The New York Times and the Washington Post both devote considerable news resources today to lamenting the death of the public financing of campaigns. Ed Morrissey explains why we shouldn’t join them:

The end of this fund is nothing to mourn. While the presidential campaign funding was a less egregious form of contribution control — after all, the candidates could opt out, as they are now — it still did little towards its presumed goal of eliminating corruption. Candidates who opted into the system still raised money and worked with power brokers to get it. In the end, it only worked as a cap on spending, hardly worth the overlooked problem of forcing taxpayers to fund candidates with whom they disagreed. And let’s also not forget the rather objectionable idea of putting the federal government in charge of determining which candidates are acceptable to run it.

Although I agree with Morrissey’s analysis, taxpayers are not technically forced to fund candidates they oppose. According to the NYT:

The system is financed by taxpayers who check a box on their returns to allocate $3 to an election fund, with about 33 million people a year in recent years directing a total of about $400 million to each quadrennial presidential election.
But the fund has faced chronic shortfalls as the percentage of taxpayers contributing has declined to less than 10 percent last year from over 30 percent in the 1970s.

This just highlights another problem with the system: When given the choice, taxpayers would rather donate to the candidate of their choice than to a fund that finances both. Big surprise.

UPDATE: Radley Balko: “Wanna Reduce Corruption? Shrink the Government.”