Some Thoughts on the Epstein and Lessig Discussion on Campaign Finance Reform
20100205
The following are some thoughts I'd like to direct to Professors Epstein and Lessig, in response to their debate of August 11, 2009 on the WRFU program The Logic Consortium. I came upon this link after listening to Prof. Lessig's video on fixcongressfirst.org and reading his article in the Nation magazine on February 4, 2010. I'd be very grateful for any feedback on these ideas.
I'd like to start with a point that Epstein makes responding to Lessig's call for campaign finance reform to eliminate "influence buying" in congress:
"There are two places in which you can try and buy things: one is to get your favorite senator or representative in Washington, and the other is to lobby like hell on a particular issue."
Epstein asserts that even if you could control the first method of "influence buying" with campaign finance reform, then all the "influence money" would simply transfer to the second method, resulting in all kinds of single-issue PACs that would effectively perpetuate the current system of influence peddling.
This argument seems convincing, and Lessig effectively agrees, and then makes the horribly weak assertion that, essentially, it is better to do something that won't work than to do nothing at all, since people's faith in democracy is fading.
But Epstein sees the real problem as being the fact that all constitutional constraints on what government may do have eroded.
"The object of a constitution is to try to figure out how the legislature can advance the common good, such that they can improve the lot of one only if they improve the lot of others."
While this sounds like a noble sentiment, I suggest it is flawed by its scope, as I'll explain momentarily.
Epstein goes on to say that, "The thing that you hated under this system is the taking from A and giving to B. That's exactly what modern politics does, and that's exactly what the supreme court and all the lower courts frown upon."
Now the argument is muddled. What is to be hated about taking from A to give to B if the result is to improve the common good? An avalanche of questions suddenly arise as to the nature of the good achieved, the nature of the loss A suffers, and how B's benefit advances the common good, and not just B's position, etc.
A better strategy for the legislature to adopt when trying to improve the common good is this:
The government should do nothing for anyone that it is not willing to do for everyone.
The problem with requiring the legislature to "improve the lot of one only if they improve the lot of others" is again the ambiguity involved. For example, what if improving the lot of A also improves the lot of B, and none else? Or what if A benefits along with a small segment of the society? How big of segment should benefit before legislation is justified?
The answer really should be: all or none. This is the only fair answer, but its real value is that it eliminates the possibility of corruption, exactly the kind of corruption that defines "modern politics".
Moreover, it is easily achievable, once legislators stop viewing themselves as the dispensers of largess, and start to see that their role is really one of understanding how to act in ways that benefit everyone. It can be done, as the following example will illustrate.
Let's assume that we want to craft a piece of legislation that, in the first place, adheres to the restriction that, "government should do nothing for anyone that it is not willing to do for everyone", and secondly, aims at doing the greatest common good with the least upset to the existing system, while eliminating the corrupting influence of money, and solving all of the major problems facing our country and our economy ( as well as creating a new paradigm for the global economy).
The solution is as follows:
The legislature needs only to revise the U.S. Tax Code. All existing Tax Code can be essentially discarded and replaced with a simple two-bracket tax system. Each year, each citizen is allowed to choose which tax-bracket they would like to apply to themselves. In the first bracket, a citizen elects to pay a flat 25% of their income as taxes. In bracket two, a citizen elects to pay 50% of any income they have other than a $2,000/month payment they receive from the government, which can be called a guaranteed income, a negative income-tax payment, or a tax credit. There are no deductions, and no lengthy tax forms, only a simple declaration of income. (Also note that corporations have no choice. They are required to pay the flat 25% -- or perhaps 30% -- on all net income, and to report the details of their financial transactions.)
By making this change to the Tax Code, the legislature would effectively create a Guaranteed Income program for all citizens, set at a level which would assure a family an income roughly equal to the current average American family income. Set at this relatively high level of an annual $25,000 per person , all other government entitlement programs could be eliminated, since no one on those programs would be worse off under the new Tax Code plan. Thus, there would be no obstacle to eliminating Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Welfare, Food Stamps, Educational Loans, Subsidized Housing, etc.
Notice that this legislation also solves the Health Care problem, because everyone receives a monthly stipend set high enough to allow them to purchase a health insurance policy if they so desire. Of course, the legislature will still need to address regulation of the health insurers and the health providers, but this is the work the legislators should be doing, not doling out largess.
