Editor’s note: In response to the column by Blake Hasenmiller: Corporate politics: Company contributions would decrease with less government spending.

Mr. Hasenmiller wrote, “If the federal government is allowed to mandate what a corporation can and cannot do with its money, whose money is it, really? The corporation’s or the government’s?”

Whose money, indeed.

Without campaign finance laws, or disclosure laws, then we will never know where the money came from. Just as we are seeing with the bailout of big banks right now, where did the money go? Who knows. The corporations know what they are doing so we should all rest easy. Republicans spent us right out of a surplus into a huge deficit, so their strategies must be sound.

Republicans want to make this decision one that flies in the face of “big government” and gives power back to “business.” The problem is that the Republican facade is always based on the fact that those who are doing the extolling of righteousness are never the ones who stand to be harmed by the implosion. Or they have spent too much time trolling in stiff economic theory, believing the world orients itself to perfectly constructed frameworks. The same way these hard nosed economists believed that an inflatable bubble would never cease to exist. Forgetting simple physics maxims in light of Gaussian economic theory.

Elections are bought and sold right now. Both parties are corporations. Money is speech. Those who argue this are going to drastically change the way politics are run in this country and are ignorant of the current status. Those that say it will offer more freedom and fairness are simply ignorant.

Hasenmiller continued, “By reducing government spending and providing checks and regulations on what the government can use its money for, we can make vote-buying a less profitable venture in the first place. Campaign finance laws aren’t the way to do it.”

Why not tort reform? Tax cuts? Other simple platitudes for the quick fix solution? If Republicans had all of these answers and failed to act upon them for the six years they held the majority, what do we call that? Fiscal sloth-ness? More government isn’t the silver bullet.

There isn’t one, nuances abound, money talks and in most cases, it talks for those who have it and disregards those who don’t.

Adam Kenworthy is a senior in English at Iowa State University