The seven members of the Huntington Beach City Council will make a choice tonight between tentatively facing reality or keeping the scales firmly adhered to their eyes. Or in plain English, whether to approve an extremely modest increase in the campaign contribution limit to $500 or leave it at the absurdly low $300. The proposal is being pushed by HB Councilman Don Hansen, whom I've gotten to know as a sensible, clear-thinking man.

As readers of this blog know, I believe campaign contributions ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history. They're a restraint on our free speech and totally fail in their objective of cleaning up politics.

Not that that dissuades adherents of campaign contributions limits from opposing efforts to increase of abolish such limits. They venerate the ideology of campaign donation limits they way primitives worship a volcano, and with less justification.

This paragraph from the OC Register article encapsulates the argument, such as it is, against raising contribution limits:

The proposal has divided council members. Keith Bohr and Debbie Cook voted against considering the issue at the last meeting. Both said there should be less, not more, money in politics.

And I think it should be summer all year round, but passing an ordinance to that effect will be almost as effective of getting money out of politics.

If reformers want money of politics, then they need to remove government from money.  As long as government officials possess the legislative and regulatory power to advantage some individuals and businesses at the expense of their competitors, or to negatively affect a businesses ability to stay in business, there will be money in politics.

And unless the U.S. Supreme Court renders the 1st Amendment as dead as the 10th Amendment, money will always find a way into politics.

Our experience with campaign contribution limits is grand testimony to their futility. For 30 years, reformers have chased their tails trying to devise ever more complex rules for "getting money out of politics." On the federal level, it has led to a frightening assault on free speech in the form of McCain-Feingold.

But that is the internal logic of campaign reform -- enact restriction after restriction in pursuit of a Utopian ideal of the Perfectly Clean Campaign, and like most utopias, the harder devotees fight for it, the more like a nightmare it becomes. In this case, campaigns become less free in the name of "cleaning" them up.

My only criticism of Councilman Hansen's proposal is it it too timid -- the limit ought to be abolished, or at least increased ten-fold, but perhaps this is as far as he can get his colleagues to go. Limits -- especially a draconian $300 favors incumbents above all. It's hard to put a price on the value of having "Councilmember" as your ballot title, and a non-incumbent needs to raise a lot of money to overcome an incumbent's advantages in name ID, ballot title and fund-raising. In fact, it's much harder for a non-incumbent to raise money under a low-dollar limit regime than it is for an incumbent.

That much is obvious to any campaign watcher. Not that such a common sense analysis ever made it into the OC Register article, which focused its energy on perusing Councilman Hansen's campaign reports -- because any suggestion of loosening restrictions on political activity must stem from grubby, tainted motives. Next time, the reporters might try asking the two incumbents who favor the strict limits to comment on how they insulate incumbents like themselves from challengers.