At 07:43 PM 12/17/95 PST, you wrote:

On December 17th you wrote:

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To: cypherpunks@toad.com From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com> Subject: Political Cleanup program

Politics is traditionally corrupt, it appears, because donors to politicians and political campaigns expect a quid pro quo for their donations. Various unsatisfactory solutions include campaign spending limits, etc.

It occurs to me that it would be a major advance if a system could be set up that would "blind" campaign donations as to their source: The donor could be satisfied that his donation gets to the candidate or cause, but the candidate couldn't know who actually paid the money (and the donor would be unable to prove that he made a donation, for example). Admittedly there are a lot of details that need to be worked out, but if this could be accomplished it would change politics as we know it.

If you'll give it some more thought, Jim, you'll see that it has a loophole in it you could drive a semi through. There is no way to keep a donor from passing the word to the recipient. No matter how you work out the details, it's impossible to keep the information from passing. It could never work.

It is absolutely true that you couldn't stop a person from communicating claims of a donation to a politician. But what you COULD do is to ensure that the donor couldn't PROVE that he made such a donation. In other words, _I_ could claim that I gave $1K to Senator Sludgepump (a lie) and the good senator would have no idea that I wasn't telling the truth. The people who REALLY made such donations would be helpless.

Consider a more radical, and possibly workable, solution to the thorny issue of campaign finance. If we go back to the root of the problem, it seems clear that it is the high cost of a campaign. If a typical campaign were to cost a tenth or a twentieth of what it presently costs, we'd have gone a long way towards ameliorating the situation. How to do it? Simply ban all paid political spot ads - TV, radio, newspaper - all of them. Write it so that there's damned little wiggle room - a candidate can use lawn signs, but not billboards. They can use personal appearances, but not commercials. They can spend all the gas money they want running around their state or district, but not a dime for media spots.

Well, I have an even better and cheaper solution to the problem of government and politics. At an average of $20,000 per Congressman, we could clean up Washington for $10 million dollars.