A mash-up of Google Maps and Prop 8 Donors.
Proposition 8 changed the California state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. These are the people who donated in order to pass it.
This map is causing something of a foofaraw on the right, where some worry that such exposure will tend to reduce donations to political causes.
These are, of course, for the most part the same people who want to do away with all regulations governing political donations, and substitute instead transparent, full, and accurate public disclosure.
Unless, of course, it is their ox being gored.
I’m fine with it. I think full disclosure is fine, no matter whose cause is affected, and I much prefer that to the government restrictions on political donations in place today.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Here’s a question from the devil’s advocate: What’s the difference between anonymous donations and the secret ballot? One of the arguments for the secret ballot is that it helps prevent intimidation of people who vote the ‘wrong way’. Unions want to replace the secret ballot with card-check precisely for this reason. Does the same consideration apply to anonymous donations?
Open donations would operate as a replacement for the clearly unconstitutional regulations on financial political speech now in place. If you don’t like transparent donations, and don’t like the government regulating the hell out of the donation process, in defiance of the constitution, then what is your suggestion?
Just leave the donations you like secret?
Net, I suspect I come down more or less where you do — repeal the regulations on donations and require transparency. But I’m not entirely ‘fine’ with it, because the loss of anonymity does carry real costs that need to be acknowledged. If it were possible to come up with a system that preserved both free speech and anonymous speech, that would be a good thing IMHO.
Well, get back to me when you come up with it. In the meantime, I’ll remain fine with full transparency on political donations. Just as I remain fine with the idea of absolutely no privacy for politicians who serve in elective office.
Probably a logical impossibility. The real solution is to limit government power so that it’s not worth bribing an official or rigging an election.
Probably a practical impossibility. The solution to that is to kill people who want power until the gene is eradicated.
What’s the difference between anonymous donations and the secret ballot?
1. There are usually restrictions on who gets to vote in a secret ballot election. Foreigners cannot vote in US elections (by rule if not practice).
2. In most elections the votes are weighted equally so there is no reason to believe that anyone individual has greater influence.
Restricting who can vote in a secret ballot election does not require revealing who voted which way. One could equally well restrict who is allowed to donate to a political campaign without making public the amount donated or the candidate who received it.
Transparency does nothing to prevent one side of a political campaign from being better funded than the other.
Another thought on the seeming conflict between free speech and anonymous speech — can you prevent the transparency requirement from metastasizing through other institutions? We’ve already seen how regulations on monetary donations turn into regulations on non-monetary donations or actions that could be substituted for money. If putting up a website to support some cause is treated as an in-kind donation (which it has been under current law), why wouldn’t an anonymous website violate transparency requirements?
SteveF is certainly correct that reducing the power of government would help things a lot here. A powerful government is a magnet for illicit rent-seeking, and transparency requirements help turn over the rocks that kind of behavior hides under. Stop enabling rent-seeking and there won’t be as much need to turn the rocks over.
Would you feel the same about a mash-up of google maps and prop 8 opponents?
or would that be bigotry?
Isn’t that the point of political transparency? I want to know who is funding the candidate/issue. I want to know when big Oil/big gambling/big union/big whatever is funding a specific campaign. I want to punish those entities that choose to finance (what I deem) unworthy causes.
Let ‘The Right’ scream. It only reveals how much they have slipped into the anti-liberty camp.
Sure. All political donations should be unregulated except for complete transparency, and all politicians should surrender the right of privacy, when either serving in, or seeking, elective office.
And why do you dumbasses keep trying to trip me up by posing idiotic questions like this?
It’s pretty simple: I favor civil rights and civil liberties for everybody, and I oppose state oppression of those rights for some people. People who do support state-sponsored oppression for whatever reason, of Jews, Blacks, Gays, or any other such minority, are, in my opinion, Jew-haters, Black-haters, and Gay-haters, and so on, and I will continue to name them as such. I’m not going to use “bigot” any more. It doesn’t really describe what they are.
