You already did that once =P hence why you have Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and California

@Joel. Woah, your views on Ron Paul are pretty extreme. Few points.

1) Ron Paul isn't wishy washy - I disagree with his views but he certainly sticks to them more than any of the other candidates.

2) The South Korean military would likely still be able to destroy the North Korean military if it came to war. The technological difference is just huge.

3) When on earth did China talk about invading Japan? China still has a bit of a grudge about WWII (which, lets be honest, they have all rights to) but I've never heard of them having an interest in invasion. Taiwan is more likely, but even then they'd rather not have the extreme damage to their economy that would without a doubt occur.

4) America is just as bad for supporting brutal dictatorships as anybody else. For example - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkmenistan, Yemen and Guinea.

5) An American invasion of Canada? The fuck? Why would America invade a close ally and economic partner?

@Badgenome. With public funding campaigns would mostly have to flourish on the candidate and the candidates positions. Currently elections are mostly decided by how many millions of dollars you can spend on ads attacking your rivals.

We invaded The Republic of Texas and Mexico, not just Mexico.

I think I have solved your problem.  You see the main problem here is people.  What if we instead just turned it into a beauty pageant for monkeys?  You vote for the cutest monkey.  That way they still maintain the same policies while ensuring no money is needed for them to "debate".

If the USA invaded Canada it certainly would look impressive on a map!

Well technically it wouldn't... it mostly is ice. ;)

We could finally connect to Alaska!

I suppose you could do a lot of good things by abridging freedom, but it's rarely worth it.

I don't think that's accurate, though. Money tends to follow popularity rather than the other way around, and uber rich candidates like Meg Whitman and Steve Forbes have had no luck buying their way to electoral victory.

That is because they still view the people as mega rich and not the job creators (gotta use the politically correct term).  Hell, you still have fools that believe Bush Jr. ran decent businesses when he actually only turned a profit on the Rangers deal.  All his other ventures were complete failures.  Pretty amazing that you can do basically jack shit and be elected.  Oh wait didn't we just do that again (I actually voted for him because I didn't like McCain nor his bitch (I mean Palin)).  Might as well elect the most unqualified person.  How about a person in a coma or a newborn baby? 

Then what do you suggest? Until Citizens United is overturned, things are only going to get worse, not better. We can talk all we want about "getting government out of big business" but how the hell is that going to happen if big business is the group telling government to help them, and that they have to listen because big business has the money to get them elected that no-one else has?

The only way to get even a libertarian solution to work is to at least temporarily cripple the ability of businesses to participate.

I don't believe it's really abridging freedom, I believe it leads to a more free and fair democracy.

If you look at the countries which rank highest in freedom indices - most of them actually have reasonably tough electoral spending laws.