Re:Hillary and Bernie’s Quiet Email Battle
by SilasX on Wednesday February 17, 2016 @04:00PM
(#11121349)
The bottom line is, you're trying to explain why big money is able to produce policies that go contrary to the wants of most voters without also assuming deficient reasoning on the part of those voters. You're trying to do that with a key claim that the bad-idea-money[1] is able to drown out the non-exploitative idea such that most voters never hear such an idea even once (else they would, on average, switch to it), even from hearing friends talk about it or other non-paid means.
That is a huge assumption that doesn't seem to match the world we live in. Your best attempt to justify it is with a claim that voters, while not morons, make a small amount of errors that is somehow enough to fail to appreciate the tidal wave of "let's not get exploited" advice they hear from friends, who would want to spread it like the dickens.
I don't see how that constitutes a reasonable model. At some point, you have to blame the voters themselves.
[1] And I'm going to assume you know here that I mean "bad idea" in the sense of "the purported idea that goes contrary to most voters but gets propped up by money" so as to save me the talk about "there are only bad ideas for particular voters".
(1) There is no such thing as a "bad idea". There are ideas that have net negative utility for particular voters. But these same ideas may have net positive utility for other voters.
(2) Campaign spending doesn't have to get people for whom an idea is bad (net negative utility) to accept it to be useful to propagate, as long as it does either of the following (a) reach people to whom it is of net positive utility, who will adopt it and act on it politically, or drive up the price of the resources (media access, etc.) needed to spread competing ideas that are net negative utility to the actor deciding to spend resources on the current idea, so as to reduce the cost to that actor from the uptake of those harmful ideas.
Of course, with rationality (which, aside from personal utility maximization also includes perfect information about all alternatives including their costs and benefits), propagating ideas (political or otherwise) would be unnecessary, since every one would know and choose their best alternative without needing to be exposed to or propagate ideas. But if you weaken the assumptions of rationality only enough to make propagating ideas meaningful (that is, abandon knowledge of all alternatives, but still assume that once exposed to a proposed alternative people can perfectly weigh its utilities against all other alternatives they have been exposed to), then greater inequality in access to resources to propagate information still has a distorting effect without further assuming people ever make any errors in assessing the relative merits of ideas that they are exposed to, and there is still a role for campaign finance restrictions.
It is simply false to say that you need a model in which people cannot effectively process information they receive about policy alternatives to justify campaign finance limits: it can be justified while assuming people are perfect evaluators of alternatives they are exposed to.
You can't justify it if you assume people are perfect evaluators of their alternatives without a need to be exposed to them, but with that assumption there is literally never any utility to campaign spending (and, as it has a cost and no utility, no one would do it if they were perfect evaluators of their alternatives), so I think we can reject that assumption as being useful in any universe in which campaign spending (limited or not) actually occurs.