This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 4th, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

Is public financing a presidential campaigns relevant to participatory politics?

Do we forego a diversity of candidate opinions in pursuing arbitrary contribution limits?

John Samples, is director of the Center for Representative

Government at the Cato Institute. He says that public financing wastes money

typically serving candidates that have already demonstrated that they're not

exactly in it to win it.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton told Tim Russert

I meet the press recently,

the real answer here is public financing, and I'm going to work very hard in my time in the

Senate and then in the White House to try to get a public financing system that we can support

under the Constitution, because as you know, we've got some constitutional issues we have to

address because that is the answer to all of these issues that have arisen.

What is you referring to when she says constitutional issues with public financing?

Well public financing has had persistent constitutional issues but in fact I

think most of the constitutional issues that the court has dealt with over the years have dealt with

non other kinds of restrictions on political speech through campaign finance

regulation. The Supreme Court for for better or for worse, and probably for worse, has

decided that the basic mechanisms of campaign finance regulation where taxpayers finance the campaigns are constitutional.

You can, for example, it's illegal and unconstitutional to force people to put spending

limits on them, to force them to spend only so much

money but if you give them public financing you can cause them to or make them abide

...