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Bloggers Exempted From Campaign Laws
MaceyHW writes "The Federal Election Commission ruled today that the only online political activity subject to Campaign Finance Laws are paid advertisements on a third party site. Today's ruling extended the regulations to paid advertising as required by a 2004 Federal Court ruling, but explicitly exempted all other forms of online activity: 'For example, the rule says individuals can use union or corporate computers or other electronic devices for political activity, as long they do it on their own time and are not coerced to engage in such activity by the union or corporation. Bloggers would be entitled to the same exemption from the campaign finance law that newspapers and other traditional forms of media receive. "There will be no second class citizens among members of the media," [FEC Chairman Michael T.] Toner said.'"
This is not really about giving cash to candidates. Even under your scenario: suppose all candidates are funded equally from a public pool. I, a private citizen, wish to dedicate my time and my checking account to persuading as many people as possible that candidate X is the best choice. Under your proposed system, is this permissible? Does it change if I encourage others to join me? If I encourage others to help me by volunteering? Help me with cash donations? What if I voluntarily do the bidding of the campaign manager? What if I try to guess what the campaign manager wants, and do it? What if I take money from the campaign?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I agree partially but mostly disagree with you.
You do not have a first ammendment right to give money to your candidate for the very reason that Money IS speech
Actually, money is time -- you get money when you save someone time in doing a service or providing them a product. The money they give you their time saved -- they received in doing the same thing for someone else. Rothbard's (free e-)book available here offers a simple explanation of what money is.
Because money is my time saved, I should be free to use my time (or time saved) as I want as long as I don't directly use that time to harm someone's person or property. If I want to use my time saved ("money") to promote something, I should be free to.
The difficulty I have with campaign finance laws is that they were written specifically to prevent me from using that time saved in the way I want to. They were written to keep both parties more powerful than the individual, and to also block any third party from using a smaller crowd of individuals to finance their elections.
The biggest problem with government today is that it is too powerful, taking over rights left to the individual. When a government gets powerful, it attracts the time-saved ("money") from powerful individuals. It uses this over-broad power to harm the masses at the profit of the few.
If you want to fix the system, you need to remove the powers they've taken against their Constitutional and ethical limits. Ridding Congress and the Executive Branch of their excessive powers will remove most people's desires to finance the elections in order to get favoritism-treatment (ie, cronyism).
The idea of public funding is bad because there are other laws preventing most people from getting on a ballot. The problem is not the funding, the problem is the power given to the elected.
> For example, confiscating land for "public use" is quite clear and is vastly different
> than "private use that might ultimately provide some public good." It didn't take much for
> 95% of the population to agree on that after the travesty that was the Kelo ruling.
Actually Kelo was a good example of strict constructionism at work. The 'good guys', as opposed to the nimrods who yank new laws fully formed from their asses, on the court ruled against an outcome they clearly would have preferred and stuck to the law as written. The state constituition in question clearly permitted the action and the US Consitituition as a general rule only limits what the US Government can do. So they upheld the taking and noted that if the state laws were different they would have ruled differently, whereupon the outraged folks in the various states looked at their local laws and are in the process of making changes where needed.
Democrat delenda est