Which would you rather have, power or money? How about both? The irresistible combination of using other people's money for their own purposes is one of the things that makes politicians so loathsome. But the flow of money goes not only from politicians to their favored cuts of pork, but there is a flow back to politicians personally, which is the money that is used to finance their campaigns. But it is the combination of politicians having the power to do stuff and the backflow of money to them that makes for the current unsatisfactory contretemps.

In the American system, campaign donations are subject to various limits. There's hard and there's soft money, there are limits on third-party groups campainging on behalf of candidates, and the perennial subject of campaign finance reform ebbs and flows with the political tide. Compared to most European countries, campaigns in American elections are relatively unencumbered by government oversight, and campaign finance is a largely private affair. In many European countries, however, there are much stricter limits on campaign contributions and political parties often receive subsidies from the taxpayer. This means that my tax euros are being used to fund political parties I disagree vehemently with. This, advocates say, is a fair price to pay for a clean political system, that does not suffer from the money-driven influence peddling that befalls America.

Superficially this may be so, but in practice there's still plenty of collusion between Big Money and politicians in Europe, all the more pernicious because it's seldom out in the open as in the US. There campaign contributions are made public and can be studied; indeed, they can become parts of the election campaign itself. The influence-buying process in Europe is done behind closed doors and illegally. The list of underhanded political contributions is long. Big business is not only close to the government, in many cases it is (partially) owned by the government and its top executives are appointed by the government. Those appointees are usually benevolent in their favors, once they have their hands on the corporate accounts.

In France, the collusion between various governments and presidents was of gigantic proportions. In Italy, a whole generation of politicians was swept away in the investigation of tangentopoli, the wide-ranging corruption investigation that got off the ground in the early 90's. Now the Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, is not in danger of being corrupted by big business; he is big business. A conflict of interest of this magnitude would never be allowed to stand in the US. In Germany, the Christian Democrat party was rocked by revelations that its long-time leader and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had been involved in receiving illegal donations for the party. The Social Democrats of the SPD had a more recent run-in with bribes being paid to local politicians in Northrhine Westphalia in return for public works contracts. By outlawing certain types of contributions, the effect has been to drive them underground, not to eliminate them.

The flow of money is efficient, a bit like traffic. Soon after a new route around a congested area is discovered, traffic will divert from the congested route to the new one, and balance itself out over the two routes. But the flow of money is even stronger. It gushes forth from the highest peak and flows downward. Occasionally new laws may impede the old, well-worn routes for it to flow to the politicians waiting at the bottom of the mountain, but the flow will adjust. It's still going to go down, because that's where political gravity takes it.

What we need is an anti-polticial-gravity device. The reason big money seeks to influence politicians is because their decisions can be hugely profitable for the donors, or spell disaster for those who sit out the money-slinging contest. Spending money on politicians is the behavior of an economically rational actor. Trying to outlaw economically rational behavior is bound to fail; one has to remove the underlying incentive for the money to flow in the first place. And again, that brings me to the point that policians and the state should far less power than they have now. Eliminate the politicians' ability to bring instant wealth or ruin on a business, and businesses will find better ways to spend their money.