If more proof were needed that New York City’s public campaign financing system deserves to be scrapped, it has come this week with the attempt by the council speaker, Gifford Miller, to manipulate the rules ahead of his planned run to unseat Mayor Bloomberg. Mr. Miller, with the help of a pliable Campaign Finance Board, is trying to make sure that every dollar he raises for his 2005 mayoral campaign is matched by $8 taken forcibly from taxpayers and deposited directly into his campaign coffers. This would be an increase from the current four-to-one matching scheme. There’s a reason that politicians are not supposed to regulate the manner of their own elections. It is because they will act like Mr. Miller, unscrupulously and self-interestedly, twisting the rules to suit the interests of whoever is in power.

In this case, Mr. Miller and his 47-member Democratic majority in the City Council — that’s a veto-proof majority, by the way — are looking to do everything they can to take back the mayor’s office from the billionaire Mr. Bloomberg. Facing a Bloomberg blitz that could outdo the $75 million he spent in 2001, the Democrats have come up with a two-pronged campaign-finance gambit to slow the mayor down. The first part, mentioned above, is doubling the amount the taxpayers kick in every time someone donates to a mayoral candidate. This, in a suspicious coincidence, only kicks in when an ordinary candidate, such as Mr. Miller, faces off against a wealthy, self-financed candidate, such as Mr. Bloomberg.

The other prong of the attack is to create a “limited participation”option in the public campaign-finance system. This may not sound like much of a hindrance, but it almost certainly will be used to harass Mr. Bloomberg in the 2005 campaign. Since Mr. Bloomberg does the taxpayers the favor of not asking them to finance his campaigns, he is unhindered by the spending limits that come along with accepting public money. Now, however, Mr. Miller and Co. are being so gracious as to offer the mayor the “option” of tying one hand behind his back by accepting spending limits without getting a cent of extra money in return. It is virtually certain that Mr. Bloomberg would turn down such a magnanimous offer, but watch for Democrats to carp that he is making a mockery of the public financing system by refusing to play fair.

But public financing — and campaign-finance regulations in general — has not the first thing to do with playing fair. The entire racket is about protecting incumbents. “Politicians in New York have a tough time of it,” New York historian Fred Siegel told The New York Sun, mockingly, yesterday. “They get to run virtually without opposition and on the public dime as well.” Not one City Council incumbent lost his or her bid for re-election in this year’s races, and the taxpayers shelled out almost $5 million for this. As Mr. Siegel has told the Sun previously, “Public funding has turned into a welfare system for politicians…In the context of a one-party system, this is a subsidy to incumbents.”In particular, it is a subsidy to Democratic incumbents. In 2001, when there was a full slate of citywide races, including the race for mayor, New Yorkers shelled out $42 million for the public financing system. About $40 million of that went to Democrats and about $2 million went to Republicans.

As our campaign-finance system degenerates further into parody, the same is happening at the federal level. Currently, about 12% of Americans check the box on their federal tax returns to give $3 — at no additional cost to themselves, mind you — to the public financing program for presidential candidates. This system, however, has not provided enough cash to entice President Bush or Democratic challengers Howard Dean and John Kerry to rely on the public pot. Meanwhile, restrictions on citizens’ First Amendment rights to associate, in the form of a ban on soft money, is leading to the virtual dissolution of the national Democratic Party. As an illuminating article by Jeanne Cummings in the December 2 Wall Street Journal detailed, the party is being supplanted this time around by a loose coalition of interest groups (organized as so-called “527s”) held together informally by something by the name of “America Votes.”

Our politics, at the city and national levels, have not become cleaner and they have not become more transparent. Money will always be a part of politics and is just another way of saying “speech” in the first place. Instead, reforms have only made our politics more complex and opaque. The folly of the campaign-finance reformers becomes more apparent with every new law and every new method that is found to route around the new laws. But the regulators and the public financers have only one answer: more, more, more. The city needs to open its eyes and close its purse.

A network of politicians and consultants and family and family friends is getting fat off the taxpayers’ dollars, and the only ones benefiting are Democratic City Council members, chief among them Mr. Miller. If Mr. Miller wants a shot at the mayoralty, he could spend less time scheming to raid the taxpayers’ purse and trick Mr. Bloomberg into forfeiting his constitutional rights and more time making the city a more livable place by cutting the size of the city’s government and the city’s share of our paychecks.