Barney Frank: “not surprisingly in this political city the debate over campaign finance reform has taken the shape of people talking…”

“not surprisingly in this political city the debate over campaign finance reform has taken the shape of people talking about which party would be advantaged, but there is a more profound issue, more profound even than the kind of subtle corruption that campaign money takes. It goes to the nature of democracy. We have two systems in this country. We have an economic system, capitalism, which is based on inequality. It is inequality which drives that system which has been so productive of wealth and which is so broadly supported. If people are not unequally rewarded for their labor, if people are not unequally rewarded for the wisdom of their investment decisions, if people are not unequally rewarded because they respond to consumer demand, capitalism does not work. So inequality, some of us want to keep it from getting excessive, but it is at the heart of that system. We also have a political system, and the heart of that political system is equality. That was the genius of the American Constitution, not fully realized at the time, a goal that we have been striving towards with some success ever since. What we have in our public policy is a tension between an economic system built on inequality where people are unequally rewarded and unequally powerful and a political system in which people are supposed to be equal, in which people's preferences are supposed to count each equally one for one.”