Well, OK, we don’t actually have a "quote of the day" feature, but if we did, this would be a good quote:
“Men often oppose a thing, merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.”
– Alexander Hamilton
We have remarked on several recent occasions that disclosure, though often a good thing, is not always a good thing, and like anything else, it is never without its costs as well as its benefits. We think about this today in terms of Hamilton’s warning. Hamilton, recall, was the lead author of the Federalist Papers, and in many quarters, he was deeply disliked. We try to imagine how much less fruitful might have been the debates between the Federalists and anti-Federalists but for the anonymity that most writers on both sides claimed.
Take any day of the week and peruse the comments on popular political blogs and fora, such as Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, or Free Republic. Ideas are routinely dismissed for no other reason than the identity of the speaker. It seems to us that the disclosurephilia of the so-called reform community in campaign finance contributes to this debasement of political discussion. The argument for disclosure is increasingly based less on the idea that it prevents corruption – probably because in most cases campaign contributions aren’t much corrupting anyway, so disclosing them won’t mean much – and more on the notion that the public simply needs to know who is behind a communication in order to evaluate the validity of the argument therein. But if all we need to know is identities, then we really don’t need to listen to one another at all, do we? Just don’t complain to me about the personal nature of the debate.
