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On Jan 22, 1:53 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:

Thanks. Were you a civics teacher? g It's called a propaganda machine;
the
ideas pressed with the most money win.

--
Ed Huntress

No, but I took civics, did you? g You just have no faith in the
public.

I have faith in the public. I also have faith in the power of propaganda. It
used to pay my bills.

Like investment banking, it's something that has to be regulated and
controlled, or they'll run all over you. Advertising is a positive and
useful force that, left on its own, will transmogrify into a cancer.


So you think that Obama should have accepted campaign limits? You
think that Obama won because he raised the most money? So you are
against the free market place of ideas? So you want censorship?

That's quite a string of non-sequiturs, Dan. d8-)

Yes, I think the candidates in 2008 should have stuck to campaign limits.
Obama harnessed a new way of accumulating money that sounded like it was all
sweetness and light -- tens of millions in the form of little contributions
gathered through the Internet -- but it's still a hammer that beats down
fair debate, no matter where the money comes from.

Whether he won because of the money is questionable. Anecdotes are not very
useful for analysis. It's the difference between a correlation coefficient
of 0.7 and a coefficient of 1.0. It doesn't work all the time. It just works
*enough* of the time that advertisers spend a couple of hundred billion
dollars per year on it.

The free marketplace of ideas and advertising, in the real world, have
little to do with each other.

Censorship is controlling what can be said. Campaign limits are for avoiding
having our representative democracy become a plutocracy.

Advertising works. It's an important element of the golden rule: The one
with the gold, rules.

--
Ed Huntress