Most campaign finance reforms, including the euphemistically named “Clean Elections” proposal, revolve around some aspect of government funding. Some people are irresistibly drawn to government as the solution to any and all problems–this despite the fact that government almost never does anything well and almost always makes anything it touches worse–the election system included. In fact, the current clamor for federal election changes is to reform the “reforms” instituted after Watergate. The latter brought into the electoral process much more government regulations and intrusion. Now almost everyone acknowledges those “reforms” are a failure.

Any public campaign financing scheme must be understood as yet another would-be drain on the taxpayer. Government has no money of its own; it can give money to politicians running for office only after it expropriates money from someone else, namely the taxpayer. More importantly, public campaign funding violates the right of franchise. If franchise means anything, it means the right to support those with whom one agrees and to oppose those with whom one disagrees. To be compelled, through the coercive power of the tax system, to fund somebody whose views one finds an anathema is a corruption of the right of franchise at the root. As a matter of principle, therefore, public financing of campaigns fails and should be rejected.

The compromise to franchise is too high a price to pay, even if one could postulate some election efficiencies coming from public financing. (One can envision a crime-free society, if we construct a police state severe enough. But the loss of freedom has too high a price- tag.) The reality however, is that no such efficiencies exist. In fact, there have been elements of public financing of campaigns for some time. Yet no one sees any improvement in the political process or better people getting elected. Why then should there be the belief that more public financing will produce better results, when some public financing has produced bad results? The usual refrain when a government program isn’t working is to expand it–invariably making the situation worse.

It is true that incumbents are disproportionately re-elected, because they have certain advantages. They get the mailing list; they find out about their constituents; they know how to mail the birthday cards and condolences. At the federal level they have a franking privilege (free postage). They have staff in the State House, or the Capitol (who are supposed to stay out of campaigns but that’s mythology. If the candidate is not re-elected these people are out of a job, so the line blurs very easily.). Incumbents send out newsletters; they get to interact with the constituency; then there’s all that pork they get to distribute and claim credit for; they get to be on the news because they can propose bills or say something that will make them newsworthy. All these things the new challengers don’t have, and all these things continue to build name recognition and identity, ultimately translating into votes.

Incumbents also have an intimidation factor. Since they are likely to get re-elected, would-be contributors are afraid to give money to challengers. After all, contributor names and amounts are recorded and these become tantamount to an enemies list for incumbent politicians. Government has such an extensive reach today that everyone rightly fears political retaliation.

But the solution is not to restrict campaign financing. Most of the advantages of incumbents are not monetary as such. In fact the only hope a challenger may have is to spend money to overcome these advantages. The more one restricts financing, the more it benefits the incumbents. Consider an extreme case: Suppose candidates could only spend $5 for a race. Who would win? The incumbents, of course, because of all the above-mentioned advantages they already have. It would be impossible to mount a challenge. The more one restricts campaign expenditures, the more incumbents are assured re-election. If both candidates are limited to the same amount, the incumbent becomes the odds-on favorite.

There’s another problem: In a state like Massachusetts, for example, which has many more Democrats than Republicans, it stands to reason that the Republican is going to have to spend more to try to influence those voters. In other words, he’s already an underdog. To mandate that campaign spending be the same for both parties is to pretend that both of them start even on the track. But they don’t. In any given race, the Democrat is going to be favored. So how do we take that into account?

Clearly, money is needed. The only questions are where’s the money going to come from? Who’s going to have it, and who’s going to spend it? The Supreme Court has said you cannot limit somebody spending money on his own behalf. That means that there’s already a predisposition in favor of very wealthy people who can spend their own money. I know of none of these proposed reform schemes that will effectively change that.

The only policy change that may help is term limits, which, at the very least, will truncate the amount of time these politicians will be in office. It will also change somewhat the mix of people who aspire to high office in the first place, because it will preclude empire building. The Ted Kennedys of the world are an insult to the principles that this country was founded on–the citizen politician, somebody who would leave his farm and serve some time in public service and then go back to his farm. Now, I realize that Ted Kennedy already had his farm handed to him and going back to the farm for him would mean going out to pasture, but that’s not our problem. Our problem is that Ted Kennedy-types become institutionalized in the Senate, and that is not good for the process or the republic.

My reform would be: I’ll take my chances the way it was. Let people get money from whom they want, and if you think that seats are going to be for sale to the highest solicitor, well that’s exactly the complaint I hear now. We should go back to a system without the regulations, restrictions, or reporting requirements. In the days before there was so-called campaign reform, the government had its share of corruption, but it was no worse than now. Certainly the government then was less intrusive, less oppressive, and less expensive than now; and does anyone really believe that politicians today are any better than their counterparts of earlier times? I suspect not. The system would probably work better, and we would have better people in office. Combine that with term limits so that whoever gets in is there for a limited period of time. Then the amount of damage he can do will also be limited, and we can get on with it. Thomas Jefferson was right when he said that government that governs least governs best.

Avi Nelson is a political commentator who has worked in radio and television in Massachusetts since 1973. He is a regular panelist on the “Five on Five” show on WCVB-TV in Boston, where he is also an on-air political analyst. He ran for Congress in the Republican primary in 1972 and again in 1978 for the U.S. Senate.