort of a black box test.
Individuals and corporations can both invest money in political speech, but the amount any individual or any individual corporation is allowed to put in is limited to (some credible estimate of) the largest amount a not-entirely-crazy person
So you're prohibiting me from pooling money with friends in order to send a message of our own. Is that your intent?
(Please note that there are several different people in this discussion. My opinion is not necessarily the same as wpietri's or wonderzombie's.)
I think that how well democracy works depends on all kinds of things. How well informed voters are is certainly one of them. Voters, being human beings, are demonstrably vulnerable to misinformation. Therefore, it is possible that taking measures to reduce misinformation may make democracy work better.
And I am entirely at a loss to see how anyone can seriously regard this sort of position as not believing that democracy can "really work", whatever the hell that's meant to mean.
> for such restrictions to be implementable, there must be a line defined somewhere.
For sure. But how do you get from there to suggesting that anyone who thinks there should be some limits is somehow obliged to have a specific place where they think the line needs to go, still less obliged to tell you where that place is?
> might reveal more about what these people are trying to accomplish (or not accomplish, as the case might be).
Jiminy.
> you're prohibiting me from pooling money with friends in order to send a message of our own.
I'm not prohibiting anything, and the proposal I made would obviously not have the effect you describe -- and this sort of rhetoric is one reason why I don't in the least blame anyone who declines to answer your tell-me-where-the-line-goes demands.
However: my suggestion is that you and your friends are welcome to send your money wherever you want, but that any single legal entity acting as a single entity only gets to play with as much money as a typical person could afford to use for influencing the political process.
The sort of corporate activity that some people worry about is not remotely like you and your friends pooling some money.
> I'm not saying that the people who want to limit political contributions are opposed to democracy. I'm saying that it reveals that they have little confidence that democracy can work.
Nicely put!
Just going to point out that a corporation isn't just a "large group" - it is a government-created entity that enjoys vastly reduced liability for individual members of that group.
My definition of democracy is that everyone gets an equal vote. I don't see where it relates to who can advocate with how loud a voice.
You haven't addressed my question about where, in the spectrum of single speaker to small groups up through corporations, the right to invest money in political speech ought to be curtailed.
So you make money, you buy up other banks, and you become progressively closer to "too big to fail." ... more and smaller banks -> more resilience, more diffuse risk rather than big, big chunks of concentrated risk
I appreciate your reply here. It's thoughtful, and you're the first one I've encountered that has actually tried to put some meat behind the standard talking point. So in my book, you've got an upvote for engaging in a principled debate, even if I disagree with you.
The thing is, G-S did not prevent banks from becoming too big to fail. It prevented them from diversifying. So if G-S were still in place, there's no reason to believe that the banks would have been any smaller. It just would have ensured that the banks didn't have sufficient diversifying to ride out any problems. If you look at my citation above, you'll see that this is exactly what happened. There were giant non-diversified banks that were failing, while those that did diversify, thanks to Gramm-Leach-Bliley, were able to weather the storm.