Suppose you own a large successful business which makes money by telling customers things they want to hear - reassuring stories, comforting platitudes and advice and guidance about how to live their lives. Suppose also that, for tax reasons, you are not allowed to use your influence over your customers to push them towards voting for one particular candidate over another, and you're also not allowed to donate any of the company's profits to political parties or candidates.<\/p>\n
However, you'd still prefer to have one candidate elected over another because your preferred candidate might lower your taxes or give you more freedom to run your business the way you want to run it, or maybe just because he's a good customer. How could you covertly support that candidate?<\/p>\n
One thing you could do is a pick a couple of social<\/a> issues<\/a> which aren't fundamentally a big deal to you one way or another but which differentiate your preferred candidate from their opposition and which the opposition is unlikely to change their minds on (perhaps because they are objectively correct in their position). Then you can use your platform to tell your audience that your preferred position on said social issues is vitally important, and deciding the wrong way on them will lead the country to ruin. You don't even need to mention the names of the political candidates or the upcoming election to your audience at all - they can figure out themselves what they need to do.<\/p>\n For this reason I think we need to avoid making \"tax deductions for political neutrality\" deals - it's too easy for the organizations in question to be covertly politically non-neutral and the tricks they use cause pressure to move candidates away from objectively correct positions in this kind of issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Suppose you own a large successful business which makes money by telling customers things they want to hear - reassuring stories, comforting platitudes and advice and guidance about how to live their lives. Suppose also that, for tax reasons, you are not allowed to use your influence over your customers to push them towards voting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1463,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions\/1463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}