Getting money out of politics is not the answer

People keep decrying the existence of 'money' in politics.  They argue that if we can find a way to keep 'money' out we will be governed better.  This is balderdash.  So long as the state is powerful and can enrich or impoverish with the flick of a pen, then it is rational to do everything in one's power to get control of the state.  Indeed, for the rich and powerful, it is improvident for them not to do so.  This was the lesson of the late Roman Republic.  One that we seem hell bent on relearning.  

Many unions have election day off written into their contracts.  Senior citizens idleness is massively subsidized - giving them hugely disproportionate electoral clout.  Public employees and their fellow travelers, the Lawyers have far and away the largest per capita interest in the political process.  The amount of extra electoral clout these groups deploy probably exceeds by tenfold the value of all campaign giving and lobbying expenditures combined.

The key is to do what the founders set up the constitution to do (and we have so foolishly dismantled).  Make ambition check ambition. In my humble opinion, one of the greatest disasters of the 'progressive' era was the shift to popularly elected Senators.  Before that, Senators were creatures of the States who jealously guarded their prerogatives against a centralizing Federal government.   This led to a real and broad market for good governance.  Once the Senators became, as it were, their 'own' men, winning elections by direct appeal to the people, their loyalty to their state and Federalism collapsed - their easiest path to glory became Federalization.  So we now have a continental scale government Monopoly (the states now being effectively provinces - for the Federals pay the Piper and therefore call the tune), one that (in the short run) has no need to to fund itself via taxes.  

So, with no effective check by the people on its spending and promises and no competing government offering better governance, it has behaved like all monopolists do.  And I fear the only thing that will change this is a collapse in Federal credit.  Once the Feds can no longer print money, they will have to meekly come to the people, represented by their states to renegotiate our badly degraded constitutional settlement.

The result will be less 'progressive'.