| Rath said: However several governments with far less corruption and far higher rankings in most of the freedom indices have electoral laws that dictate what is allowed in a political campaign. |
Yeah, and with the exception of Canada, they're all boutique countries with mostly homogeneous populations numbering less than 10 million. Such nations have a natural tendency towards low corruption. I'm pretty skeptical that any lessons learned from New Zealand or Finland can be applied to the U.S. I mean, I imagine pretty much all politics in your country are local, whereas in a country the size of the U.S. one has to watch for meddling busybodies and corrupt assholes as the federal, state, and local levels. It is for all intents and purposes impossible. I've already pointed out how arbitrary this shit ends up being in practice here - Dog Eat Dog Films and Lions Gate's vastly more successful (and thus, more dangerous, eek!) Fahrenheit 9/11 doesn't trip the FEC's alarm but Citizens United's two bit production somehow does? - so I'll be fucked if I want to give the ravening beast that is the federal government the power to tell anyone to shut up.
