Actually it’s the Ayres-Bulow way, but my title is more descriptive.
OK, Yale Law professor Ian Ayres, and Stanford economist Jeremy Bulow came up with an interesting way to reform campaign financing. It’s summarised in this Slate article by Steven E. Landsburg.
Basically, instead of fuller disclosure and contribution limits, which is the way most people think of finance reform, the Ayres-Bulow reform would make all donations anonymous. Example… If SterlingNorth wants to give $30,000 to the John McCain fund, I can go ahead. It’s just that John McCain, nor anyone else would know who gave him the $30 grand. How? Apparantly the money will be filtered through an intermediary account.
Does this make any sense to you?
OK, Is this a good idea?
Steve spots some interesting ramifications in this…
Do any of you here have any thoughts about this? Can any of you make heads or tails of this?
I see, so the thought is because the politician wouldn’t ‘know’ who financed them, they’d be impervious to sways.
this assumes that the doner wouldn’t be creative in finding a way to insure that the politician didn’t know where the $$ came from.
Never, ever underestimate the creative powers of folks wanting their way.
I think it’d be pretty easy for them to find a way of making their donations known (handing the politician the check made payable to the account and having them mail it in for example).
In addition, current lobbyist ‘pay’ in ways more creative than simply case on the barrel head as well.
wring, in the article there’s supposedly a way around this, being the 10 day “Paypal” delay where it’s possible to change your mind and cancel the donation. And I’d assume that “Paypal” would make a batch payment at the end of the week, so McCain wouldn’t know if a $100,000 deposit came from one person from the ACLU or 1,000 people from the Unification Church.
Though I could try to circumvent this by making it known that I donate in amounts in multiples of three in packs of five on slow days.
But I’m sure someone can figure out a way to break secrecy.
grumble grumble grumble, gotta get some new glasses
And, of course it should be
in preview, seeing Sterlings answer - or, even more simply, giving the $$ in cash to some one known/trusted to deposit etc. There’d be many ways, since the stakes would be high enough to come up with them. Hell there’s ways now for people to get around limits on personal donations (my infant child just gave some etc.)