...you are willing to give up freedom of speech rights to try to control campaign spending.

Being able to support a candidate who you think would best represent your interests with financial campaign contributions to pay for advertising is not waste, it is an investment in your agenda, put forth before the public, for the public to decide if they agree with you when the voting public goes to the poles. If your candidate has no chance of winning, it usually doesn't have anything to do with huge sums of money, it usually means your candidate has an agenda that wouldn't get them elected even if all candidates were restricted to spending exactly the same amounts of money.

The only segment of our free market economy that is zero-sum (every time someone makes a dollar, someone else must lose that same dollar) that I'm aware of is the commodities market. Many people make money in advertising, the monies spent didn't vanish into thin air.

Bob