RALEIGH – Post-election campaign reports are coming out, leading to the inevitable calls for campaign-finance reform.
It’s bunk. Some of the advocates of tighter restrictions or taxpayer-funded elections are sincere, typically the younger activists. But the rest of them must know that as long as America remains a free society, it will be impossible to force politically active people to shut up. Donors can either give money to campaigns and political parties that express their views and promote their preferred candidates, or they can fund or form independent groups to expend money expressing their views. Now, armed with technologies for social networking and online commerce, it’s easier than ever before to organize such groups and fund them with large numbers of relatively small contributions.
The campaign-finance rules really determine who gets to control or coordinate these expenditures, and the degree of difficulty in tracking them for public disclosure. If you block campaigns or parties from directly receiving donations from the politically active, you reduce somewhat the efficiency of political communication and the ability of reporters, watchdogs, and rival candidates to figure out what’s being spent by whom. You chase the politically active into darker corners.
Add in additional institutional actors – ranging from companies, unions, and political action committees to the news media, universities, and think tanks – and the result is the picture of a complex, ever-changing market for political speech that resists simple description or simplistic regulation.
As I’ve suggested in the past, you can test the seriousness of your friendly neighborhood campaign-finance reformer by asking them if they also favor government rules on how much space the news media devote to particular candidates and what that space can contain. If they say yes, they are being consistent – though, obviously, hostile to the basic principles of a constitutional republic. If the reformers say no, they demonstrate either an uninformed inconsistency or an intention to tilt the playing field in favor of candidates more likely to attract favorable press coverage – those on the Left, in other words.
Journalists have no more right to speak, and to expend resources to attract an audience for what they say, than anyone else does. Freedom of the press means the freedom to print and distribute (and in the modern context to broadcast or publish online). It’s an individual right enjoyed by all citizens, not a special privilege.
Defenders of North Carolina’s public-financing system have another problem: under a recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s patently unconstitutional. JLF Legal Analyst Daren Bakst has the skinny in a new Spotlight briefing paper. The Court ruled that provisions awarding participating candidates extra campaign cash when non-participating candidates spend their own money to campaign – the famous “millionaires amendment” – don’t stand up to legal scrutiny. North Carolina’s system is even more egregious because it gives extra cash to subsidized candidates not just when unsubsidized ones spend money but also when independent groups spent money promoting an unsubsidized candidate.
That is an example of North Carolina being consistent, I suppose. We’re consistently wrong, intruding on the basic right to free speech.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation