[Originally posted February 10, 2006]

I’ve been reading the book Why Not? by Ian Ayres & Barry Nalebuff.  They brought up a really good idea, in light of all the scandals we’ve had recently in politics.  So the basic problem is that it costs a lot of money to run a campaign, especially for a federal office.  People who donate a lot of money tend to get favors.  We’ve seen this with the recent Duke Cunnigham and Tom Delay prosecutions.

My initial idea was to just limit all campaign financing to public funds.  So there’d be a fixed amount that each candidate is alloted and they could not spend more than that.  There are some concerns with limiting free speech.  Plus no one in goverment would vote for that proposal because of their self interest.  Well what if we instead require that all donations be anonymous.  The candidates would not be allowed to know who contributed money to their campaign.  If we have a central trust fund through which all donations must be processed then we could just earmark each donation for a candidate.  READ MORE »