In the common media wisdom, super PACs are a result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. This is said to have created a “loophole” that the super PACs have exploited to evade campaign-finance restrictions on the money that candidates can raise on their own.

The real loophole is the U.S. Constitution. The High Court merely restored the right of corporations and unions to exercise their First Amendment right to political speech, which includes the right to assemble to support candidates with money. Congress had illegally restricted that right with McCain-Feingold, which was the latest attempt to do the impossible and banish money from politics.

This is the history of the campaign-finance movement going back to Watergate and before that to the progressive era. Congress passes some limit on campaign fund-raising or spending, but the candidates and their supporters find a way around the law, often after the courts strike down one provision or another. Then the reformers say we need new laws to plug the holes their old laws failed to plug. Some people have wasted their lives playing this unconstitutional game of whack-a-mole.

The super PACs were inevitable as long as the politicians reacted to Citizens United by maintaining strict limits on donations to individual candidates. Under current law, a donor can give $2,500 for a primary and another $2,500 for the general election per candidate.

The charade is that these PACs must be formally independent of candidates, even if everyone knows the candidates they are backing. The Restore Our Future super PAC has spent well north of $1 million in Iowa pounding Newt Gingrich on behalf of Mitt Romney. Yet when Mr. Gingrich faulted the ads, Mr. Romney was obliged to do a Sergeant Schultz of “Hogan’s Heroes” act and claim he knew nothing about it—though Restore Our Future is run by former Romney aides who don’t need to be told how they can help Mr. Romney.

Thus have the campaign-finance scolds also reduced political accountability. The candidates can deny responsibility for any attack ads while their super PAC allies savage their opponents. When candidates have to take responsibility for their advertising, they are likely to be more careful about the rhetoric and facts.

To his credit, Mr. Romney got to the heart of the matter when he told MSNBC that “We really ought to let campaigns raise the money they need and just get rid of these super PACs.” If candidates could raise unlimited funds the way they once could, super PACs wouldn’t be needed.

We also might get more and better candidates who are currently put off by the burden of raising money in $2,500 increments or less. To raise $10 million at $2,500 a pop requires 4,000 donors, if everyone gives the maximum. Assuming an improbable success rate of one donation for every two calls, that’s 8,000 phone calls. Then multiply that by three because it’s assumed that a competitive primary run requires upwards of $30 million or more. That’s a lot of phone calls.

President Obama’s campaign has boasted that it will have as much as $1 billion to spend this campaign year, and you can bet his super PACs will come out swinging at the GOP nominee as soon as that choice is clear. The Republican nominee had better have more than one super PAC spending on his behalf as early as March if he doesn’t want to suffer the fate of Bob Dole in 1996 when Bill Clinton bludgeoned him unfairly on Medicare.

In our raucous, media-saturated democracy, candidates need to raise such sums to inform voters and break through mainstream media distortions. The campaign-finance obsessives want the corporations that run the New York Times, the Washington Post and NBC to be able to spend whatever they want to influence campaigns via their reporting and commentary, but they want to deny that same right to others. The next time you hear someone denounce super PACs, remember they are denouncing what their own misguided reforms made necessary.