Smaller Government = Campaign Finance Reform

Life is short, so I’m starting with the conclusion:

If you’re a Campaign Finance Reformer, then reducing the size of government should be right smack dab in the center of your agenda.

The way to get money out of politics is to get politicians out of our lives. Reduce government influence. When government has less influence, people have less reason to spend time and money influencing government.

So, all you Campaign Finance Reformers, you should be on the Small Government bandwagon.

That’s the conclusion. Here’s the setup:

My weekly column over at FoxPolitics.net this week was about Wal-Mart, and that capitalist hellhole’s sudden conversion to Obamacare, and what it all means.

It’s really good. You should go read it.

Anyway, we’ve got a guy here in Wisconsin named Jack Lohman, whose typical schtick is: Noun-Verb-Campaign Finance Reform. Everything starts with that. No other issue matters – indeed, no other issue can matter, because there’s no way to affect any issue when the moneyed special interests have all the power. Until corruption – defined solely as money – is out of politics, no other issue matters.

That’s Jack.

So, he “reasons,” we’ve absolutely got to have single-payer health care, because the insurance companies are spending so much money lobbying Congress. He commented on my column:

No, it’s not socialized medicine or anything else along liberal lines, it is corrupt politics. But heaven forbid we call it correctly. The $46 million in insurance industry campaign contributions did exactly what they were supposed to do; bought politicians.

…The smartest thing we could do is pass a single-payer healthcare system. Call it socialized medicine if you wish, but health care should become a part of our infrastructure and not be an employer burden.

How, exactly, we’re supposed to get single-payer care when the insurance companies have bought all the politicians (his calculus, not mine)…well, that’s a mystery.

Why money would cease to be a factor when health care is “a part of our infrastructure” is another mystery. Does he think, somehow, that having government running health care will take all the politicians out of the picture? That giving our health care to the government will magically eliminate corruption?

I asked him that. This is from his second comment:

No Lance, we need campaign corruption out of our political system, and we need greedy CEOs and shareholders out of health care. If you wanted to start with a national non-profit run by administrators and not owned by a for-profit entity, like the Red Cross but funded by taxpayers, I’d buy into that.

Uh-huh. A nationalized, taxpayer-funded health care system can exist with no government meddling whatsoever. The politicians will just lay off, leave it alone, have neither influence nor interest in what it does and how it does it and, thus, wealthy interests will have no interest in lobbying those politicians.

Jack Lohman should, in my opinion, be more careful about whose brownies he eats.

He wants to get corruption out of politics. That’s a fine goal. He thinks the way to do that is to get money out of politics. I’m skeptical, but okay.

The way to get money out of politics is to get politicians out of our lives. Reduce government influence. When government has less influence, people have less motivation to spend money influencing government.

If you’re a Campaign Finance Reformer, smaller government should be your goal.