[EL] "Our Corrupt Politics: It's Not Only Money"

[Lowenstein, Daniel]

       Money is a medium of exchange, a convenient means of obtaining or distributing resources without having to engage in barter.  Any enterprise that consumes resources, including an election campaign, is dependent on money.  Mr. Wechsler observes that he can plug "money" and "members of congress" into Lessig's definition of dependency and will find that the definition is entirely applicable.  He will obtain the same result if he plugs in "money" and "American universities"; "money" and "the United States government"; "food" and "Robert Wechsler"; "reading materials" and "scholarship"; "journalism" and "interviewing"; or "money" and "City Ethics, Inc."

        In short, the deployment of multisyllabic words like "institutional" and "dependency" does not in itself make a substantive point.

             Best,

             Daniel H. Lowenstein
             Director, Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions (CLAFI)
             UCLA Law School
             405 Hilgard
             Los Angeles, California 90095-1476
             310-825-5148


________________________________
From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Robert Wechsler [catbird at pipeline.com]
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2012 10:39 AM
To: Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: [EL] "Our Corrupt Politics: It's Not Only Money"

In his review of Lawrence Lessig's Republic Lost in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Ezra Klein ignored what I think is Lessig's most important contributions to the literature on campaign finance and lobbying:  his focus on institutional corruption and, more specifically, on the national political system's "dependency" on money. That's dependency as in addiction. For those of you who haven't read the book yet, trying plugging money and members of congress into Lessig's definition of "dependency":

[A] dependency develops over time; it sets a pattern of interaction that builds upon itself; it develops a resistance to breaking that pattern; it feeds a need that some find easier to resist than others; satisfying that need creates its own reward; that reward makes giving up the dependency difficult; for some, it makes it impossible.

Klein's principal criticism of Lessig's book involves Lessig's focus on money in politics, and yet he never mentions how Lessig presents the problem of money in politics. That's neither fair nor informative.

For more, see my review of Lessig's book<http://www.cityethics.org/content/lessig-effects-elected-officials-dependency-problem> in a November City Ethics blog post.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research
City Ethics, Inc.
rwechsler at cityethics.org<mailto:rwechsler at cityethics.org>