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Lessig on Corruption and the Right

I saw Larry Lessig deliver this presentation yesterday and thought it was pretty interesting:

The intent is to try to sell small government types on Lessig’s campaign finance reform agenda. Since I’m not personally a small government type, it’s just not directed at me, so I don’t know how to decide whether it’s persuasive or not. But I will offer this remark.

I mentioned yesterday that the Chilean center-right is coming back into power for the first time since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. I know extremely little about Chilean politics and nothing about Chilean campaign finance. But my guess is that when power shifts from center-left to center-right, what we’ll see is that public policy will become more attentive to what business executives, priests, and military officers want and less attentive to what union leaders, environmentalists, and feminists want. That’s more or less what happens when conservative coalitions come to power.

And though Lessig tries to set it up as a kind of paradox that the Age of Reagan has led not to small government, but to government more controlled by business interests. But is that really a paradox at all? What else would you expect?

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