Published reviews will just make reviews political in new ways. As a graduate student, I helped my advisor review a paper submitted to Nature that was publishing a large biological data set. The internal metrics that the authors provided made it clear that the data was 95% noise. The review was direct and to the point. The paper was rightfully rejected, but ended up in another high profile journal after the authors removed the damning evidence. The corresponding author was one of the most famous and powerful people in a very large field. My advisor was still a relatively junior professor at the time, even if well known. I don't think publication of the review would have changed things for him, but for many others I have known, it might have.
I'd say this is actually a stronger argument for publishing reviews, as a persuasive argument might prevent venue shopping, potentially in multiple ways, depending on the when.
But outside of physics, there's many fields of science where double and even single blind is meaningless. If you get access to the review directly, you can tell by what they say and how they say it who they are. If you're a vindictive powerful person, who cares that you might be wrong?
Good point. However, the primary value of peer review is to reject bad papers. Does science benefit when authors can shuffle a rejected paper to another journal and tweak the results to hide the initial criticism? To me, the real value of reviews is making sure that bad studies never see the light of day (under the current system).
Personally, I am interested in seeing a model where all papers are submitted to a public archive and reviewed publicly (and optionally anonymously). The high profile journals would shift to providing value-added curation, formatting, and commentary.
