Lawrence Lessig spoke at Google this week on his and Joe Trippi’s Change Congress organization. In particular, he made a convincing pitch for the Strike 4 Change initiative, which asks people to make a pledge:

“I’m pledging not to donate to any federal candidate unless they support legislation making congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded.”

Many of my politically smartest friends believe that campaign finance changes are essential to making government work. I’ve never been in that camp – I’m very skeptical that anything can remove the influence of money on government, at any level – but I’m coming around to the belief that we need to try to plug holes in the system and hope to make progress while the “moneyed interests” are figuring out how to route around the new rules. A few observations seem to have tipped the scales for me:

• Regulatory and legislative capture by established, often declining, industries appear to me to often be the biggest roadblocks to progress, even within those industries. (Think: cars, music, finance, or health care for starters.)
• The common and brazen movement between government officials and lobbying firms is a form of institutionalized corruption.
• The amount of time elected officials need to spend raising money for their next races is shocking and necessarily distorts everything else they do.

Lessig makes these points, and more, very effectively.

For the last several years, I’ve been giving money to a lot of campaigns, almost always Democrats challenging Republicans or contesting open seats. I feel good about this (even though an economist would probably find the utility of these contributions as low as the utility of voting). At first I was negative on the idea of the donor strike, because I feel it’s one side giving up a possible powerful edge unilaterally. What I came to realize, while listening to Lessig, is that this acts as a useful filter – I don’t want to give money to someone who’s wants the status quo in politics to continue; there are certainly plenty of possible candidates to give money to and this gives me a way to nudge on this important issue.

Let’s hope Lessig’s optimism about being able to pass the Durbin-Specter bill is justified; my cynical fear is a filibuster that “supporters” of the bill don’t try too hard to override.

I suspect the Google talk will be available online soon, but it doesn’t appear to be yet. This talk appears to be similar: