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Matt Yglesias, on the need for a different approach to campaign finance:

What you need to cut down on the time politicians spend fundraising isn’t less money in politics. It’s easy money. Generous public financing of the campaign of any major party nominee for Congress would ensure that even a terrible fundraiser stands of chance of getting elected. Being bad would still be a disadvantage. But today it’s a disadvantage to be ugly, stupid, inarticulate, or corrupt, and yet we still have ugly, stupid, inarticulate, and corrupt members of Congress. What we don’t have are members of Congress who can’t raise money.

This got me to thinking about campaign finance reform, which I haven’t written about much since the whole Citizens United brouhaha last year. My feeling then (and still now) was that I think it’s bad for democracy that anyone and everyone is able to pour bazillions of dollars into elections. However, I have yet to hear a solution that doesn’t cast far too wide a net.

Reading Yglesias’s post sent me down a slightly different path, though. Political campaigns cost huge amounts of money—national campaigns, certainly, but even state and local races are expensive affairs. There aren’t laws or regulations we can pass that will change that fact in any meaningful way, so people running for political office are going to need a lot of money, and it’s going to come from somewhere. We can write all the laws we want saying one group or another can’t spend in elections, but the money will still find its way into the process, because the people running for office need it.

So in that description, replace the word “money” with the word “drugs,” and you’ve basically got the argument for the legalizing drugs and eliminating the supply-side approach of prohibition-type strategies. What’s weird, though, is that I’d be willing to bet a large percentage of the people who think we need to keep money out of politics also think we ought to legalize drugs.

I tend to agree with Matt that public financing of elections would be the best solution to the problem, but I just don’t see how that’s going to happen in the current climate of anti-spending hysteria. Absent that, it really seems like disclosure of contributions is what we’re left with.