For the first time since federal funding for presidential candidates was made available in 1976, it looks like no one’s going to take it. Senator Clinton, for one, has announced she will opt out at the national level. Senator McCain, himself the sponsor of a central law restricting campaign speech, is making an about-face and signaling that he will say no thanks to federal funds as well. With these two fundraising forces launching campaigns with no spending caps, any serious candidate will have to forgo federal funding as well — along with its prerequisite spending caps. All signs point to an unprecedented billion-dollar presidential election.

And to that we say, God bless America. For 30 years, the socialists and their fellow travelers have been trying to foist off on this noble republic the idea that it would be corrupting if people with money spent it on politics. They won the passage of laws that were breath-taking in their denial of liberty. They got the courts to okay some limits on campaign contributions and spending, though they were able to do so only by the most bizarre distortions of the ideas of the First Amendment and separated powers. But somehow, the American people have behaved in a way that has exposed the whole regime as a fraud, and the system of taxpayers financing of campaigns is on the rocks.

This is thanks in part to one remaining shred of the First Amendment that required that candidates be given the choice to opt out of public funds and the spending caps that go with them. This is exactly what candidates for the 2008 election are doing. Because the federal hand-out to presidential candidates under the 1976 law depends on voters marking their tax returns to allocate $3 to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, taxpayers get to vote every April 15 on whether they think it’s a good idea to shell out their hard-earned dollars to fund campaigns they may not agree with. The result has been extremely encouraging — almost no one is interested. It turns out that a scant 10% of taxpayers check the little box.

We have a theory as to why this is so. It’s because American voters are nothing if not smart. They know to whom they want their political contributions to go and are disinclined to have that decision delegated to government stooges. It’s something to think about. Every taxpayer has had a chance to check this box. It’s right there prominently on the tax form. Yet almost no one except the editors of the New York Times, the directors of Channel 13, and the members of the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has checked the box. The vast majority of American taxpayers just don’t want anything to do with the idea of public funding of campaigns. No doubt they fear, among other things, that some of their tax money will go to politicians they don’t want to underwrite.

The notion that public funding of elections keeps overall spending down strikes us as a detriment to democracy. What public financing does is hand out millions of taxpayer dollars to some politicians who are capable of raising money on their own and to others who are incapable of it. It’s hard to tell which is worse. Like any socialist measure, campaign finance “reform” creates more problems than it solves, making a regulatory maze out of what should be a level playing field. With spending caps on presidential candidates effectively gone, pundits are fretting about a “billion-dollar election” as if that’s too much money to spend to sort out who will be the best leader of the free world. By our lights, it would be better if twice — or thrice — that were spent.

Yet this is a time to be wary. The danger is that what a recent New York Times headline called the “death knell” for public funding may become a call to arms for those who would socialize free speech. The Democrat-controlled Congress is wasting no time according to the Times. It is working on a proposal that would drastically increase the amount of public money offered to candidates in the 2012 election. Closer to home, Governor Spitzer has proposed “full public financing” of state elections in New York. We’re all for fighting corruption and cleaning up government. But public financing of political campaigns has been a failure, and will be a failure in the future. This is the lesson from the last 30 years during which so-called reformers have been curbing our First Amendment rights.