Why We Worry

(Update Below) 

A relatively new right-wing political advocacy group could possibly spend $250 million in an attempt to influence the 2008 elections. This group, named Freedom’s Watch, was formed last year by former Bush White House aides . The group’s main focus was supporting Bush’s “surge.”

But let’s go back to that dollar figure. $250 million. That’s about as much as the three top fund-raising presidential campaigns (Clinton, Obama and Romney) combined. But more worrying is that Freedom’s Watch is focusing on congressional elections. Combined, the Republican and Democratic committees for congressional elections have raised roughly $35 million.

Freedom’s Watch even greatly outclasses its’ closest left-wing counterpart, MoveOn (of General Betray Us fame). MoveOn was only able to spend $21 million in 2004.

This certainly plays into the stereotype that the Republican party (and perhaps right-wing politics in general) is the party of the rich.

But what really inspired me to write this post was this from Matthew Yglesias:

It’s always worth keeping in mind that inequality in the United States has allowed certain concentrations of wealth to exist that, in principle, mean things could get really crazy. Adelson [a contributor to Freedom's Watch] could decide that $250 million is chump change and that he actually wants to spend five billion dollars on the 2008 election, and then give $1 billion to each of his five children, and then then live very comfortably for the rest of his life on his remaining $1.5 billion. Now I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but it could. And Adelson’s only #15 on the Forbes 400 list.

That’s an interesting scenario, and I think it’s one worth mulling over. I’m not sure how to reconcile my feelings on the subject. On the one hand, I don’t like the idea of crazy rich people buying political power, because more than likely, I think that will tilt our government toward helping the rich at the expense of the rest of us. Hell, there’s a good argument that’s already happened. On the other hand, I generally oppose barriers to freedom of speech, especially political speech.

So is there a solution? Is this even a problem at all? Should I just trust that people will see through a possible onslaught of misleading ads?

Update:
Yglesias has posted a follow-up post to the one I quoted. He quotes a suggested fix for the situation by Matt Weiner:

One possible answer is that we should prevent such extreme concentrations of wealth. John Rawls thought extreme concentrations of wealth were bad precisely because that much money led to disproportionate political power (and meant that people without the money were shut out of political power in important ways).

I think that’s basically right.  The immense concentration of wealth in our society has many negative side-effects, not the least of which is the imbalance of political power.

I’m sure Yglesias will be tarred a communist for suggesting we try to distribute wealth more fairly. Kudos for being open about it. But I really hope he isn’t serious about “patriot dollars”…

Flickr photo from Steve Rhodes

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