No. Money in politics in America goes back as far as elections go (see here). In the recent Amash amendment vote to curtail some of the surveillance, the voters in Congress who voted to continue the surveillance received twice as much money from the defense/surveillance inustries as the voters who voted in favor of cutting back the surveillance.
As long as Congress votes on anything that has political and economic effects, which is always, affected people will be buying votes, influence and access. Conventional politics, which is expansive politics in which votes occur on just about anything, will always be up for sale. Public financing contradicts any notion of liberty because it forcibly extracts money from taxpayers who pay for the advertisement of views with which they may disagree. A ban on all financing contradicts any notion of liberty because then a man cannot use his property to advertise his views, and he can’t contract with others to use theirs. The current presidential election finance system is a complicated mixture of these two extremes.
10:49 am on July 29, 2013
