"Money is speech" is doublespeak for sure, but it's doublespeak used by people opposed to Citizens United to make it seem like money is at issue rather than speech. Those people want you to believe that a political movie about a Presidential candidate stops being speech and becomes money just because of where the money to make and air it came from.

The ruling in Citizen United was that they had the right to buy ads and pay to have the movie televised. The law that the Supreme Court struck down banned corporations and unions from paying for candidate ads during the last 30 days of a campaign. The ruling found that 1) paying for TV time is equivalent to free speech and 2) a corporation is equivalent to a person for the purpose of the constitution's "We the People".

Right. Opponents of Citizens United would have us believe that banning the act of people (acting through a corporation or otherwise) paying to have a political movie aired is not suppression of speech. That's doublespeak--saying that speech is actually money even though the expenditure of money is wholly incidental to the act of political expression. By that reasoning the government can ban spending money to publish a book, or buying a bus ticket to attend a protest.

Don't forget that the billionaire may support a minority view that wouldn't be heard with campaign limits.

Democrats and Republicans are far more likely to be able to deal successfully with campaign contribution limits than small independents or third parties; both the major parties can make it up on volume, but a smaller voice... not a chance on those terms. Campaign limits is actually one way that the legal system entrenches monied interests in the political system rather than disconnecting them. This is why there is such a convergence in the governing outcomes of the two major political parties in the U.S.

The larger issue with money in politics isn't that people can spend money on speech: it's that often times that the access money buys is worth the price. Too much control by a government and there will be those that want to have their voices heard and can afford to do so.

> Money is access to popular mass communication channels.

But doesn't that basically equate to speech? Money = your power to reach people?

I'm curious because my beef with search engine advertising revolves around its ability to translate money into salience (which I consider to be a kind of "speech"), so I find your distinction interesting. I wish money didn't equate to speech, but it feels like that's the world we live in.

Money == the power to influence people who are ignorant enough to choose their presidential candidate based on a TV commercial, spam email a robocall, etc., which sadly is a large slice of American voters.

Joking or not, it does seem like a lot of criticism of Citizens United/money-in-politics really does boil down to "voters are morons who will be swayed by easily-purchased propaganda".

But once you're ready to accept that, you have to recognize the uphill battle there and the need for far more fundamental reform, like sortition (randomly select people who can seriously focus on the election and take time to think about it).

> voters are morons who will be swayed by easily purchased propaganda.

I don't think that's the sentiment Citizens United opposition boils down to. Instead, I think a more accurate sentiment is that easily purchased propaganda sets the tone and content of available political discourse, severely limiting what narratives and ideas reach the eyes, ears, and minds of the citizenry to only those which are best-funded. That people are then swayed to certain positions, especially when they are in opposition to people's own best interests but couched in manipulative terms that hide this fact, is not a product of people being morons, but of there being no viable alternatives in political discourse as a product of being silenced by lack of money to pose them before citizens. By allowing unlimited spending, the playing field for the hearts and minds of citizens is inherently unbalanced in the favor of moneyed interests.

Obviously, no one says voters are morons, they just don't recognize the implications of the assumptions that justify campaign finance law. Doesn't matter whether someone says it explicitly, or couches it in the language of being duped by "the general tone of the discussion". You're still saying that most people aren't qualified to rationally process ideas because of the biases that propaganda exploits.

And you'd be correct! But wealthy donors aren't the only ones who can propagandize. To truly guide policy from the implications of the above, you need far reaching reform, like sortition or (heaven forbid) a strongly restricted franchise.

> You're still saying that most people aren't qualified to rationally process ideas because of the biases that propaganda exploits.

No, actually, I think the one of the major points made by proponents of campaign finance laws is that wild imbalances in spending prevents less well-funded ideas from being heard at all, and that, while people may be perfectly well equipped to process ideas that they are exposed to, they can't process ideas that are completely drowned out of discussion.

You don't need to assume that voters are morons to justify campaign spending limits.

You do -- if people really are rationally processing ideas, then, so long as someone is exposed to good, not-socially-destructive ideas, they will propagate more successfully than those that aren't.

Again, that assumption has a lot of far reaching implications that aren't appreciated. In fairness, there's some wiggle room between ideal rational agent and moron, but not that allows money to turn bad ideas into ones accepted by people whom we consider qualified to vote. Or do we really consider them qualified?

> You do -- if people really are rationally processing ideas, then, so long as someone is exposed to good, not-socially-destructive ideas, they will propagate more successfully than those that aren't.

Actually, expending effort to propagate even subjectively good political ideas (that is, ideas that would benefit the person involved if they were widely held) is usually irrational for most people, because the expected marginal utility is low compared to the cost to spread them.

Its useful to the individual if other people spread the ideas, but its often a classic tragedy of the common situation.

Now, for wealthy people (or people with otherwise disproportionate media reach and impact), the utility cost of propagating useful ideas to those who might be receptive is lower compared to the benefit, so its more likely to be rational to do it. Further, with unconstrained spending, the spending of the rich bids up the market cost of reach for ideas, making it less rational for the less rich to expend resources propagating the ideas they favor.

