Thoughts from the Middle of Nowhere

I'm a little confused, a normal state it seems like. There is a bill in the Montana Legislature to public finance legislative races. The bill even talks about how the money is going to be raised for the idea. They would use $500,000 in State money to seed the project and then "fund the program with voluntary income tax checkoffs." All fine and dandy if you want to publicly finance campaigns. The next paragraph in the story is where my confusion starts.

Montana used the same checkoff method to help fund campaigns of governors and Supreme Court candidates, but the number of people contributing sank so low that the program was eliminated.

So, the citizens of Montana have a proven record of not voluntarily doing this via tax checkoff but we still want to try and do it again. This confuses me. Why is the person sponsoring this not showing a little wisdom and paying attention to what history has all ready shown to be a failed method of funding? Some people never learn I guess.

As for my opinion of publicly financed campaigns, I really don't have an opinion. At least this bill is voluntary. I don't like the idea of such a thing being mandatory. If it were mandatory it could violate a person's right to free speech. By being voluntary this is avoided. In the long run I don't support this since the voluntary funding idea will never work so then they will start using general tax funds to fund it. That I don't like.

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age. Albert Einstein