Interest groups are infamous for soliciting special government favors, but favoritism is often supply driven, with politicians extracting payment from interest groups in exchange for protection from onerous regulations or special taxes. Campaign-finance reforms that ignore this reality are unlikely to achieve their objective.

Fred S. McChesney (1948–2017) was the de la Cruz-Mentschikoff Endowed Chair in Law and Economics at the University of Miami.
Campaign FinanceContemporary PoliticsEconomyGovernment and PoliticsLaw and LibertyPolitical HistoryPolitical TheoryPublic Choice
Other Independent Review articles by Fred S. McChesney
Spring 1999 Of Stranded Costs and Stranded Hopes