Public financing

Arizona -- along with Maine, New Mexico, North Carolina and Wisconsin -- has a law that diverts public money to the campaigns of certain political candidates, without giving taxpayers any say about whose campaigns they help finance.

Actually, the Grand Canyon State does better than that. Once an approved candidate has agreed to accept such "public financing" and to foreswear all private donations (the kind that come from willing donors), the state will even reward said candidate if one of his opponents raises "too much" private money, by giving the government-favored candidate even more tax money, in order to "level the playing field."

This is ballyhooed as "an antidote to the corrupting influence of money in politics," on the theory that private money freely given is "corrupting," whereas money seized from the unwilling and distributed by those in political power can have no effects that are not pure and good.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard an appeal to the Arizona law,.

The court's conservative-leaning justices, who have issued a string of decisions throwing out public campaign finance schemes over the past five years, appeared skeptical of the Arizona law, holding that "leveling the playing field for all candidates" can run afoul of the First Amendment right to "speak" in favor of political ideas by voluntarily backing them with money.

A decision in this case should come by summer. Here's hoping the court cuts off the taxpayer subsidies to the anointed elite.

While voters who enacted the Arizona law may have meant well, it's hard to imagine a more dangerous form of "corruption" than allowing the government to set provisions for whose campaigns get funded, and then to hand more money to the government's chosen candidates whenever those who are funded "merely" by voluntary donors threaten to outspend the anointed ones.