Notice also that once such a system of income guarantees is implemented, it could well become a badge of honor for a political candidate to declare the guaranteed income as their only source of income. Legislators would still need to adopt programs to ensure that candidates have access to the tools needed to run for office, but not by dishing out money to individual candidates, as Lessig apparently suggests with "grub stakes". Instead, all candidates can be given access to tools such as websites, television airtime, phone services, printing services, and anything else which can be made available within the confines of the prime directive:
Government should not do anything for anyone that it is not willing to do for everyone.
I hope this solution will appeal to Lessig, who did agree here that "what is necessary is something fundamentally new." Although this idea was originally worked out in the 1960s by Milton Friedman, Robert Theobald, John Kenneth Galbraith and other economists, as well as by the comprehensivist Buckminster Fuller, and was embraced by Martin Luther King, Jr. in a speech given in Atlanta on August 16, 1967, it can still be considered "new" in relation to the "solutions" -- that won't solve anything -- currently being discussed (such as "stimulus" and "jobs" programs).
Epstein clearly delineated why the current "solutions" won't work:
"What is interesting about our constitutional evolution and our judicial and quasi-institutional evolution is that all of these transformations take place without anybody doing a system-wide analysis of what happens at one part of the place when it comes to the interactions at the other. I think even [Lessig] agrees with that. You need a general equilibrium analysis, and these guys are all playing very partial equilibrium games."
A Guaranteed Income program is a comprehensive, system-wide solution designed to insure economic security and stability for each person, for the entire American economic system, and for the global economy. The cost of implementing the plan is far less than the financial bailout that has enraged the nation, and once implemented, it becomes self-sustaining from a number of factors too numerous to detail here, except to mention that a fraction of the huge sums now funding the corruption in our current system can be redirected to the common good.
But the important point to note is that it accomplishes a bloodless revolution that ends the corruption in the current system by liberating the citizens of our democracy from the economic domination of the corporations (or more specifically, the shareholders) and circumscribing the economic power of legislators. Would Paulson & Bernanke have been justified in handing the Treasury over to the banks and brokerage houses if the economic security of all citizens had been protected by a Guaranteed Income program?
Thankyou for considering these ideas.
Loren Castleton
oloren1@fastmail.fm
The following are some thoughts I'd like to direct to Professors Epstein and Lessig, in response to their debate of August 11, 2009 on the WRFU program The Logic Consortium. I came upon this link after listening to Prof. Lessig's video on fixcongressfirst.org and reading his article in the Nation magazine on February 4, 2010. I'd be very grateful for any feedback on these ideas.
I'd like to start with a point that Epstein makes responding to Lessig's call for campaign finance reform to eliminate "influence buying" in congress:
"There are two places in which you can try and buy things: one is to get your favorite senator or representative in Washington, and the other is to lobby like hell on a particular issue."
Epstein asserts that even if you could control the first method of "influence buying" with campaign finance reform, then all the "influence money" would simply transfer to the second method, resulting in all kinds of single-issue PACs that would effectively perpetuate the current system of influence peddling.
This argument seems convincing, and Lessig effectively agrees, and then makes the horribly weak assertion that, essentially, it is better to do something that won't work than to do nothing at all, since people's faith in democracy is fading.
But Epstein sees the real problem as being the fact that all constitutional constraints on what government may do have eroded.
"The object of a constitution is to try to figure out how the legislature can advance the common good, such that they can improve the lot of one only if they improve the lot of others."
While this sounds like a noble sentiment, I suggest it is flawed by its scope, as I'll explain momentarily.
Epstein goes on to say that, "The thing that you hated under this system is the taking from A and giving to B. That's exactly what modern politics does, and that's exactly what the supreme court and all the lower courts frown upon."
Now the argument is muddled. What is to be hated about taking from A to give to B if the result is to improve the common good? An avalanche of questions suddenly arise as to the nature of the good achieved, the nature of the loss A suffers, and how B's benefit advances the common good, and not just B's position, etc.
A better strategy for the legislature to adopt when trying to improve the common good is this:
The government should do nothing for anyone that it is not willing to do for everyone.
The problem with requiring the legislature to "improve the lot of one only if they improve the lot of others" is again the ambiguity involved. For example, what if improving the lot of A also improves the lot of B, and none else? Or what if A benefits along with a small segment of the society? How big of segment should benefit before legislation is justified?
