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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs.

I'm confused. Presumably, these would be substitute goods. That is, suppose someone is spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs right now. Then, an alternate means of political influence arises, say, the money vote. It may, in fact, be plausible that they might even want to increase their total spending, but the nature of substitute goods would imply to me that they would even then spend something more like (made up numbers) 70 units on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs; 60 on the money vote. It seems unlikely that they'd continue spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs... and another 30 on the money vote.

One of the things I actually sort of like about the scheme is that it would be a substitute way of channeling money. Probably one that I'm even a bit more comfortable with than the traditional ways folks use money to buy political influence. We might even get some data about relative values of things, which could help with election design in the future.

Most of the rest of your comment seems almost entirely inapplicable, as it completely ignores the two main features of the proposal - the limited strength of the money vote in comparison to the traditional election, and the strong secrecy. I kinda feel like your response is just sort of irrelevant if it doesn't consider those features.