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Forums - General Discussion - US supreme court rules that corporations can buy candidates.

Kasz216 on 22 January 2010
SamuelRSmith said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Words Of Wisdom said:
But we can still vote for the candidate we want right?

Yes, but realistically people want whatever is marketed to them. A candidate that is on every TV screen, and on every radio every ten minutes is going to beat the candidate that can only afford to give speeches at a town hall once a week, no matter how good that candidate is. We'd like to think we pick the candidate we want, and we do, but we pick them from a small pool that is decided by the people who have enough money to put them in the limelight.

I would just like to pull a quote from one of my favourite books, Freakonomics:

 

"Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that one his votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes and the money?

That's a crucial question but a very hard one to answer. Voter appeal, after all, isn't easy to quantify. How can it be measured?

It can't, really - except in one special case. The key is to measure the candidate against... himself. That is, Candidate A today is likely to be similar to Candidate A in two or four years hence. The same could be said for Candidate B. If only Candidate A ran against Candidate B in two consecutive elections but in each case spent different amounts of money. Then, with the candidates' appeal more or less constant, we could measure the money's impact.

As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time - indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972. What do the numbers have to say about such cases?

Here's the surprise: the amount of money spent by candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of his vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can shift the vote in his favour by only that same 1 percent. What really matters about a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are."

I totally don't remember that.  I've got to read freakanomics again.

You get a chance to check out the new Freakanomics book?

Superfreakanomics I think it's called?



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halogamer1989 on 22 January 2010

This is good and benefits both parties. In the end it is a vindication for free speech, corporate or not.



The Ghost of RubangB on 23 January 2010

Corporations are just like people! They should have all our rights!

We just need to invent ways to make them bleed, suffer, die, and rot in prison forever, just like the rest of us "actual people." And every 60-90 years a corporation should die and have all its possessions split up between its kin, instead of just recycling CEOs and shareholders and growing forever.

Real people don't get to own things forever. Corporations do. And apparently now that includes the government.



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Kasz216 on 23 January 2010
The Ghost of RubangB said:
Corporations are just like people! They should have all our rights!

We just need to invent ways to make them bleed, suffer, die, and rot in prison forever, just like the rest of us "actual people." And every 60-90 years a corporation should die and have all its possessions split up between its kin, instead of just recycling CEOs and shareholders and growing forever.

Real people don't get to own things forever. Corporations do. And apparently now that includes the government.

They do need to fix the laws.  That i'll agree with.

Doesn't really make much sense that coprorations are treated as individuals when they are, well groups of individuals. 

Restricting a corporations free speech doesn't restrict the free speech of the people the corporation makes up.  

However, that's not current precedent.  We need laws otherwise to change such things.


I'm not sure how much this really changes... there are the doom sayers... but once again, this just brings us back to the Bill Clinton era of politics.

It's going to be bad, but hardly the corporate run bordello state and death of free choice lot of people are making it out to be.

 

Well outside how much of case that already is, just based on the dichotomy of our system.  As long as there are only two dominant parties corporations will control both.



TheRealMafoo on 23 January 2010

There could be some positive in it. Almost all campaign funds are used for advertising. If you are not the top Republican or the top Democrat, you have no chance of winning.

Let's say Ron Paul ran again as an independent, and Wal-mart thought he was the best candidate. Exon liked him as well.

With just those two companies behind you advertising for you, you could be a viable third candidate. No longer do you need to worry about what party you belong to.

Not sure that's how it's going to play out, but if it did, that would be cool.



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SamuelRSmith on 23 January 2010
Kasz216 said:
SamuelRSmith said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Words Of Wisdom said:
But we can still vote for the candidate we want right?

Yes, but realistically people want whatever is marketed to them. A candidate that is on every TV screen, and on every radio every ten minutes is going to beat the candidate that can only afford to give speeches at a town hall once a week, no matter how good that candidate is. We'd like to think we pick the candidate we want, and we do, but we pick them from a small pool that is decided by the people who have enough money to put them in the limelight.

I would just like to pull a quote from one of my favourite books, Freakonomics:

 

"Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that one his votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes and the money?

That's a crucial question but a very hard one to answer. Voter appeal, after all, isn't easy to quantify. How can it be measured?

It can't, really - except in one special case. The key is to measure the candidate against... himself. That is, Candidate A today is likely to be similar to Candidate A in two or four years hence. The same could be said for Candidate B. If only Candidate A ran against Candidate B in two consecutive elections but in each case spent different amounts of money. Then, with the candidates' appeal more or less constant, we could measure the money's impact.

As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time - indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972. What do the numbers have to say about such cases?

Here's the surprise: the amount of money spent by candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of his vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can shift the vote in his favour by only that same 1 percent. What really matters about a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are."

I totally don't remember that.  I've got to read freakanomics again.

You get a chance to check out the new Freakanomics book?

Superfreakanomics I think it's called?


Yeah, I've read it. I found the case studies far more interesting in Supefreakonomics, too.



Kasz216 on 23 January 2010
SamuelRSmith said:
Kasz216 said:
SamuelRSmith said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Words Of Wisdom said:
But we can still vote for the candidate we want right?

Yes, but realistically people want whatever is marketed to them. A candidate that is on every TV screen, and on every radio every ten minutes is going to beat the candidate that can only afford to give speeches at a town hall once a week, no matter how good that candidate is. We'd like to think we pick the candidate we want, and we do, but we pick them from a small pool that is decided by the people who have enough money to put them in the limelight.

I would just like to pull a quote from one of my favourite books, Freakonomics:

 

"Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that one his votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes and the money?

That's a crucial question but a very hard one to answer. Voter appeal, after all, isn't easy to quantify. How can it be measured?

It can't, really - except in one special case. The key is to measure the candidate against... himself. That is, Candidate A today is likely to be similar to Candidate A in two or four years hence. The same could be said for Candidate B. If only Candidate A ran against Candidate B in two consecutive elections but in each case spent different amounts of money. Then, with the candidates' appeal more or less constant, we could measure the money's impact.

As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time - indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972. What do the numbers have to say about such cases?

Here's the surprise: the amount of money spent by candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of his vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can shift the vote in his favour by only that same 1 percent. What really matters about a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are."

I totally don't remember that.  I've got to read freakanomics again.

You get a chance to check out the new Freakanomics book?

Superfreakanomics I think it's called?


Yeah, I've read it. I found the case studies far more interesting in Supefreakonomics, too.

I've got to pick that up one of these days.



SamuelRSmith on 23 January 2010

Haha, I'm lucky - my mate bought it for me for Christmas, wasn't even expecting anything. He just saw the book and thought of me.

Apparently, I have a way of turning every decision I make into some kind of over-blown economic analysis.



Kasz216 on 23 January 2010
SamuelRSmith said:
Haha, I'm lucky - my mate bought it for me for Christmas, wasn't even expecting anything. He just saw the book and thought of me.

Apparently, I have a way of turning every decision I make into some kind of over-blown economic analysis.

Haha, nothing wrong with that.  Yeah, i've got to pick that up after I get through the Gladwell series of books.  Started with Outliers and working backwords.



SamuelRSmith on 23 January 2010

Hmm, never heard of the series, what are the books like? Is is just some sort of hard hitting fact-fact-fact, like Niall Ferguson's style writing, or a more jokey, colloquial style like the Freakonomics books?

I can only read the former if I agree with the opinion of the author... my nan got me some book on the collapse of globalism - that was a straight-lined book, and I kept throwing it around the room in anger where I didn't agree with the author :|.