Government And Business

Intellectual Ammunition — Campaign Finance, Cronyism and Inequality

Recently, I debated Professor Rick L. Hasen of UC Irvine School of Law at a Federalist Society event at Southwestern School of Law in LA. The subject was campaign finance law, and Professor Hasen took the opportunity to outline the case he makes in his new book, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections. From the title, you might guess that he is both not a fan of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and that he thinks money in politics is leading to a kind of plutocracy, in which the wealthy end up influencing government far out of proportion to everyone else.
Government And Business

Cronyism, Corruption and Government Power [Video]

Cronyism is on everyone’s lips these days. The conventional view is that wealthy “special interests” — typically businesses — use their resources to influence elections and “game the system.” The result is special favors for them at the expense of everyone else. Ours is a government not of, by, and for the people, this view holds, but of, by, and for the “special interests.” Our system is not capitalism, they claim, but “crony-capitalism.”
Government And Business

Inequality and money in politics

Economist John Cochrane has a terrific op-ed on inequality in The Wall Street Journal in which he identifies money in politics as the chief target of the inequality warriors, as he calls the critics of income inequality. When you get past their bogus economic arguments, says Cochran, “most inequality warriors get down to the real problem they see: money in politics. They think money is corrupting politics, and they want to take away the money to purify the politics.”

Further Reading

Ayn Rand | 1957
For the New Intellectual

The Moral Meaning of Capitalism

An industrialist who works for nothing but his own profit guiltlessly proclaims his refusal to be sacrificed for the “public good.”
View Article
Ayn Rand | 1961
The Virtue of Selfishness

The Objectivist Ethics

What is morality? Why does man need it? — and how the answers to these questions give rise to an ethics of rational self-interest.
View Article