Should legislative seats be sold openly to the highest bidder?

First of all, let's be honest — this is effectively what happens already, in the US at least (some statistics here). The only difference is, all those billions of dollars spent on campaigning are essentially wasted, as far as general welfare is concerned.

So, what if the government were to simply auction off legislative seats at two-year intervals? It would be more honest and transparent, at the very least, and provide a steady stream of revenue that could be used for actually useful things. Plus, it would mitigate concerns about moneyed interests holding undue sway over the legislative process, since the price of the seats would tend to be bid up to the point of marginal utility, where it's only just barely worth it for the candidates to pay the price.

Could it happen? Maybe, if you bribed enough people... :-)

Or... we could actually get rid of the corruption by severely restricting how campaign funds are allocated.

Why not have set spending and tax-funded elections instead? I suppose mostly because the Supreme Court disagrees?

You know what be even better than this concept of buying seats (I mean how do you prevent foreigners from buying seats?)... assign seats at random to American citizens.

That would be a correlation. People tend to give campaign money to the people who are likely to win to begin with. A study in Freakonomics shows that when the same candidates vie more than once for the same seat - in the control group, that is - the influence of money is negligible from race to race.

After all, everyone knows that Big Business was pulling for McSame. By rights, he should have gotten the dough and the votes, eh?

If we ever got to that point, they will have suspended elections entirely.

Yeah, why not give the people who are actively corrupting the system which is supposed to give the people as whole the power instead of just the rich. Because it would be more honest to simply declare something which is wrong as right instead of working to change it.

While we're at it, why not make a state church and all that fun.

Seriously???

Wait, that was actually a legitimate suggestion? Oookay.

@ breadloaf: How would it be possible to do that? For example, in order to effectively restrict campaign spending, you'd need to specify what exactly it means to spend money "on a campaign" rather than for some other purpose; not to mention how to deal with third-parties who campaign for a candidate without being affiliated with that candidate. How can these restrictions be made simple and transparent enough that they do not themselves become an opportunity for shady dealings?

I'd love to see more government offices chosen by lot, but I think that's even less likely to happen than this.

@ Doma Doma: Interesting; I hadn't thought of that. Do you know any more details about this study? Intuitively, though, if spending money had no causal effect on election results, you'd think that candidates wouldn't even bother trying to raise money in the first place.

@ 3 of 4: I actually am kind of serious about this (insofar as an internet forum discussion can be serious). As it is, it pays for corporations etc. to lobby the government because they can get more out of it than they spend lobbying. But if the price of a "representative" is allowed to rise freely, it will only just barely be worth it; and the government itself can capture the surplus. You might think of it as a tax on people who try to influence the government with money.

So you fix democracy by destroying it?

You seem to assume that the corporations will bid against each other instead of doing the smart thing and work together (at least one cartel big enough to outbid everyone else) take control of the legislative branch and rewrite the laws as they please while the people can't do nothing about it?

edited 28th Nov '11 1:53:47 PM by 3of4

@Eio

Well the first thing is to restrict campaign contributions. While I realise that the US Supreme Court already ruled against some of these ideas, the American people can potentially demand a constitutional amendment to fix the situation.

• Full ban on corporate and/or organised donations. Only individual donations allowed limited to a very small amount. The amount an individual can donate should be based on what the poorest American can be expected to donate, so that each person has exactly the same political power as is demanded by a democracy.

• Full ban on third-party advertisement for any candidate at any time. Restore the ban on any advertisement on identifiable political issue during the campaigning days (some countries have the concept of dropping the writ, as in, officially starting an election, so I'm not too familiar if there is a similar concept in the US). An identifiable political issue is basically if a political candidate has a particular policy (for instance, dogs may not poop in parks anymore) and your ad targets that policy (I think dogs should poop in any park they feel like!) then it is banned. Otherwise, I'd leave it up to courts to decide whether an ad was too similar to support one party over another.

• The ability for a party to ask for police to "follow the money" on third party advertisement that are political in nature, or attack/support a particular political party/candidate. If it follows back to a political party, that is banned, fines/jail time is levied.

Now, then for tax-funded elections.

• You get a lump sum of money per election which you spend however you feel like. To qualify for this, you must gain a certain percentage of votes in the previous election to be allowed to get this lump sum of money. This significantly boosts third parties in relation to the primary two.

