1: I'm flexible. Corporate donations are the most problematic, in that they create a feedback loop. If I can lobby for a thing that gets me money, I can use some of the profits to buy more favorable legislation. But I'd be happy with pure public funding of elections, no donations allowed. Or an individuals-only model, where each person has a strong limit, like $250.
2: I left out for-profit corporations on purpose, but I'm sure there's a reasonable case for including them.
3: The same way we police campaign finance, lobbying, public records, and elected official ethics. That is, a variety of groups with investigative power who do their best to root out offenders. You couldn't eliminate everything, but as long as we got the bulk of it and reduced the financial incentives for elected officials to favor donors, I expect we'd do pretty well.
4: In this case by neutral I mean "paid by the government to serve the legislators". Sure, there are risks. But giving legislators their own well-funded research groups means they'll have to lean less on industry-created "facts".
Everything is of course corruptible, but perfection isn't my goal. We're already much less corrupt than most other countries [1], and I'm suggesting that we could do better by limiting or strictly controlling channels of information and money. Those old channels made more sense when we didn't all carry around all the world's opinions and information in our pockets.
1: I'm flexible. Corporate donations are the most problematic, in that they create a feedback loop. If I can lobby for a thing that gets me money, I can use some of the profits to buy more favorable legislation. But I'd be happy with pure public funding of elections, no donations allowed. Or an individuals-only model, where each person has a strong limit, like $250.
2: I left out for-profit corporations on purpose, but I'm sure there's a reasonable case for including them.
3: The same way we police campaign finance, lobbying, public records, and elected official ethics. That is, a variety of groups with investigative power who do their best to root out offenders. You couldn't eliminate everything, but as long as we got the bulk of it and reduced the financial incentives for elected officials to favor donors, I expect we'd do pretty well.
4: In this case by neutral I mean "paid by the government to serve the legislators". Sure, there are risks. But giving legislators their own well-funded research groups means they'll have to lean less on industry-created "facts".
Everything is of course corruptible, but perfection isn't my goal. We're already much less corrupt than most other countries [1], and I'm suggesting that we could do better by limiting or strictly controlling channels of information and money. Those old channels made more sense when we didn't all carry around all the world's opinions and information in our pockets.
[1] http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percepti...