Donor Lists, and Comparing Apples To Pineapples

American Mercenary and I have been going back and forth in comments to two posts on his blog over the virtues and evils of campaign donor lists. Blog comments on Blogger are text limited, so there really wasn't time to go into all the details I would have liked the second time around. So I left this part of the back and forth for here, where there is more space.

To follow this, you'll need to see the prologues, or it will be coming out of nowhere to you.
If you want to see this from the start, go here and here. Then come back.
In the second half of the second post on the topic, AM writes:

I'd like to say at this point, "I rest my case." but I'm not done yet.

So if campaign finance laws aren't hurting the progressives, who are they hurting?

Let us take a step away from the 1st Amendment, which includes both the right to free speech and the right to assemble, and move to the 2nd Amendment.

If an informed public is justification enough to have a donors list, then isn't having an informed public justification enough to have a gun owners list? Think about it, if we just knew where all the guns were, clearly then we could track down criminals in mere fractions of the time it takes now!

Except that only punishes the law abiding, who fill the forms out, who will then be punished when someone who breaks the law with a gun draws the ire of law enforcement.

If gun registration does nothing to prevent crime, it is not a stretch of logic to say that donor registration does nothing to prevent corruption.

I am by very nature both anti crime and anti corruption. Having lists made of law abiding people, by their very nature of being law abiding, does NOTHING to combat crime or corruption.

History has shown that gun registration is a bad thing. So far with Eich and the IRS scandal we are starting to see a historical pattern where donor registration is turning out to be a bad thing.

How many more years of conservatives being hounded from their position in business, how many more years will people tolerate bureaucratic discrimination? 

An informed public is an empowered public. But only if the information is impartial and complete. And when only the law abiding play by the rules, the information will never be impartial or complete.

Why do you think that Democrats rail against Voter Identification Laws? Because it makes voter fraud harder. It is not in the best interest of the law breakers to make voter fraud harder. But Democrats will go on and on about "the fundamental freedom to vote being so sanctified that it must not be perverted by a card check."

Like I said, laws only affect the law abiding. War is politics by other means, and it would be a poor warrior who went to war on the enemies terms, and let the enemy change the rules of engagement to the enemies advantage. Yet somehow liberty minded individuals are supposed to let progressive communists dictate campaign financing?

1) First apples to pineapples comparison: There is no Constitutional right for everyone to run for office. Unlike there is for keeping and bearing arms.

2) You, as a private citizen have a right to privacy that covers your papers etc.
You, as someone running for public office, enjoy no such presumption of privacy.
Therefore trying to compare an informed public when selecting those who wield the levers of power, to an informed public sticking their noses into your house or gun safe are two HUGELY different things.There are only 545 people in the federal government who directly participate in a democracy. 536 of them are elected. 4 of them by each one of us, the voters. Asking who's bankrolling their campaign, as well as local campaigns, and ballot initiatives, doesn't hinder anyone's speech, but it sheds a tolerable amount of light on what used to take place in the stereotypical smoke-filled back rooms. 

3) "Knowing where all the guns are" is practically and epistemologically impossible thing, and a rather poorly expressed strawman to stand in for the gun controller's rationale (to the extent that braindead liberals can be said to think rationally). Trying to drag guns into this argument is a specious stretch requiring the flexibility of Elastigirl from Incredibles. The only point of similarity is that the First Amendment is right in front of the Second.

4) Donor registration isn't to "prevent corruption". No law "prevents" anything. Trying to pose the argument of anything thusly is intellectually dishonest, and opens the door to saying with the same tongue-in-cheek "logic" that since laws against murder don't prevent murder, we should eliminate those laws too.
Donor lists provide readily available evidence of corruption, while leaving the voters' common sense (or lack of it) to use that information to vote out the crooks or liars. Or not.
So the only "flaw" in making donor lists is that it leaves individuals free to take the action they think is appropriate, at their whim, rather than coercing that action. Hardly a flaw.

5) Brendan Eich is presented as the sole example of donor registration lists gone bad.
The IRS scandal has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with listing donors. (It has to do with the Sixteenth Amendment being a monumentally stupid-assed idea, pretty much since the get-go, and unto the end of time.)
To date, we've had about twenty federal elections since post-Watergate campaign donation rules were enacted (1974ff.), with 468.5 federal offices (give or take) up for election each time, plus state offices in the tens of thousands, times multiple candidates, times bazillions of listed donors, and thousands and thousands of state ballot initiatives, and yet Eich is essentially the sole exemplar of why reporting campaign donors is horrible.  This would be akin to getting rid of all ships because one rowboat sunk.
It also ignores the fact that Eich was forced out of a post on a corporate board because his views were offensive to the board he was picked to head, and potentially damaging to the business of that company. That's why he was deemed incompatible with the company's business, and shown the door - with an undoubted gold-plated severance package. So I'm not shedding tears for the man, or what happened. He is not the rallying cry to stop listing who gives what to whom.
This isn't a case of bureaucratic discrimination. It was just business.

6) The IRS was used as a weapon to discriminate against conservative groups.
That has crap-all to do with putting names on a donor list. How would you go about concealing the NRA's political bent from the IRS? Or any other group?
In the past, both Democrat and Republican administrations have used the IRS as a weapon, long before the existence of 1974 campaign donor laws. The problem is the IRS. Not campaign donor lists that didn't exist prior to the post-Watergate reforms enacted by Congress to prevent multi-million dollar dirty tricks squads, slush funds, and hush money all paid from that morass of unaccountable untraceable cash contributions.

7) Campaign financing isn't "dictated by progressive liberals". The Congress, both houses, was held by the GOP entirely, and with the White House too, for six years. They changed none of it. In fact, they made it worse.
Because campaign finance rules are dictated by incumbents, to make their offices a bastion against upstart challengers. And exactly as noted, the unconstitutional (though upheld by SCOTUS, exactly like Dred Scot, Kelo, or upholding Obamacare) McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reforms have made it about 98% unlikely that a challenger will unseat an incumbent, ever, any time.

Blindfolding voters about who gives to what campaign, whether for candidates or ballot propositions, won't accomplish that, or any other good thing.

Voting out McCain-Feingold, a completely separate issue, will.

Repealing the Sixteenth Amendment would unleash political and economic freedom like nobody would imagine, and hobble Leviathan to actually seeing to its business along Constitutional mandates.

Which is why a jihad against publishing the donors to campaigns is misguided, ineffective, and malicious.

By the way, under current federal rules, any contributions by anyone under $50 may be in cash and anonymous, which accounts for probably 90% of all political contributions going back to forever. So the law really only effects people that want to dump money into political campaigns. And frankly, as long as the identity and amounts were reported, I couldn't care less, generically, about who does that. As long as I can look up who's backing something or someone, the amount they give, IMHO, is constitutionally protected political free speech, and should be entirely unhindered. The farcical and intellectually vacuous opinions of some of SCOTUS notwithstanding.