This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 17th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown. Critics of the Citizens United decision are regrouping to restrict and reform political speech.

Among them, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig and New York Senator Charles Schumer.

John Samples, Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government,

and author of the fallacy of campaign finance reform, evaluates the complaints and the efforts

at reform.

This is what Lawrence Lissic writes in the nation.

If money really doesn't affect results in Washington, then what could possibly explain

the fundamental policy failures relative to every comparable

democracy across the world whether liberal or conservative of our

government over the past decades. The choice made by Democrats and Republicans

alike to leave unchecked a huge and crucially

vulnerable segment of our economy which threw the economy over a cliff when it

tanked as independent analysts again and again predicted it would, or the choice to leave unchecked the

spread of greenhouse gases or to leave unregulated the exploding use of

antibiotics and our food supply producing deadly strains of E. coli coli or the inability of the 20 years of small

government Republican presidents in the past 29 to reduce the size of

government at all. He's talking here about the fact that money clearly impacts

outcomes in Washington. In this case he's citing negatives of how money has impacted policy decisions in

Washington otherwise I presume he means that these policy decisions would

have been made quite a bit better.

Yeah the only thing when he leaves out that strikes me is 9-11 itself, which a lot of people said,

...