Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig writes in the February 2010 issue of The Nation on How to Get Our Democracy Back.
Changing the influence of money on our political system. A constitutional convention, if necessary.
Food for thought.
-RichardH
About two thirds or more through the article, we finally get to some proposals.
I think proposals such as this fail to take heed of how Obama changed the way elections can be run.
He raised a lot of money from large numbers of individual contributors. Harnessing the power of the new technology, the internet, Obama was able to raise unprecedented amounts of money and organize legions of supporters instead of depending on the usual sources.
The $2,400 limit on individual contributions might even have hampered Obama from raising larger sums that came from the people instead of the lobbyists.
Lowering the limit to $100 would be a major step backward. The solution to the problem is emerging from the competition of ideas that is fostered by the freedoms we enjoy in this country.
It would be a real crying shame if we gave up on this promise just as it was coming to fruition. We don’t need tighter control of what the people can do with more arcane rules.
The proponents of deregulation in general were right about one thing. Every regulation engenders its own loophole. Every time we try to close the loopholes, we just make life more complicated with decreasing benefits with the more layers we add.
At some point we do need to clean out the accumulated crud of all these layers and start from scratch with a simpler regulatory scheme.
For example, if we had been able to get rid of the clutter accumulated over the years and merely gone back to the basic Glass-Steagall act, perhaps the financial meltdown could have been avoided. However, perhaps the only way to get there from here was to have a major disaster by overdoing deregulation. Now that we are reminded of the dangers of total deregulation and we are clear of the years of built up layers, we can find a new and simpler regulatory scheme that fits the modern age.
Human society is a vast ecological system with many feedback paths that prevent deviation from some natural path. As we have learned about the natural ecosystem, changing just one thing without understanding the vast interactions often leads to disastrous unintended consequences.