Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It

The demand for fund-raising plus the supply of safe seats meant American politics could afford to become more polarized, as a means (or at least a by-product) of making fund-raising easier.

Where the harm is almost certain, Congress does nothing. Where the harm is at best contested, Congress races to the rescue.

We need to ask whether there is a feasible or reasonable way to win back the confidence that the presence of money takes away. Are there procedures that would remove the doubt of the reasonable person?

Between 1974 and 2008 “the average amount it took to run for reelection to the House went from $56,000 to more than $1.3 million.”3 In 1974 the total spent by all candidates for Congress (both House and Senate) was $77 million. By 1982 that number was $343 million—a 450 percent increase in eight years.4 By 2010 it was $1.8 billion—a 525 percent inc

“Cognitive capture is a better description of this phenomenon than crony capitalism.”53

the question that I mean these data to raise is simply this: Not: Did these contributions buy the silliness we see? Instead: Do these contributions affect your ability to believe that this policy is something other than silliness?

Highly organized special interests leverage their power to transfer wealth from consumers to farmers.

If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves in this way, to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption, and the employ

Negative externalities impose costs on others. Positive externalities create benefits for others, even if, as with competition, they make some people worse off.