"Fool
me once, shame on you; fool me constantly, you must be Big
Brother." ~ Rule of Subjection
Campaign finance reform is Congress's latest expression of love for
America. Politicians and their envy-eaten allies who favor reform
are selling it as a victory for the common man over corrupt, monied
interests like Enron. As they see it, giant corporations,
eager to put pals in office, funnel soft money to their favorite
political parties, where it often ends up hard at work supporting
their candidates, thereby giving them government privileges the rest
of us are denied.
On the other side, pro-liberty pundits are screaming about the
unconstitutionality of the bill now going into the Senate. They
could pick almost any bill at random and holler just as loud. There's
nothing in the Constitution, they say, authorizing Congress to
control political campaigns--a view with which proponents of reform
completely agree. With one catch.
Daniel Ortiz of the Brookings Institute spells out that catch:
"One would search the Constitution in vain," he wrote in
1997, "for any mention of 'campaign finance,' let alone
'contributions,' 'expenditures,' 'soft money,' or any of the other
specialized terms in the campaign finance vocabulary. Yet
despite this silence, the U.S. Supreme Court has firmly and
repeatedly held that the Constitution greatly limits what Congress
and the states can do." (emphasis added) [1]
By virtue of that silence, the Constitution does limit what
Congress can do. But to people like Ortiz, this interpretation
is inhumane because it prohibits legal compulsion, except as
punishment for a crime. They don't want to leave people alone,
they want to dictate how they should live. One of the major
victories of the New Deal was the unofficial repeal of the Tenth
Amendment, which opened the gates for Congress to bleed and control
business. The resultant havoc raised cries for more
regulations, sending us spiraling towards statism. But to
demagogues, interventionism is the great savior of American
capitalism. It's the best thing they've got as a cure for
liberty.
Besides being flagrant violations of our rights, restrictions on
campaign spending happen to favor incumbents, a coincidence that
apparently tip-toed past our public-spirited legislators. "Money
is of much greater value to challengers than to incumbents,"
Cato Institute's Bradley Smith writes, "so higher spending
opens up the political system to new people and ideas." [2]
But incumbents could object. They could point out that the
American people perceived that our government had a scant
$2,000,000,000,000 budget with which to prevent 9-11 and so wisely
demanded drastic increases in funding and power. The idea of
ignoring the Constitution to guarantee our safety is unfortunate,
pols will admit, but at least now when we board a plane we'll land
at an airport instead of a conference room--by virtue of converting
minimum-wagers to federal employees and shaking down soccer moms and
their progeny. If campaign finance reform will keep out of
office radicals who are blinded by allegiance to the Constitution,
then this legislation is truly a case of God blessing America.
If we peek behind the rhetoric of politicians calling for more
control over our lives, we'll find an infallible fidelity to force.
Acts of God notwithstanding, social problems emerge from the
human act of choosing. The government's role, they
believe, is to put a stop to those choices--by passing laws. Their
purpose is to convert us from beings who choose to robots who obey.
This is what kept legislators up until 3:00 a.m. on
Valentine's Day morning, ensuring we don't corrupt any more
elections as we did when we chose them for office.
Government regulation has always been a con game. It creates
havoc and injustice, not order and fairness. Nonetheless, it's
sold to the public as a way of instilling civility in an otherwise
dog-eat-dog economic system. That's Big Brother's two-for-one
sale--two myths in one breath. Government schools perpetuate
these myths with great success.
Leftist commentators in the media and higher education point to
Enron as a textbook example of the evils of unregulated capitalism.
But Enron was buried in regulations, as are all business
entities. If anything, the regulations helped provide a false
sense of security for those who didn't know better. As for the
fraud Enron committed, that's been on the books for ages as a
criminal act, independent of politicians' meddling fingers.
As economist William L. Anderson explains, the Enron "collapse
did not come because regulators blew the whistle on the company's
fraudulent operations, but rather because potential investors came
to realize the company's shell games could no longer be hidden. The
judgment of investors . . . was swift and sudden: America's
corporate darling was relegated to the abyss of penny stocks."
[3]
While government has the power to run our lives, there will always
be favor-seekers and mounting abuse. We need to take away that
power. We need to restore the Tenth Amendment and return our
lives to their rightful owners.
-------
1. http://www.brook.edu/gs/cf/sourcebk/chap3.htm
-- Campaign Finance Reform: A sourcebook, Ch. 3 "The First
Amendment at Work: Constitutional Restrictions on Campaign Finance
Law," Daniel R. Ortiz.
2. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa238.html
-- Policy Analysis, Campaign Finance Regulation: Faulty Assumptions
and Undemocratic Consequences, Bradley A. Smith.
3. http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=892&FS=Regulation+and+Reality
-- Regulation and Reality, William L. Anderson.
