Campaign finance law is hard, so we should give up

I hate this sentiment.

The arguments here are similar to those over tax reform. Tax laws are too complicated, so we should simplify them. Well, look kids...there's a reason this shit is complicated. It's because the targets of both, the tax evaders and government bribers, are very clever people, and they find complicated ways to launder their money to make it look clean.

The problem is that the difference between the allowed and the forbidden is very, very fine. So, you have a choice. You can try to enact extremely precise laws, in which case you end up with the systems everyone's bitching about: very complicated, very intricate laws that attempt to surgically extract the bad actors from the good, honest folk.

But there is an alternative. You can trade fairness for simplicity. In other words, if you want a simpler system, fine. We can do simpler. It just won't be as fair. We could, for instance, just lower taxes across the board for those in the lower income brackets instead of the complicated system of credits and deductions, and we could similarly tax the upper brackets at a higher rate in proportion to the amount of money we expect the rich to offshore and otherwise sleaze out of. Similarly, in the realm of campaign finance, we could just forbid any political advertising from any group in an election year, and give a fixed amount of time to each candidate to use as they please (perhaps with a higher proportion going to the challenger to take care of the incombent effect).

Would those be fair? No. Certain honest players would get screwed. But hey, maybe it's worth doing that to take care of the apparently terminal complexity.

Despite the fact that many of the arguments in the article are downright insipid, like comparing the operation of the federal government to the operation of the Virginia government (since, really, who the fuck has a serious vested interest in _Virginia_, for fuck's sake?!), they do have a point: bandaids for campaign finance reform don't work. I agree. I think you need to overhaul the system. Barring a total severing of the tie between money and media exposure, you're screwed. The money always wins.

And don't get me started on the utterly retarded argument that prohibiting media spending is tantamount to prohibiting speech. Last I checked, a guy on a street corner in Bumblefuck, Idaho handing out leaflets is not going to have the same impact on the electorate than a PR piece funded by Monsanto running simultaneously on every tv channel will. Not all speech is created equal. Being drowned out by someone else's message is no better than being forbidden to utter your message at all.