How to Get Our Democracy Back. (via the Nation)
Lawrence Lessig writes a great argument tying the grassroots drive of the Obama campaign to how we might start to fight corruption in Congress. He lists a number of reasons people find for this corruption, but forgets an important one: politicians need money to advertise on television during their campaigns.
It’s for this reason that I have a really difficult time supporting the solution he proposes–publicly financed elections. I don’t think its fair that taxpayers hard-earned dollars go straight into the pockets of media companies, even if it does alleviate some of the influence of big-money donors. Public financing isn’t necessarily a bad idea; there are just other things that would need to be fixed at the same time for it to be a truly effective and just solution.