• There is a maximum spending limit. I'm not sure why you think that's difficult, since it's just submitting an expense report and having a national auditor. I mean, yes, the US is horrible corrupt in this regard but other countries are not. I think the problem with the US is the lack of a single auditing agency. It's important here to note there should only be ONE auditing agency because having less than one leads to lack of transparency and having more than one leads to bureaucratic in-fighting and thus no auditing actually happens.

Actually, the Constitution was written in such a way as to keep "the people" abstracted out of the process as much as possible because they didn't want uneducated yeomen writing laws, voting directly for the president, or doing much of anything in the way of important decisions. Democracy was kind of a four-letter word at the time.

But yeah, actually going that far would be bad.

edited 28th Nov '11 2:10:38 PM by Pykrete

The way it works now, you have special interests, lobbies and other contributors donating money to both sides of a campaign if they believe that a seat will be heavily contested. If they see that only one major candidate will likely win, they don't donate as much as they would if the race were heavily contested.

Contributions don't buy you control; they buy you access. Politicians receive money from multiple quarters, so it's unlikely that any one official will be completely in the pocket of any single contributor.

Personally, I'd be in favor of unlimited contributions to candidates and races, provided that the source of every penny was accounted for and made public. The more they try to close loopholes in campaign finance laws, the more loopholes they'll find. It becomes a mess, and often the true sources of money are obfuscated because they're filtered through multiple sources.

Basically, candidates can take money from wherever they want, as long as they do it openly.

Alternately, there should just be public financing of all elections. Everybody on the ballot gets the same amount, and media outlets should be required to charge the exact same to all candidates for advertising.

7: You do have to buy ad spots and such. So there is a baseline minimum.

What good would having open donations be? Americans are extremely apathetic.

"Oh, the banks funded a billion for him? Oh well, whatever"

@OP- No. Just no. That'd completely turn us into an oligarchy. At least everyone has a CHANCE too win without billions.

Also, Some senator is proposing a amendment that would ban companies from giving campaign contributions.*Thumb of approval*

There have been amendments proposed to restrict that for ages. Hell, Bush even managed to pass one before it got shot down as unconstitutional over the next 8 years or so.

Said moves tend to get a resounding LOLNO from both sides of the board.

edited 28th Nov '11 4:09:57 PM by Pykrete

People will be apathetic one way or the other. At least with full disclosure maybe, just maybe, some people will become less apathetic. Like they say, in a democracy the people get exactly the kind of government they deserve.

edited 28th Nov '11 4:54:39 PM by Lawyerdude

I want to see far less donations to individual candidates. Why not donate mainly to political parties instead? The candidates who do well in polls can get access to that party's funding. In addition, donations should be absolutely and completely transparent. If people aren't being provided with full information, the whole thing is untrustworthy.

> Personally, I'd be in favor of unlimited contributions to candidates and races, provided that the source of every penny was accounted for and made public.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/what-if-the-law-required-campaign-contributions-to-be-kept-secret/248613/

This is an article from atlantic that argue rather than openiong source of contribution to apathetic citizens, making contribution secret to everybody, including the candidate might be better option.

A single blind donation, that's an interesting proposal. I prefer to take money out of the equation entirely but okay.

Restricting campaign spending isn't a big deal. You have an x dollar limit, you can't exceed it. Are you trying to state what counts as election spending and what doesn't count as election spending? As in, trying to spend through third party groups to circumvent election laws? I suppose then your problem is that if they can do that and not be caught your system is corrupt. In which case, you should solve the corruption. I reject the idea of "This becomes a mess, therefore who cares about corruption and the rich buying out votes".

Then again with blind donation, the rich might have a hard time convincing the candidate that they were the ones who made the donation. Then again, if the rich are in control of the staff at the donation booth you lose that blindness.

On the other hand with a strict spending limit and tax-funded election, the dollars come from the tax coffers, you have set limit on spending and no one can do a thing to affect that. The only way to circumvent this system is for the justice system to be incredibly lopsided to one party to forgive any transgressions of election law.

Making it blind won't really stop anything. Lobbyists will be perfectly capable of letting them know where their money's coming from.

Hell, a good chunk of 'em are on a first name basis anyway.