Especially from corporations with billions of dollars to burn on it and a clear profit incentive. I mean, who do we think should run government, the people? We the people? Pssh.
For years I've heard this, and I think I've reached the limit of my credulity with the line of reasoning that goes something like this: "X has billions of dollars! Billions of dollars! They will control politics as we know it!"
Lots of entities have billions of dollars. People who sell peanut butter have billions of dollars. Billions of dollars spent every day trying to get me to do something or another -- buy soap, change deodorants, purchase a new car, go to the mall. Very little of it has any impact. We're a society that is extremely used to outsiders using all sorts of clever tactics to try to get us to do things.
So unless these corporations have "special" billions of dollars that somehow magically control my mind, they are welcome to bring their message to the political discussion. In fact, everybody who wants to speak are welcome. Bring them on. All I require is that you disclose to me who you are and what you're trying to sell. Welcome to the party.
Not trying to pick a fight. I actually held the opposite view and have been slowly changing my mind over the last ten years or so.
Well, here's the deal - corporations are obligated, by statute, to protect profits at the expense of all else, including moral behavior or the good of the country.
And that's fine. I'm not some dreadlocked hippie who wants to burn the corporations to the ground as I'm consuming things that are produced by them. I recognize their value. That's great.
They are not, however, good citizens. They're obligated, by statute, to be bad citizens if that's more profitable to them.
If someone I disagree with wants to influence the process based on a set of principled beliefs, well fine, I'll fight them to the extent I can but I'll certainly respect them. However, corporations aren't people - if they were people, they'd be psychotic, amoral people who only lived to sell peanut butter or whatever. They don't deserve to have more of a say in the process than I do.
You make a very persuasive case -- much more than I would make if I tried to argue the other side of this.
I'm left with the conclusion, however, that I'm free to associate with other people and pool money to run political ads. Whether or not I do that as a corporation shouldn't factor into it.
Let's assume five of us play poker every Tuesday night and we're all plumbers. A new candidate is running for office that wants to license plumbers, which we're against. So we pool our poker earnings and start running some radio spots calling his mother a fat alcoholic. So far pretty standard political fare.
But if we were a corporation of plumbers, suddenly the rules change.
Or another example. Let's say I'm General Motors and I don't like Candidate X. So I just tell MSNBC to run negative stories about him right up until election day. No harm no foul. But if I'm Ford? (which doesn't own a cable news network) I'm crap out of luck.
There's just too many self-contradictions here. The basic theory says that I'm fine pooling my money with others to speak out. Whether or not that is done with a corporation or not doesn't seem to come into it. Yes, corporations are single-minded. But so are PACs. So are all political organizations. In fact, the entire purpose of a political organization is to be single-minded about something or another.
So I like what you're saying, but it doesn't carry the argument with me at the end of the day.
You hit on the exact point that I left out and was wishing I had covered -- I have no problem with individuals, or politically organized groups of individuals, mobilizing politically even if they have more money than me, and regardless of where that money came from.
That applies to PACs, too, as long as they aren't blatant fronts for corporate interests, which we have a bunch of today anyways.
I suppose my real issue is that if you can't motivate individuals to give money/time out of their own pockets, you don't deserve to be part of the political process. If we remove all restraints on the ability of corporations to influence the process, it rapidly becomes something that they can't afford not to do -- then we get someplace where corporations "just doing business" have 10X the impact of individuals who are genuinely motivated by their principles or even their selfish interests. The damage from that scenario isn't really quantifiable -- either you get what I'm saying, or you don't. I'd consider it another major leap on our trajectory, as a nation, towards idiocracy.
This thread, plus the thread on the recent SC decision removing restrictions on corporate political spending, has caused me to change my mind. In that other thread I made a comment that was negative re the decision.
After reading that other thread and its related articles, and this thread, I've moved closer to the position that massively financed corporate political speech has its problems, but limiting that speech opens a new and just as problematic can of worms.
So, thanks HN. I'm still confused, but I feel better about it.
Wasn't there a chapter in Freakonomics about how, contrary to the popular perception, the amount of money spent on a candidate's campaign has very little impact on the outcome of the election?
Well, I'm sure you could put together a graph that supported that point, but every single full-time politician who gets elected to a living seems to disagree with them, based on the amount of time they spend fundraising.
The health insurance industry spent 750 million dollars this year lobbying against healthcare reform. That pretty much guaranteed that the bill we wound up with would be a piece of garbage.
