42 Campaign Finance

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Campaign finance has a consequence vs. causation aspect about it: do candidates win because they get lots of money, or do winning candidates get lots of money? At the national level, it certainly seems to be the latter because many, many candidates spend vasts amount of money for seemingly inconsequential elections which they then lose. However, it is true that candidates who are unknown with no resources have little chance of convincing people to vote for them.<br /><br />It is important to know who “owns” a candidate, so mandating disclosing of who gives what to whom is clearly valuable to our democracy: we need to know if foreign nationals are supporting particular candidates with possibly nefarious motives. And businesses should not be able to contribute to campaigns at all: if the owners of a business wish to own candidates that promote their business, they should have to support them under their real name.The specious argument that businesses have Free Speech needs to be definitively counteracted with legislation since the Supreme Court seems unable to do so. Only people are people: the fictional device our country uses to facilitate commerce, business, has no Rights, is not protected by The Constitution, and has no place in politics. On-the-other-hand, putting campaign contribution caps on private individuals is a limitation of Free Speech. Democracy is constantly threatened by Marxism, and in the absence of debate, the poor many will vote to take the rich few's stuff. Campaign donation caps laws are intended to mute the rich, clearly a violation of their liberty.</p>