HSIEH: The Best Congress Money Can Buy?

The root of all evil is the love of money...

Last year, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart released audio of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton soliciting money from a lobbyist. She expressed "surprise" that the lobbyist hadn't donated to her campaign yet and bluntly reminded him that she was chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over his "sector."

But regardless of whether it's a legislator engaging in a near-shakedown of a lobbyist or a lobbyist attempting a near-bribe of a legislator, the root of the problem is the same. Government has vast regulatory powers over Americans' economic transactions. Hence, those who are affected will have a correspondingly large incentive to sway government laws in their favor.

And yet, money is the symptom, not the disease...

Many liberals correctly recognize that the current system is corrupt, but they wrongly place the blame on "money in politics." They've attempted to fix the problem through ever-stricter campaign finance laws limiting how money can be spent for (or against) political candidates or causes. But this approach is doomed to fail. Every time one legal avenue of political spending is closed, lobbyists and legislators find other ways to channel money into political campaigns. "Money in politics" is not the fundamental problem. Rather, it's merely a symptom of a deeper problem caused by politicians' control over the economic marketplace.

Is there a solution?

Instead of limiting "money in politics," we must limit the scope of government. Ayn Rand once advocated "a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church."

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