My latest column from TCS, on the FEC:

Why is it that campaign-finance-reform advocates and their accomplices in the media are able to recognize politicians as the petty criminals they are when it comes to mundane issues such as highway-bill pork and tax-loophole drawing, yet their heads implant themselves firmly in their rectums when it comes to the regulation of elections?

…

It’s as if they’ve read James Madison, but missed the irony. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

Madison’s point, in the first sentence, was to counteract the somewhat anarchic streak that had taken hold in American political thinking since the Declaration of Independence. In the second sentence, he acknowledged the danger of placing power in corruptible, human hands.

The reformers, however, seem to have read the second sentence and thought: “Yes! Angels! That’s the ticket!”

Yes, I’m fixated.