You know, I’m growing more and more disenchanted with maintaining any personal connection to the religion-besotted, other-hating segment that calls itself conservative these days. Why don’t y’all head on over to Stormfront or some other website more in tune with your beliefs?
It’s a tough nut.
IMO, the direction the right has traditionally taken has concentrated on recipients rather than the donors: The right wants to find the guy who took George Soros’s cash, so they can go after him. (There have been exceptions: The matching of Democrat donors against university faculties and the like. But I don’t recall anyone seriously suggesting a university should be boycotted because some specific faculty member made a campaign contribution to Barak Obama.)
The Prop 8 thing is different because here the activists are engaging in organized action against people (donors) who would not otherwise be considered public figures, and innocent[1] third parties. It’s uncomfortable because you have an activist minority which is prepared to take extrordinary measures against those it sees as opponents, their employers, and their associates. And activist minorities don’t always favor liberty: The extreme extension of this scenario is what happened to the non-Nazi leftists (and the Jews) in 1930s Germany.
I think Kyle (and I) are searching for a way to make political participation- voicing or supporting one’s positions- consequence-free.[2] But like Bill, I can’t figure out any way to do that AND maintain the transparency in the process that we seem to agree is needed. And on the third hand, shouldn’t actions have consequences? (Think of the outside BANANA environmentalists who parachute in to tie-up local development in lawsuits. Wouldn’t it be great for them to have to pay a share of the economic damage they cause?)
Which leaves me- reluctantly- agreeing with Bill: Full disclosure any time cash changes hands, no other regulation, and let the chips fall. With Kyle’s additions: Anonymous individual speech, and the secret ballot. That’s the best I’ve got.
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[1] “Not so innocent,” say the activists, “or they wouldn’t have hired somebody like that!” Maybe uninvolved?
[2] A condition which has never (what, never?) obtained at any time in history.
Ordinarily, I’d agree with you, Bill, but the Left is increasingly into spiteful vandalism.
Last time I looked, there were laws against vandalism. Enforce them. Or must we make all our laws based on the nanny-state fear of what might happen?
The Islamists will love that.
UPATE: And the more I think about it, the more I believe that is a terrible reason to decide how we will order our society. That simply turns the whip hand over to whichever thugs have the biggest clubs.
Because you tend to lash out over this issue–even at friends(well, regular posters and contributors).
And I am a gay marriage supporter.
But I am against some of the state sponsored opression you occasionally seem to support–like laws that make a gay-hater HAVE to rent property they own to gays….or sell to gays…or hire gays.
See, I think something I own belongs to me–and the state should not tell me who to rent to, sell to or hire.
And I have no problem extending that right to gay people or people who hate gays—as long as the government doesn’t get to mess with ANYONE’S property.
And I know there’s a bigotry laden downside to that–it would allow people to irrationally discriminate.
But I am pretty damned sure that you can’t get rid of the feelings behind bigotry by legislating them out of existence.
Or blacks, or Jews, or chinks, or women, or spics, or, well, whoever you want to carve humanity into to suit your right to act on your hatreds however you see fit.
And I don’t give a shit. We have made some compromises with absolute anarchy, libertarian-style, in order to give pretty much everybody a more or less even playing field. And I completely support that.
You don’t like it? Tough. As I said, I don’t give a shit. I don’t want to live in a country where every hater gets to shit on the commons for everybody else. And I am extremely glad that I don’t have to.
The difference between now and the days of my youth in the 50s is incredible. I have not heard Brazil nuts called ‘n-(word) toes’ in decades. Most of the real personal racial barriers have come down. No, you can’t legislated it totally out of existence, but we sure as hell have legislated it out of the vast ‘middle America’ bigotry that existed a half century ago.
Yeah, you can sure legislate acting on those hatred out of existence. Nobody gives a damn what sort of asshole you are between your ears, as long as you can’t make other folks’ lives miserable because of it.