annoyedAnd for all the charts, and the naming of names, the authors' case for objecting to health care reform rests on a few horror stories out of Canada rather than on a principled and intellectually consistent argument.
OK, I'm now longer than the title and sub-title, but I'll let Lynne Kiesling summarize.
I think that those who want barriers to corporate forms of political expression because of its injection of money into politics are naive in the extreme. Put another way, money has always influenced politics, and it always will, so comparing real-world politics to an idyllic, utopian republic is an exercise in futility. Wherever we use political institutions to decide outcomes that affect the well-being of any collection of individuals, those individuals are going to attempt to influence the processes leading to those outcomes. Even under BCRA restrictions on corporate political expression, lobbying, rent seeking, and money have continued to determine political outcomes.I suspect that will be true no matter how many polemicists of how many stripes argue along the lines of "their representatives corrupt, our replacements better."
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
