Visiting Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission David Mason wrote this article for the latest edition of The Federalist Society’s Engage.
In an era of broad-based Internet fundraising, public financing begins to look like a cure in search of a disease. Even worse, the super-subsidies required to compete with Internet enabled fundraising off er powerful inducements to the fraud and corruption that campaign finance laws are purportedly intended to prevent. A campaign finance scheme enabling corruption is not a cure worse than the disease: it is a contagion masquerading as a cure.