but they don't do anything about it. I say they shouldn't.
As predicable as the press complaining about the large number of themselves at the Super Bowl and the Boston writers over rating the next great Red Sox prospect, the political coverage of the last week or so is centered on the number of negative election ads.
Please stop!
This is not a rant about any of the parties involved. My rant is in favor of these commercials. Hey, everyone is complaining about the state of the economy. Did you ever stop to think that the obscene amount of money spent on these ads is serving a number of purposes? First of all it allows the politicians to spend their own and donors money which is a pretty cool way of spreading the wealth. They are, after all, making transactions to get these ads run. On the other hand it allows those who have more spend more, which again, create transactions that spur the economy.
My old Communistic Sociology teacher used to describe Capitalism as simply as the 'Economics of Beer', others call it 'Trickle Down'. Without getting into all aspects of the details his premise, which I'm betting he used for his doctoral thesis, was that Capitalistic (be it Market or Keynesian) spending helps to spur the sale of beer. Basically with additional capital available to producers, more construction is needed to fulfill capacity, which leads to the hiring of construction workers. Construction workers like to drink beer. When construction workers are paid they will spend money on beer, among other things. The purchase of beer needs to take place at a local store owned by a proprietor (in his case personally or state owned). Because there is greater demand for beer, the proprietor will order more from the distributor, who gets his take and passes the orders to increase demand to the brewer; and so the cycle continues.
In the case of elections that process takes place in a different arena but with similar results. The problem comes with election day. After that the process just suddenly ends and there is no major national election for another two years. Like Archie Bunker's solution to end hijacking by giving everyone on the plane a gun, I say let's have a national election referendum on something every six months. That way the money will keep flowing to those sign makers, videographers, political consultants, television stations and bartenders who profit from the election cycle. Of course we may need to take a break for the more important voting issues in this country; you know, things like American Idol.
