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Comment by triplesec | Hacker News Reader

One solution never considered in the USA for some reason is what most other Western democracies do, which is public funding for candidates, and limits. Candidates may spend no more than X on their campaigns under penalty of serving penal time. In the UK it was about the equivalent of about $10,000 last time I looked a while back. Accounting must be done. This limits the role of money. The parties can raise their own extra money but only for national-scale media advertising.

However, there are conditions in the US that conspire against this: the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 1st amendment being one of them (e.g. corporations are people); the size of the US and its federal structure being another.

Yet I agree with the author: there is a hack to make the system more representative without breaking it much more. We just have to find one and somehow get it implemented!

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"Corporations are people" has nothing to do with campaign spending limits being unconstitutional. Congress can and does legally limit donations from anyone (people, corporations, whatever) to politicians. It can't ban any communication mentioning a candidate for federal office without permission, which is what the McCain–Feingold Act attempted to do.

The Constitution says "shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" and doesn't say it's a particular right of individuals, just a blanket ban on legislation on the topic. Protecting the freedom of the press as an exclusively individual right doesn't even make sense.

To expand on this point, the laws they are attempting to pass and have passed have all been about protecting incumbents. The best way to view many laws out of Washington is to read them as doing the opposite of what their stated purpose is.

I believe you entirely miss the point of that decision. IT was nothing to do with the freedom of the press: it's still free whether corporations are "people" or not in law. What changed was the ability of non-press organisations to use money as a proxy for speech to buy up "freedom of speech" through expensive media campaigns. This is the problem of gross inequality that this decision made.

But if you limit spending by too much you give the media additional power over elections.

Couldn't agree more. There is a reason corps like GE and Comcast buy up media companies, and it's not for direct profits. It's to sway public opinion.

Good point ... and which is why the BBC exists, and why Italian politics (all big media owned by Berlusconi) is generally worse than other Western democracies in transparency. Germany, France, Scandinavian countries all have state broadcasters which at least attempt some kind of balance, even if with a hegemonic (incumbent) slant. And the private sector still has a health left wing media, which is more cultural.

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