Like 300,000 kilometers per second, it’s not a law you can break.

Umm, sure. The federal government now influences huge segments of the economy, and it’s only going to get more power as it passes some form of health care “reform”. In an arena where power is so concentrated, just how much more naive could you be? Wherever there’s power, there’s going to be money. If the government has the power to save or kill industries, there’s simply no way that money won’t be spent trying to influence it. For a bright guy, you seem pretty naive about this.

Let’s take the proposal here:

Part 1 says, in part, that the government will fund the campaign of anyone who meets a specific support threshold. Well. If lobbyists can’t fund campaigns directly, what do you suppose they’ll start funding instead? Signature drives? Ads to drive up name recognition? Issue/Attack ads to drive down the support of people they don’t like?

Fine, you say, limit the amount that can be spent there. Well. We’ve spent the last 30 years attempting to plug holes in that kind of system. How well has that worked out? How much of our right to free speech has been limited by that attempt? How much will have to be flushed away while well meaning people attempt to “take the money out of politics?”

Let’s take (2), where it says any citizen can donate, but only up to $250. Hmm. I suppose you just aren’t familiar with the concept of bundling, because we’ve tried this limitation, and it doesn’t work.

The sad reality – and one that tecnocrats like you are loathe to face up to – is that wherever there’s lots of power, there’s going to lobbying, with money and other inducements (promises of jobs, etc). You want less of that? Then what you really want is more decentralization, not more central control. Devolve power back to the States, and have the states devolve it back to smaller localities. That won’t eliminate corruption, but it will make the scope smaller and less damaging

Before the housing bubble burst, overbuilt American industry had a hard time disposing of its full output even with everyone maxing out their credit cards and tapping into home equity to replace every damned thing they owned every five years. And we’ll never see this level of demand again. So this business model–Sloan-style large-batch production combined with planned obsolescence and the rest of the “push distribution” paradigml–is as dead as Elvis. We just haven’t started smelling the corpse yet. In a few years, that superfluous plant and equipment will be rust.

If the government is going to spend money on anything, it should be a “bridge” to a manufacturing economy organized on the Emilia-Romagna model, with small-scale production for local markets. That way, we might just barely escape turning into Somalia when gas is $12/gallon. But instead, Congress is dead set on expending its available resources on pumping more embalming fluid into Dead Elvis until it’s too late.

Before the housing bubble burst, overbuilt American industry had a hard time disposing of its full output even with everyone maxing out their credit cards and tapping into home equity to replace every damned thing they owned every five years. And we’ll never see this level of demand again. So this business model–Sloan-style large-batch production combined with planned obsolescence and the rest of the “push distribution” paradigml–is as dead as Elvis. We just haven’t started smelling the corpse yet. In a few years, that superfluous plant and equipment will be rust.

If the government is going to spend money on anything, it should be a “bridge” to a manufacturing economy organized on the Emilia-Romagna model, with small-scale production for local markets. That way, we might just barely escape turning into Somalia when gas is $12/gallon. But instead, Congress is dead set on expending its available resources on pumping more embalming fluid into Dead Elvis until it’s too late.

Today we just pay taxes fo fund people like Rezko who finance candidates we may or may not support – which I find worse. Might as well cut out the middleman (Rezkos).