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Many here seem upset at the idea that Bloomberg is spending a lot of his own money to run for president.

No - it's not that he's spending his own money. But rather, how he's spending it.

And they're not "upset". They're calmly pointing out the obvious: that this kind of attempted influence buying is profoundly dystopian and antidemocratic.

All of the other candidates are also doing that; there's nothing special about how Bloomberg is spending his money. The others are doing the same, but with other people's money -- people who will now expect to wield influence behind the scenes. Is that not worse?

Perhaps stating the obvious here, but if the money comes in small increments from millions of people who are broadly representative of the population (ahem, Bernie Sanders, ahem), then the politician will be beholden to the people they're actually supposed to be beholden to: the voters.

If we allow the extremely wealthy to have an extreme advantage in campaigns, we'll end up with a government that only serves their interests. Why would we expect anything else?

The solution to this is public funding of elections that puts all candidates on an equal playing field, or at least overturning Citizens United and only allowing direct donations under the maximum including from yourself.

All of the other candidates are also doing that; there's nothing special about how Bloomberg is spending his money.

Hiring dedicated trolls at $2500 a month, you mean? Do you have a source for that?

> profoundly dystopian and antidemocratic

I don't think it's antidemocratic. Bernie Sanders is doing just fine with a fraction of the ad spending. Ultimately, nobody is being forced to vote for him. Super Tuesday will be the first test, and it's very possible that Bernie will sweep all of the big states himself.

So instead of people buying politicians with large donations, he can buy people with large donations....like he's done with all those mayors.

It's worse because it's self-serving. It's unprecedented because he's outspent every candidate (I believe in the history of the US) and it's all his own money. He can buy anyone at this point...I'd rather have a politician pulled in several directions than one that just does whatever he pleases because he can buy influence and influencers

What are you going to do with your $2500? ;)

> is better than a candidate with a wealthy donor network of obscure motives pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Surely this was said of the current occupant... never quite as clean as that, it would seem.

For what it is worth, I got text asking for donation to Bloomberg's campaign. So I would not expect Bloomberg not taking money from large donors.

Bloomberg doesn't need money. He solicits donations because the act of donating money causes the donator to feel personally invested in the campaign. They will be more likely to take steps to influence their friends and family to vote for Bloomberg, and more likely to actually bother to vote themselves, than someone who hasn't.

This is the same reason governments sell war bonds -- they don't actually need the $100. It rather serves to make ordinary people feel they are contributing something to the cause.

War bonds actually raised a ton of money to support WW2. The govt actually needed that money.

The reason to sell war bonds in a fiat money world, at a base level, is that you want to devote some resources to the war effort, and therefore those resources are not available to produce consumer goods.

Now there are two options. Either the consumers have just as much money chasing a smaller amount of goods, leading to inflation, or you need to reduce the amount of money consumers have. Selling bonds is a mechanism for doing the latter. The end result is the same: the war effort means lower living standards, whether through inflation or through people voluntarily forgoing consumption by purchasing war bonds; the latter happens to make people less upset and likely has different distributional characteristics, so is probably a better idea.

Note that there are various details like whether your economy is at capacity (and if it's not, maybe you can do the war effort production _and_ still produce the goods consumers want by expanding overall production). And there can be various different mechanisms which lead to inflation in practice, ranging from "printing money" to pay for the cost of the war effort production, thus bidding up prices in general, to establishing rationing and a corresponding black market with high prices.

In a non-fiat-money world, there can be other reasons to do war bonds, of course, including "getting some of whatever counts as money", since the government does not control the supply of that.

Your idea makes sense. I guess there are always exceptions to any rule - I shared screenshot of that text and link to the amount of Bloomberg's wealth with my friends asking reasonable question - if he wants to help people, why he asking them to donate all the while sitting on $60B+ of own wealth.

So you think he is spending hundreds of millions out of goodness of his heart? Just so he would get the chance to help average citizen?

I dispute this logic entirely. Yes, he is not beholden to external special interests. But he is worth some 60 billion dollars, owns his own media company, is the single largest donator to the democaratic party(he owns Pelosi's super pac), and is deeply enmeshed in wall street. The guy literally is a special interest himself. You should all be terrified of a potential Bloomberg presidency. Everything coming out about him recently paints a picture of somebody with a lot of the exact same negative personality traits as Trump, but who is deeply competent. This is horrifying.

> He's not beholden to anyone's interests or greed or kickbacks or special interests.

What a laughable statement. Of course he is, he's beholden to his own interests as a billionaire. Bloomberg is special interests personified. How is it possibly a good thing that any single person in our country can elect themselves via sheer wealth?

Also incredible that you phrase being beholden to many people's interests as a bad thing. Of course there is corruption by another name when candidates take money from Super PACs (Buttigieg/Biden), but isn't it a good thing that, for example, Sanders is now beholden to the interests of his over 2 million donors? Almost like he's beholden to the interest of his constituents, as an elected representative...