You can pretty much make a living betting against the regulators since they seem to always get it wrong. Burdens on energy companies leads to shortages and high prices. The public school monopoly leads to substandard education. Control of about half of all health care spending leads to a flawed market. And multiple attempts to regulate political speech, after Watergate and with McCain-Feingold, has led to ever more money in politics.
With Democrats crowing that their presidential candidates raised record sums of money and are therefore destined to capture the White House, there needn't be any more debate. Sens. John McCain and Russ Fiengold failed miserably in their attempt to drive money from politics.When will these campaign finance idiots realize that so long as politicians mess with our money, we will use our money to influence who gets to serve in office. Only when politicians stop meddling so heavily in our lives will stop meddling in theirs. All these byzantine regulations only make the system more shadowy, susceptible to corruption and removed from what politics should be about - policy.In 2004, the first presidential year that McCain-Fiengold restrictions were in place, President Bush and Sen. John Kerry turned down federal matching funds in the primaries so they wouldn't have to live under federal spending caps until after accepting their respective party's nominations. That year also saw the rise of unaccountable, independent political organizations, driven by the moneyed political base of each party. MoveOn.org, for one.
Now Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are shattering any illusion that money isn't central to winning the presidency. Together the two senators raised more than $50 million in the first quarter of this year and are enjoying reams of media coverage for the feat and for having far outpaced Republican candidates.
