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restrictions on campaign speech
You wrote "Politicians should ALWAYS have a cap on what they can spend to advertise themselves, or better yet, there should be a standardized protocol available to competing politicians, so that money does not buy political office, instead of political agenda and policy views."
In Nicaragua, there is a 4th branch of the government dealing with the elections. Supposedly independent, in fact it is controlled by the Ortegas due to their hard work and tactics to gain control of it, and it was one of the many elements that the Ortegas knew they needed to control in order to run the farce of the "election" of DOS a few years back. Would you think it preferable to have institutions like that determining the candidates who can run and the ways they can spend money and appear in public, with more and more power in countries around the world? It seems like a nice idea, but then the reality of it sadly takes over: those positions of power choosing candidates, regulating speech, etc, cannot be chosen in a fair manner; in all of history there is not an example of it, right?
For me, when I hear about restricting political free speech, of course there's a momentary thought about how if somebody "Good" was doing the regulating, maybe it would be OK... but then I realize there's nobody who could do the job. So wishing for a "Good" set of people to be legally empowered with that responsibility is like wishing that a normal-sized corn plant would produce 50 large ears to feed more people. That would be great, but it's just not going to happen because there is no way to overcome the forces of nature that limit the number of large ears on a normal-sized corn plant.
So that's why I agree somewhat with FunRunners in his statements related to the goal of fairness, and why I prefer a political system where persons are free to print as many pamphlets for the candidates of their choice or issues of their choice, even those whose proposed tactics I consider to be counterproductive to their stated goals.
As Winston Churchill said:
No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.