Professor Bainbridge looks at the very real possibility that campaign finance laws will be extended to cover the Internet:

Federal Elections Commission Chairman Brad Smith . . . believes the FEC may well be forced by judicial decisions in cases brought by McCain and Feingold to regulate a vast swath of internet activity, including blogs!

The C|Net story is here.

It is time to resurrect an article I wrote for Reason in 2000, in which I concluded that the loopholes in the campaign finance laws are the only good parts of a demented system. I can claim some prescience with the following comment:

What many "reformers" really fear is not the power of money but the power of ideas, especially ideas skeptical of government. The true agenda is to suppress these; the corrupting influence of money is simply a convenient rationale.

Exhibit A for this conclusion is the reformers' attitude toward the Internet, which is becoming the newest "loophole." Instead of rejoicing that the new medium reduces the costs of communication and thus creates great opportunities to cut the tie between money and political speech, the FEC has tried to use the fact that it costs some money as a jurisdictional hook to limit it.