Does money talk?

There are a lot of barriers to implementing publicly funded elections, the most daunting of which is the Supreme Court. In 1975, the Court ruled that limiting the amount anyone can legally give to a political campaign is in violation of the First Amendment. By equating money with speech, the Buckley vs. Valeo case set a precedent that would need to be overturned before federal elections can be funded publicly. Here are some of the arguments that were made at the time the decision was made.

[W]e are talking about speech, money is speech, and speech is money, whether it be buying television or radio time or newspaper advertising, or even buying pencils and paper and microphones. That’s the—that’s certainly clear, isn’t it?

-Justice Potter Stewart

It is...too crabbed a notion of the political process to restrain people from demonstrating the intensity of their convictions on particular ideas. Indeed, it is hard to see how a democratic nation can have a stable government if it does not permit intensity of feelings as well as numbers of adherents to be reflected in the political process....Campaign contributions represent a means by which intensity can be shown...

-anonymous Buckley plaintiff

A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today's mass society requires the expenditure of money. The distribution of the humblest handbill or leaflet entails printing, paper, and circulation costs. Speeches and rallies generally necessitate hiring a hall and publicizing the event. The electorate's increasing dependence on television, radio, and other mass media for news and information has made these expensive modes of communication indispensable instruments of effective political speech.

-Supreme Court opinion, Buckley vs. Valeo

These are three different ideas and they really should be tackled separately. But for now, I'll just say that they are all misleading in the same way. They claim to be defending an observable fact -- that money is at the essence of political communication -- but they are actually obscuring a deeper truth by simultaneously protecting and building up a regulatory system that reflects their logic.

The "money is speech, and speech is money," line, for example, just glosses over the truth. Money doesn't have an inherent meaning. Theoretically, if you give me a buck I can do whatever I want with it.

It only has the potential for meaning. A bribe, for example, or a charitable donation is meant for something. It's given with an expectation that it will be manifested in some other area. In most cases though, money means whatever its owner wants it to. It's nothing by itself.

For money to talk, it has to have a system -- a vocabulary to speak with. In this case, the system is political fundraising. When a lobbyist buddies up to a senator and hands her a bundle of checks totaling $25,000, that money is talking. In the Buckley vs. Valeo case, the Court restricted the possibility of making a new vocabulary for politics. They saw that money was talking and said, look, "money is speech."

They neglected the fact that speech needs a vocabulary to have meaning, and that the current vocabulary of money in politics actually restricts and discourages other kinds of speech. Not the least of which is actual speech; people caring enough to talk about politics and participate in the democratic process.

If we want to protect the freedom of speech we need to start by making sure the vocabulary we use allows everyone to participate freely. The fact of the matter is that in the current vocabulary, unless we are extremely rich, our ideas (real, intellectual, ideological thoughts) don't rise above the din.