The Libertarians have faced this dilemma for years — can’t take money from a corrupt system you wish to change, yet without it, you can’t get elected to change that system. Dooming yourself to defeat for noble reasons is not a productive exercise for anyone involved.

Best of luck in your (hopefully) upcoming campaign. You have my support.

You’re probably right that no-one will call Lessig on this, but if I were running the campaign I don’t think I’d just ignore things like this because it’s not a big race.

Whatever, you’re probably right that it’s worth the risk.

Collective organization of individuals for political purposes, no matter what the purpose, weakens the fundamental connection between the individual and their act of exercising political will

and I disagree. I’d say that sort of organization is fundamental to democracy (as I know it).

Collective organization of individuals for political purposes, no matter what the purpose, weakens the fundamental connection between the individual and their act of exercising political will. It relieves people of the burden of having to think about the individuals representing them, and instead merely cling to vaguely defined ideas and put the hard task of finding real people to support their concepts in the hands of the group’s own leadership — which always has its own agenda.

It is a layer of indirection that is unnecessary in this day and age. It is introduced noise.

As a means to come to consensus within a group as regards to position and platform? Absolutely.

As an intermediary and clearinghouse where the support of an individual human being’s free will can become overshadowed or falsified by money, deception or social pressure? Never.

Let us send our support to you and cut out the indirection before it begins.

If you were open about it, you could easily publish numbers for “Donations earned from readers of your books” on your website it and update it periodically. You could cap the amount per donation at $50, which would be more than a reasonable amount if somebody had chosen to pick your books up in the bookstore instead of downloading them gratis from your website. You wouldn’t know where the money is coming from.

And when you are accused of using nefarious purposes to raise money, you could reply by saying that your campaigning has been done legally with money you’ve earned from customers of your books, and that you paid taxes on that money.

This would be similar to an idea which I had about a year ago to monetize the Creative Commons and create a balance of benefits for creators and users called Open Publication.

If there were a convenient alternative, it might make sense to switch. But I don’t think much will come from this. If anything, the accusation will be that Lessig is bankrolled by people not in his district. But I see that as a strength: people across the country think his candidacy is important enough to support it.

The problem is PACs or something like them are useful tools for people in our imperfect system to support candidates. Short of complete public financing or some other overarching reform, I claim a blanket ban on PAC money is likelier to relatively empower those with more to spend and disempower those with less. I don’t believe that’s a good result, particularly right now, as ActBlue and similar groups are improving the balance of power.

If the way ActBlue operates is okay by you, then accepting money via their mechanism is the right thing to do. It also carries a political risk, as it opens up a possible attack against you in a vital area.

One solution would be to get together a couple of former or current Congressional staffer skilled in crafting legislation and work up a draft bill which legitimizes the method ActBlue uses to pass money from citizens to candidates. Make that bill a campaign asset, and in particular, announce that you’ll only take PAC money that meets the standards you propose to make law.

PACs are the form of the problem, not the essence. Get to the heart of the matter.

If you need a sound bite, it’s not hard: “The FEC shows that ActBlue has not given me any money. If the FEC reports that ActBlue or any other PAC has contributed to me, I will refund that money immediately,”

That said, in this race, who’s going to call Larry on it? This isn’t going to be the 2004 presidential race, with a Rovian opponent willing to twist the truth to win at all costs. While I agree it makes sense to consider the risk, in the end it appears pretty small and not worth worrying about.

Not using it as a primary fundraising tool is one thing, but refusing to take donations raised via Act Blue would be suicidal.

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