Reinvestment in United States infrastructure is desperately needed. Millions of water pipes carry lead contamination and fracking residue to citizens. Thirty-million homes in the US have gas leaks, damaged plumbing, and/or poor heat. One-fifth of those have lead paint. Roads and bridges deteriorate, trains run slowly off their tracks, planes crash. Unemployment and poverty rates are inversely correlated.

Simultaneously, debt is cheap around the world. Interest rates are at all-time lows, asset valuations are similarly at near all-time highs, and debt is cheap for those who can afford it. Untapped funds are available to any investor who could demonstrate future returns.

The most practical choice for the USA is clear: Deregulate campaign finance.

Political campaigns function by utilizing public resources: roads for door-knocking campaigns, airwaves for media buys, and the time of elected officials. These all have been sorely lacking in public investment for decades and have suffered for lack of funds. Through campaigns, private capital has been engaging in a successful public-private partnership, unreservedly demonstrating its willingness to fund public life, and it should be plain that increasing the supply of political spending will have trickle-down effects on the rest of the economy. The supply-side of this economic market also deserves most of our focus since supply-side economics have been proven through their resiliency to all opposing research.

A cursory examination of this market reveals onerous government regulation of free-market enterprise on the supply-side. The supply is still large, despite current legal constraints. Uncontested lower-house seats can spend over fifteen-million dollars, upper-house seats pull into the hundred-million dollar range easily, and even failed presidential primary campaigns can be as expensive as a billion dollars.

Corporations have no limits to their political spend on individual issues as that would otherwise abridge their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. Despite this, individuals still have limits on their donations per campaign cycle, set in the low-thousands of dollars. This is blatant regulatory overreach and economically short-sighted. Not only should one contest the authority for the US Federal Government to regulate speech in this manner, these laws amount to a waste of spending on private legal counsel that would otherwise be available for further political stimulus. Obviously, the freedom on group spending should be extended to individuals to fully unleash the power of the market.

Furthermore, using a flat cap on donations instead of a progressive rate restricts the speech of the wealthiest Americans. Those who have found success in private life deserve to shape our public life. This is an unconstitutional muffle on the deserving. Why should a banker on Wall Street be limited like a rural farmer in their spending power? Should we not hear their voices more clearly than the poor? Are the successful and blessed to be considered as rational and worthy as the impoverished? This tyranny of the majority, oppressing the wealthy class at society’s own literal expense, wealth forcibly bound in financial instruments rather than political candidates, is reprehensible and un-American.

We should strive in political campaigns to have an open debate of the most important issues. Taking the brakes off of this train can drive economic activity in media, law, consulting, accounting, punditry, and shadow banking that could not be replicated on such scale with similar investment in other industries. A world where we gag the rich from free expression, lest they make more noise than the rural farmer, is not a world where free enterprise and capitalist competition can survive.

Finally, this should also satisfy those who clamor for campaign finance restrictions. When there is enough money in politics, there will be no money in politics. The marginal value of each dollar spent on politics would be so low that nobody would spend money on elections. This is the reason nobody in New York City owns a car: the traffic is terrible, and parking is expensive.