> political donation the highest form of return of investment that exists
Which is why it should be banned.
Which is why it should be banned.
Functionally, this isn't possible. If the open method is banned, people will start using layers of indirection.
It's fundamentally a problem with democracy.
Maybe. It'll make it less effective. But it'll also make it more difficult to detect.
Why does anyone believe this?
> Why does anyone believe this?
Good laws are great. And there are plenty of them.
But passing bad laws just because "we need to do something" is worse than doing nothing.
Some people seem to think that people are like computers and “law” is the programming. No, people will continue to mine Bitcoin, or do drugs, or whatever other illegal thing up until the point where the FBI breaks down a door and some people get shot or (best case) thrown behind bars. My opinion is that laws are nothing other than a form of violence. If you support violence against people for running a computer program I don’t know what to say.
Under a majoritarian system, even if >50% claim to want a law in polls or ballots, but far-more-than-50% of the same people (or even just: the relevant targets of the law) can flout it without consequences, that's typically a bad law.
Noo it's spreading!!
Yes, powerful people flout them (Sarkozy) or find ways to pass off contributions as gifts (Fillon's suits) or use the support of media oligarchs without a direct monetary contribution (Macron, Zemmour) but overall, the end result is that there's a lot less money in politics, and politicians aren't completely dependent on the funding of industry lobbies for their election.
Same thing with political advertising. I'm seeing scandal after scandal about Facebook censoring or not censoring this or that political ad, and I'm just thinking "I'm so glad this is the kind of bullshit we don't need to deal with".
But if nothing else, we can assume that there's less money in politics because campaigns are less expensive.
Macron's last campaign cost 16 millions euros. Biden's last campaign cost 1.06 billion dollars. That money has to come from somewhere.
In theory, Macron's campaign could have hidden costs not reported in accounting (which is what Sarkozy did) but in practice it's hard to hide that (hence Sarkozy getting caught). Big campaign meetings in expensive stadiums are, by design, hard to hide.
Also, since you can't spend money getting your candidate on TV ads, there's not a huge incentive to blow up your campaign budget. Regulators also ensure that TV outlets spend an equal amount of time on each candidate. (Though there are also ways to game that, eg CNews got fined for putting Zemmour on prime time and every other candidate in night slots).
So while power games still exist (the key to becoming French president is basically being friends with Xavier Niel), we can assume there's less money overall because parties have fewer things to spend money on.
I don't think this is self-evident even for money, if the money is simply being spent in ways that can't be tallied.
It's even less assured for all undue influence, including insider networks of non-financial favor-trading – as you note in your (fairly cynical!) observation that "the key to becoming French president is basically being friends with Xavier Niel".
Is that really tangibly better than overt, measurable money influence from many competing sources?
It's possible the low (above-board) spending totals are really a negative indicator: evidence that a de-facto cartel has enough levers to repel challenges without explicit cash outlays. When spending on wages seems suspiciously low, as with American college athletes or French IT workers, it's not a sure sign evil money has been kept out of a lily-pure process, but rather that insufficient competition has kept all the real money/power with secure incumbents.
I am not an expert on French politics, but from the outside it seems just as protetive of traditional elite/insider interests as politics elsewhere. Maybe more so!
> Is that really tangibly better than overt, measurable money influence from many competing sources?
You're implying that any overt influence from political donations is fungibly replaced by an equivalent amount of hidden undue influence. That's not at all obvious.
It's not like hidden influence doesn't exist in a system with political donations. Having the support of media corporations is important in France, but it's important in the US too.
And to bring it back to the original subject, if crypto regulations were proposed in France, we wouldn't be worried that the MPs had been pre-bribed by crypto exchanges before the vote even began.
Making something illegal rarely prevents it completely, but very often reduces it.
He could just tweet how easy it is to lobby for electric vehicles and how he will spend a fraction of his money maybe a couple billions on lobbying. Maybe name a specific senate he may or may not donate to. He could specify donald trump or a certain republican senate for maximum impact.
There's no need to spend anything.
There will be a push to ban political donation immediately.