When You Care Just Enough to Send the Very Least

So you'd like to swing with the big boys, snagging the ear of politicians with your prodigious campaign contributions. Except that you don't have a few spare Gs to throw around… or maybe you're not quite interested enough to spare them on politics. Enter PayDemocracy, which uses the Internet to, in effect, facilitate the formation of ad-hoc PACs. Just find a position statement that matches your own concerns (or create one, if you can't find it), and the site will aggregate tiny contributions from, well, as many people as are interested enough to make one.

It's just getting off the ground, but I dig the concept. One of the classic public-choice problems is the whole concentrated benefits/diffuse costs issue. Transaction cost obstacles to political organization are much higher for taxpayers losing a few bucks each for some massive subsidy than they are for the relatively small group that makes up the subsidized. Projects like PayDemocracy hold out at least the potential to shift the political balance of power by changing the relative transaction costs.