You are invoking rationality, but doing so with an argument that ignores market conditions, opportunity costs, and relative payoffs.

(Also, rational agents -- by the definition of rationality -- don't act on the social consequences of options, but on their personal costs and benefits.)

>Its useful to the individual if other people spread the ideas, but its often a classic tragedy of the common situation.

Not at all -- tragedy-of-the-commons situations depend on freeloaders being able use that freeloading to further amplify their ability to freeload -- e.g. the guy that overgrazes the field produces more sheep than the restrainers, leading to further overgrazing (until collapse).

Under the assumption (again, with non-obvious implications) that voters intelligently reject bad ideas within the marketplace thereof, there is no such self-reinforcement -- they reject the bad ideas in favor of better ones. It would be like a magical commons that poisons any sheep whenever the blade of grass it eats is beyond its quota. Or, more realistically, like a commons whose polity has set up rules with punishments for those who defect from the solution to such a collective action problem.

>(Also, rational agents -- by the definition of rationality -- don't act on the social consequences of options, but on their personal costs and benefits.)

That's not the definition of rationality, but of rational agents with a particular set of preferences (i.e. of caring only about themselves). You can be rational and still care about starving kids in Africa.

But irrespective of semantic games, the relevant distinction for this issue is whether the voters are rational in the sense of identifying and rejecting bad ideas. To the extent you claim they meet this definition then (irrespective of how much altruism you want to insist is "rational"), the destructive propaganda of the wealthy would be stopped dead in its tracks by intelligent voters, rendering campaign finance moot -- but that obviously is not true, so it's hard to come up with a model that has it both ways.

(Of course, FWIW, the intelligent-but-dont-call-it-rational voter has to have some altruism in order to vote in the first place.)

You seem to continue to miss the points:

(1) There is no such thing as a "bad idea". There are ideas that have net negative utility for particular voters. But these same ideas may have net positive utility for other voters.

(2) Campaign spending doesn't have to get people for whom an idea is bad (net negative utility) to accept it to be useful to propagate, as long as it does either of the following (a) reach people to whom it is of net positive utility, who will adopt it and act on it politically, or drive up the price of the resources (media access, etc.) needed to spread competing ideas that are net negative utility to the actor deciding to spend resources on the current idea, so as to reduce the cost to that actor from the uptake of those harmful ideas.

Of course, with rationality (which, aside from personal utility maximization also includes perfect information about all alternatives including their costs and benefits), propagating ideas (political or otherwise) would be unnecessary, since every one would know and choose their best alternative without needing to be exposed to or propagate ideas. But if you weaken the assumptions of rationality only enough to make propagating ideas meaningful (that is, abandon knowledge of all alternatives, but still assume that once exposed to a proposed alternative people can perfectly weigh its utilities against all other alternatives they have been exposed to), then greater inequality in access to resources to propagate information still has a distorting effect without further assuming people ever make any errors in assessing the relative merits of ideas that they are exposed to, and there is still a role for campaign finance restrictions.

It is simply false to say that you need a model in which people cannot effectively process information they receive about policy alternatives to justify campaign finance limits: it can be justified while assuming people are perfect evaluators of alternatives they are exposed to.

You can't justify it if you assume people are perfect evaluators of their alternatives without a need to be exposed to them, but with that assumption there is literally never any utility to campaign spending (and, as it has a cost and no utility, no one would do it if they were perfect evaluators of their alternatives), so I think we can reject that assumption as being useful in any universe in which campaign spending (limited or not) actually occurs.

The bottom line is, you're trying to explain why big money is able to produce policies that go contrary to the wants of most voters without also assuming deficient reasoning on the part of those voters. You're trying to do that with a key claim that the bad-idea-money[1] is able to drown out the non-exploitative idea such that most voters never hear such an idea even once (else they would, on average, switch to it), even from hearing friends talk about it or other non-paid means.

That is a huge assumption that doesn't seem to match the world we live in. Your best attempt to justify it is with a claim that voters, while not morons, make a small amount of errors that is somehow enough to fail to appreciate the tidal wave of "let's not get exploited" advice they hear from friends, who would want to spread it like the dickens.

I don't see how that constitutes a reasonable model. At some point, you have to blame the voters themselves.

[1] And I'm going to assume you know here that I mean "bad idea" in the sense of "the purported idea that goes contrary to most voters but gets propped up by money" so as to save me the talk about "there are only bad ideas for particular voters".

Access to popular mass communication channels does not necessarily require money, provided the candidate does the bidding of those who own those channels, much of the coverage and positive message / "reporting" comes for free.

> Thousands and thousands of small donors to counterbalance 1 billionaire.

Exactly. Speech is definitely speech, and a billionaire can't really shout any louder than anyone else. But with money, their voice can be thousands of times louder. So is money speech?