Liberals want subsidized campaigns

Here they come again, liberals wanting South Carolina to go to a system of public financing for political campaigns. The latest plea for making you finance candidates you don't even support comes from Common Cause's State Director John Crangle, via an editorial in the State Paperthis week...

It is obvious that self-financed, rich candidates have major unfair advantages over non-wealthy candidates who must raise contributions to run — rich candidates can donate huge unlimited sums to their own campaigns while normal fund-raiser candidates are limited by state law to no more than $3,500 per source per election for statewide office or $1,000 per source for legislative office. The rich candidate can donate much more to his campaign than his fund-raiser opponent can raise, and further spend no time on fund-raising and much more time campaigning.

Crangle neglects to point out that those $3,500 and $1,000 dollar limits he mentioned were passed into law atthe urging of people such as himself...reformers claiming money was the problem with politics. Since they passed those limits, a non-rich candidate can't rely on a rich friend to help him overcome the problem ofopposing a rich candidate. So what'sCrangle's solution?

The remedy for the problem of self-financed, big-money candidates is a new form of public financing in which candidates are able to receive public funds to match those donated by self-financed candidates.

What these people really want is an end to the free market in politics. You know, the system where members of the general public decide on their own which candidates they would like to donatetheir hard earned dollars to.As we've just seen (and time and time before) each new regulation only begets another regulation to fix the problems caused by the first one. I've got a better idea, how about we stop trying to regulate the operation of the free market in politics.