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Many citizens seem to believe that Congress and state legislatures are corrupt; certainly both are held in low esteem.

The Supreme Court's 2010 decision in the Citizens United case left the feeling that campaign finance reform was dead and that political corruption had been given a green light. Recent publications have identified more precisely than ever before the nature of the political problems that bedevil representative government in the United States.

�����'s Center for the Economics of the Internet hosted a discussion on the costs of political corruption in America with Bruce Owen.

Bruce Owen is the Morris M. Doyle Professor in Public Policy in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Director of the Public Policy Program at Stanford University. He is also the Gordon Cain Senior Fellow in Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Analysis and Professor, by courtesy, of Economics. From 1981 to 2003, he was CEO of Economists Incorporated, a Washington DC economic consulting firm. Prior to co-founding Economists Incorporated, Mr. Owen was the Chief Economist of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and, earlier, of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy. He was also a faculty member in the Schools of Business and Law at Duke University, and before that at Stanford University. His research interests include mass media and telecommunications, regulation and antitrust, economic analysis of law, economic development and legal reform, and intellectual property rights. Owen is currently at work on a book about political corruption in America.