Not enough thoughtful engagement? More rules!!!
If we were better at unwinding bad rules that wouldn't be so bad. But change is always bad.
If money is easier to get, candidates will need to "pay" less for it in favors.
To understand the dynamics here, the key fact is that additional money only helps a campaign up until it has enough to get its message to the voters. More money after that doesn't impact the result.
This is almost indistinguishable from what used to be called propaganda, and generally seen as somewhat problematic even before it was inundated with individual targeting and the ungodly amount of realpolitik we see today.
This is not a game where there is ever enough money, and it can work terrifyingly good, almost no matter what agenda you push, as long as the agenda is all that you care about.
Sure it might come tumbling down one day, if the lies becomes to obvious. The damage will still have been done at that point.
If history has taught us anything, it seem to be more of the opposite of what you claim.
What I said wasn't my opinion, it's the consensus from the research that's been done on this.
Anyone who lived through the 2010 California governors race could also see Brown being outspent 5:1, and win easily.
There is a correlation/causation illusion here: The (A) winner in votes usually also has the (B) biggest donation to the campaign. Can you see the two main reasons why A causes B, and not the reverse?
Corruption outside of this fixed percentage is heavy penalized, as in life prison sentences.
I see a lot of estimating-as-inevitable in many problem areas - for example: the environment, race and sex relations, security / "privacy". I'm not sure whether it has increased, or I'm just more aware of it these days.
When we think that a problem is inevitable, we may conclude that various reponses that otherwise have little to recommend them might be a good thing: populisms, zero-sum thinking, authoritarianism, radical transparency. This idea of inevitability is in conflict with optimism in David Deutsch's sense: optimism as the principle that all problems are caused by lack of knowledge (and therefore that all problems are either solvable, or truly inevitable because of some law of physics - no examples of the latter being known).
And if all that lobbying money piled up , goes into the organized corruption, there is little left for the rest of the power percentage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Maybe you could say "technically, the case invalidated restrictions on campaign related advertising by third parties, so-called soft money. Though this may be commonly referred to as campaign finance, strictly speaking, that's not correct." I think very few non-lawyers would say the case "had nothing to do with" campaign finance.
The issue the heart of Citizens United v. FEC (i.e., the Federal Elections Commission) was whether a non-profit's funding of a TV special criticizing a candidate violated the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.
I guess it's technically true that the decision doesn't allow more money to flow directly to the campaign, and there's not /supposed/ to be coordination with campaigns either (wink wink, nudge nudge), but it's very obvious that CU increased the flow and role of money in elections.
In ordinary parlance, do we say “Apple funds iOS” or do we say “Apple makes iOS?” In Citizens United the non-profit produced and sought to air a movie called Hillary: the Movie. They didn’t “fund” any candidate’s political campaign.
> I guess it's technically true that the decision doesn't allow more money to flow directly to the campaign
By “technically true” you mean “true.” “Campaign finance” laws presumably have to do with financing of campaigns. The “role of money in elections” is a different, much broader area, much of it outside the scope of campaign finance laws. (For example, consider the alleged $5 billion in free advertising the press gave Trump. Do campaign finance laws allow the government to regulate that?)
One can imagine lumping in scenarios where someone is attempting to bypass a campaign finance restriction by directing a third party to produce content for the campaign. But that’s not what Citizens United involved either. There was no allegation of any such “indirect” campaign financing. Instead, the government tried a naked power grab: punishing a non-profit for making a political movie, with no showing of any link to the campaign beyond that.
"A campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure has not existed before today." https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/#tab-opi...
Virtually every bit of media coverage describes it in similar terms too. Still, it was a 5-4 case that produced five opinions, so if that's the hair you want to split, so be it. I think my original comment stands just as well if it's amended to "Aren't we trying that already? Citizens United already dramatically relaxed ELECTION SPENDING rules."
CU is listed in a Wikipedia section titled "Campaign finance in the United States":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
To use your own words, in "ordinary parlance" CU is part of campaign finance.