[Vision2020] [Bulk] Re: Iowa caucus stuff: The Opposite of Bush

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Friday 04 January 2008 21:06, Paul Rumelhart wrote:
> Maybe we should hold the Presidency as an auction on e-bay, proceeds to 
> go to reducing the national debt.

We're pretty close to an auction system already with private financing. The 
major problem is that donor-investor-winners extract as much financial 
power and privilege with respect to non-winners as they can, with the 
result that financial assets and institutional control are progressively 
more concentrated in the donor classes. Thinking of themselves, the donor 
classes wish to maintain the system that protects their advantages. That 
significant social problems could be solved with different expenditure and 
asset distribution patterns is neither their interest or concern. That, 
analogous to the corporation that returns dividends to investors so they 
may better invest them elsewhere, restructuring the national economic 
edifice could solve social problems, improve the economy, and create a 
better society for all appears to be beyond the imagination of those who 
merely acquire to retain assets, power, and control of the system that 
supports them.
 
> The candidates with the most money have the best chance of winning,       
> anyway.

Unfortunately, yes. Campaign finance reform is the most pressing national 
problem facing Americans simply because better solutions to so many other 
problems depend on more equitable sharing of decision-making and exercise 
of economic power among the wealthy and the not-so-rich.

This is a millennia-old problem that societies' consistent failure to solve 
redounds to the suboptimal civil satisfactions which so many suffer.


Ken