The answer really should be: all or none. This is the only fair answer, but its real value is that it eliminates the possibility of corruption, exactly the kind of corruption that defines "modern politics".
Moreover, it is easily achievable, once legislators stop viewing themselves as the dispensers of largess, and start to see that their role is really one of understanding how to act in ways that benefit everyone. It can be done, as the following example will illustrate.
Let's assume that we want to craft a piece of legislation that, in the first place, adheres to the restriction that, "government should do nothing for anyone that it is not willing to do for everyone", and secondly, aims at doing the greatest common good with the least upset to the existing system, while eliminating the corrupting influence of money, and solving all of the major problems facing our country and our economy ( as well as creating a new paradigm for the global economy).
The solution is as follows:
The legislature needs only to revise the U.S. Tax Code. All existing Tax Code can be essentially discarded and replaced with a simple two-bracket tax system. Each year, each citizen is allowed to choose which tax-bracket they would like to apply to themselves. In the first bracket, a citizen elects to pay a flat 25% of their income as taxes. In bracket two, a citizen elects to pay 50% of any income they have other than a $2,000/month payment they receive from the government, which can be called a guaranteed income, a negative income-tax payment, or a tax credit. There are no deductions, and no lengthy tax forms, only a simple declaration of income. (Also note that corporations have no choice. They are required to pay the flat 25% -- or perhaps 30% -- on all net income, and to report the details of their financial transactions.)
By making this change to the Tax Code, the legislature would effectively create a Guaranteed Income program for all citizens, set at a level which would assure a family an income roughly equal to the current average American family income. Set at this relatively high level of an annual $25,000 per person , all other government entitlement programs could be eliminated, since no one on those programs would be worse off under the new Tax Code plan. Thus, there would be no obstacle to eliminating Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Welfare, Food Stamps, Educational Loans, Subsidized Housing, etc.
Notice that this legislation also solves the Health Care problem, because everyone receives a monthly stipend set high enough to allow them to purchase a health insurance policy if they so desire. Of course, the legislature will still need to address regulation of the health insurers and the health providers, but this is the work the legislators should be doing, not doling out largess.
Notice also that once such a system of income guarantees is implemented, it could well become a badge of honor for a political candidate to declare the guaranteed income as their only source of income. Legislators would still need to adopt programs to ensure that candidates have access to the tools needed to run for office, but not by dishing out money to individual candidates, as Lessig apparently suggests with "grub stakes". Instead, all candidates can be given access to tools such as websites, television airtime, phone services, printing services, and anything else which can be made available within the confines of the prime directive:
Government should not do anything for anyone that it is not willing to do for everyone.
I hope this solution will appeal to Lessig, who did agree here that "what is necessary is something fundamentally new." Although this idea was originally worked out in the 1960s by Milton Friedman, Robert Theobald, John Kenneth Galbraith and other economists, as well as by the comprehensivist Buckminster Fuller, and was embraced by Martin Luther King, Jr. in a speech given in Atlanta on August 16, 1967, it can still be considered "new" in relation to the "solutions" -- that won't solve anything -- currently being discussed (such as "stimulus" and "jobs" programs).
Epstein clearly delineated why the current "solutions" won't work:
"What is interesting about our constitutional evolution and our judicial and quasi-institutional evolution is that all of these transformations take place without anybody doing a system-wide analysis of what happens at one part of the place when it comes to the interactions at the other. I think even [Lessig] agrees with that. You need a general equilibrium analysis, and these guys are all playing very partial equilibrium games."
A Guaranteed Income program is a comprehensive, system-wide solution designed to insure economic security and stability for each person, for the entire American economic system, and for the global economy. The cost of implementing the plan is far less than the financial bailout that has enraged the nation, and once implemented, it becomes self-sustaining from a number of factors too numerous to detail here, except to mention that a fraction of the huge sums now funding the corruption in our current system can be redirected to the common good.
But the important point to note is that it accomplishes a bloodless revolution that ends the corruption in the current system by liberating the citizens of our democracy from the economic domination of the corporations (or more specifically, the shareholders) and circumscribing the economic power of legislators. Would Paulson & Bernanke have been justified in handing the Treasury over to the banks and brokerage houses if the economic security of all citizens had been protected by a Guaranteed Income program?
Thankyou for considering these ideas.
Loren Castleton
oloren1@fastmail.fm
posted by Loren Of Lorien | 10:55 PM
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