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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Dialog on Campaign Financing

Dialog

It is hard to argue that more speech is not better than less speech; yet that is what the Supreme Court decided last year in the case of  Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom PAC v Bennett.  This disallowed an Arizona law that would have provided public financing to candidates who were competing against heavily self-financed opponents.

The problem with the flood of PAC money is that the volume of speech that it generates drowns out the speech of ordinary people who cannot compete in the advertising market. If there was some method for generating countervailing speech then Mr. Weinstock's competitive elections might well come into being (New York Times, March 6, 2012: A26). At present big money alone talks.


Sent to New York Times

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