Would a Libertarian argue for full disclosure in political donations for transparency's sake or full privacy for the donor?

Question

I've read this 'primer' on at least one Libertarian's view on campaign finance.

One line under the heading "are there any campaign contributions or expenditures that should be illegal?" suggests full disclosure "But when a candidate fully discloses a donation and puts the money in a segregated fund that can be used only for constitutionally favored political expression, that is not corruption."

But doesn't a donor have some expectation of privacy as to how much and to whom they give their money?

Answer 1

While I don't have the "standard" answer that fits all libertarians, I must note that "full disclosure or full privacy" are not the ONLY two choices.

First off, let's examine WHY one would want full transparency or full privacy:

• Transparency benefit is obvious.

  Proponents of campaign finance (unrestricted) argue that the donations in and out of themselves are NOT a problem - only the corruption which arises out of those donations (quid-pro-quo). Full transparency enables the public to evaluate whether corruption takes place, by patten matching donations with entities benefiting from politician's actions.

  This is just an objective bipartisan fact, independent of libertarianism.

• Privacy benefit is obvious in light of what happened in 2008-2014, in the wake of Proposition 8 in California.

  Progressives actively and deliberately harmed many people who donated to that cause - drove them out of their jobs, and physically threatened some, merely for exercising their right to political speech (wonder which table ACLU was hiding under while that happened).

  Examples: Mozilla CEO pushed out of a job; Another high profile person forced from the job, Another high profile job lost. Moving on from just job losses, we have physical beating. Threats, boycotts, and shakedown extortion of a restaurant owner over $100 donation. Then we have "antigayblacklist" website create to out the donors. Michelle Malkin published a pretty large compilation with more examples.

So ideally, a libertarian solution would address the corruption issue in some way, while protecting the privacy of a donator from the public.

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Now, some possible choices:

1. Only allow fully anonymous giving, anonymous to everyone except Law Enforcement.

   All donations go into a lockbox.

   The candidate only knows the TOTAL in the lockbox. They don't know who gave, they don't know how much each donation was.

   Pros: This alleviates the corruption and quid-pro-quo concerns, because the politician has no way of knowing who to "thank" for their donations. At the same time it solves the privacy issue.

   Cons: Corruption is not 100% eliminated, just made harder. Someone spending $1,000,000 would have an easy way of communicating to the politician in private that it was their "anonymous" donation, and it's large enough that you can deduce it just from tracking the totals day to day.

2. A full transparency on the receiving side, and full reveal of relevant facts about the donor, while maintaining the donor's identity private.

   In other words, what is known publicly is: "Individual in carbon energy sector donated $5,000". Who the individual is, is NOT disclosed, and will not be unless there's a subpoena/warrant in a corruption investigation.

   Pros: this largely addresses the need for transparency visavi corruption concerns.

   Cons: This will NOT protect the privacy of UHNW individuals, since someone giving $1,000,000 and in aerospace industry would very very anonymously be Elon Musk (or may be 5 other people).

   Cons: it's hard to design a good set of attributes that need to be disclosed. Industry is a start but clearly not sufficient.

3. A separate answer by @Tyler offers purely-libertarian free market approach.

4. Of course, we are forgetting the main libertarian point: shrink the power of the government and its spending.

   If the government has significantly less money to throw around (and less decisions it is allowed to make that affect non-government entities), the reason for corruption AND high campaign spending goes away. So there's less pressing need to solve the campaign finance problem in the first place.

Answer 2

As a libertarian, I would argue that no one has the right to coerce either the donor or the politician to disclose their donations. They are not coercing anyone, so, by the NAP, they are fully within their right to go about their business unbothered.

To a principled libertarian, the above is all that matters. A libertarian focuses on rights, which are discerned through reason alone. The effects, as I will discuss below using a praxeological method of reasoning common among libertarians, are of no importance. To give an example: On a more popular topic, gay marriage, it matters none if the effect is, as some Christian conservatives may argue, to destroy society; it is still a right to do it, because it doesn't involve coercing others. The same is true of all actions that do not involve coercing others; it is anyone's right to be allowed to do them. That seems perverted, but if you read "Liberalism" by Mises you will see that liberty is the glue that holds society together and that the idea that any restriction of it can be helpful to society is a contradiction.

Now you say "but what about people buying off politicians"? And to that I respond: there's no incentive to buy off officials in a libertarian state. By definition, all the state does is prevent others from coercing. It is limited to only that and anything else is prohibited. So what can a bribe achieve?

Further, it seems to be within reason that, if it is important to voters, open campaign financing would arise simply from the competition of politicians. A politician can voluntarily agree to disclose a certain amount of donation information. This can be enforceable as a contract between them and each donor, for example. Then, if they lie and anyone finds out, any donor that chooses to could sue them. And this has the added benefit of allowing a sort of market to decide how much data should be revealed. If most people want more info, they won't vote for someone who doesn't disclose enough. (Sending a signal that more data should be public, for the sake of the voters.) If donors want less info exposed, they will donate to those who disclose less. (Sending a signal that less should be public, for the sake of the donors.)

Answer 3

An approach favored by this small-l libertarian would be to require politicians or supporters of initiatives to report how much money was given to them in aggregate, allowing politicians to detail the origins of as much or as little as they see fit, with the caveats that:

1. Politicians must make a good faith effort to be accurate in the information that they do report, and
2. If a candidate who refuses to divulge funding information cannot articulate a clear reason for such refusal, an opposing candidate may invite the public to draw negative inferences based upon that.

If some political group openly advocates attacks against anyone who supports a particular candidate or initiative, and the supporters cite such advocacy as the basis for refusal to divulge identifying information about their supporters, voters could then judge whether the thread constituted sufficient basis to justify secrecy. Blatant threats would thus be counterproductive, since they would if anything solidify in the public's mind the basis for keeping information confidential.