Campaign Finance Reform is an effort in U.S. politics to regulate financial contributions to political campaigns. It is generally opposed on several grounds as a policy by libertarians who believe it restricts free speech, fails to perform its specified function of preventing political corruption, has adverse effects on elections and third parties, as well as sets a bad precedent for further regulation.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was proposed as a method to further reserve to Americans the right to freely express and publish their ideas, the most important of these being political ideas. The publication of these ideas and promotion of these agendas are most easily supported via financial contributions, the general argument following that regulating who can spend what and how much with regards to political matters is a limitation on freedom of speech of those who choose to promote a particular political agenda. Thus, the libertarian view is that private property owners who chose to use their own money to finance political causes should not be required to register their transactions with the general government or be limited in any way in the amount they may give at any one time.

Proponents of Campaign Finance Reform, usually politicians running on reform as a platform issue, insist that these regulations are necessary to produce positive changes in the political process.

Most libertarian stances argue that when government violates liberty principles, they will result in unintended consequences. In the case of Campaign Finance Reform, those most affected by the added regulations are private individuals, where the policies in place give special interest organizations and corporations special abilities to lobby large amounts of money. This has resulted in the complaint that Campaign Finance Reform has limited the influence of common supporters and enhanced the support granted to politicians from the news media, 527 groups, special interests and corporations. Likewise, since financial transactions involving cash are anonymous, full disclosure of sources is simply non-attainable. A further list of criticism revolving around negative side-effects include:

1. Politicians must spend more time raising finances and less time campaigning under strict campaign finance regulation, thus making campaigns in general shorter with less attention to the political issues.
2. Third parties and independent candidates rely on passionate support from a small group of people and thus have extremely hindered growth under strict campaign finance regulation.
3. Another criticism relies on the suggestion that strict campaign finance regulation helps incumbent candidates retain their offices, as incumbents already have the support of their existing office, name recognition, and lobbyist & special interest support. Additionally, the added limitations on running political advertisements critical of an incumbent are part of campaign finance reform measures, which can damage the effectiveness of a challenger's campaign.
4. Because of limitations on singular contributions to candidates, politics favors the independently wealthy and not the small-time candidate, thus establishing a bias against those who might change the political process or introduce new ideas.
5. Since finances to run campaigns are limited by strict campaign finance regulations, the authority of news media over campaigns is greatly increased. This lets dominant news organizations determine who is and is not a lead candidate with little public contention.

Political campaigns are a fundamental element of our political process. The less government regulates these campaigns, the more diverse and competitive the campaigns will become. While there is political corruption due to big money interests, and likely always will be, the libertarian view is that regulation makes it less likely that there will be any honest competition to the corrupt contributors. Libertarian policy, following from this, should emphasise free political speech, non-regulation of the campaign process, revoking special benefits political interest groups can get (such as tax-exempt status) to prevent them dominating the political process, and making campaigns easily accessible to a wider range of candidates.

This topic addresses legislative reform of the government policies regarding how it tracks, monitors and regulates finances of private citizens. Since this reform can be initiated as legislative policy without changes to major institutions it is classified as SECTION 1: "CORE MEASURES".