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Comment by 13thLetter | Hacker News Reader

"2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery."

Unfortunately it's not that simple. The immediate question at hand in Citizens United was about a group of private citizens being prevented from releasing a movie criticizing a Presidential candidate during an election. A movie costs money to produce and requires a large number of people to coordinate, inevitably shading over into a corporate legal structure... just like, say, a union, or a political party, or a newspaper. So how are you going to decide which corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech, whatever that means, and which aren't?

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That's a fair question, and not one that can be easily answered in am HN comment.

Personally, I would have had no problem with CU if it had remained the narrow decision that John Roberts originally wanted it to be. Clearly, if the First Amendment protects Michael Moore's right to make and show a politically charged film close to an election then it protects Citizens United's right to do the same thing.

The problem came when this narrow decision was extended to a broader one that included for-profit corporations and labor unions. (For-profit) corporations and labor unions are legally "persons" in that they can act as legal entities in their own right (no pun intended) independent of any individual human. And they ultimately consist of groups of humans. But they are not humans. They are human constructs. They are technology. And treating them as if they were humans, entitled to human rights, leads to problems.

So personally, I would advocate retract CU protections (and Hobby-lobby protections for that matter) from for-profit corporations.

I'd also re-instate the historical lower limits on direct contributions to political campaigns.

When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders. Therefore, in the case of corporate speech it's still a group of individuals talking. The only thing you could do is put an individual limit on spending, which is then translated into a limit on corporate speech by summing up the limits of the shareholders, with foreign shareholders contributing zero, and domestic ones seeing their limit divided over their shares.

> When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders.

No, it's the speech of the management. The shareholders only have indirect control. The only power they generally have is to replace board members. And sometimes they don't even have that. Google, for example, is completely controlled by Larry and Sergey. Facebook is completely controlled by Zuck.

Media are all corporations, and so is ycombinator.

If you want "truth" commissions, go right ahead with removing CU, but unless that, this was a great decision.

You don't try to make the distinction, you just regulate all political speech. During election time, you set aside fair slices of media time for every candidate, where they can make their case, and forbid all political speech outside of those times. Same thing with billboards, magazine ads, google ads, etc... The different candidates will police each other. Never going to happen in the US but definitely practically achievable as it is somewhat how elections work in belgium.

That just kicks the problem up one level: now you've got to figure out the distinction between political speech and non-political speech. I'm not familiar with how things work in Belgium, but in the United States Hollywood has released a large number of explicitly political movies in the past fifteen years, such as Lions for Lambs or Bowling for Columbine or Munich, and that doesn't even get into the political subtexts that are often present even in mass-market blockbusters. Would those be forbidden under this policy?

Assuming that you do come up with a plausible way of drawing a line here, you also need to have general trust that this power will not be abused. Given the heavy politicization of regulatory agencies in the United States, a large portion of the population is worried -- not without substantial justification -- that "is this speech opposed to the party in power" will be one of the factors used to draw that line.

Political speech is jot forbidden as a whole, just political speech that appears directly related to an ongoing election.

For example, right now, you should be allowed to make a movie about how Reagan sucked, but not one about how Hillary Clinton will suck if she gets elected.

So in your ideal world, Paul Krugman is banned from writing editorials? John Stewart can no longer discuss contemporary politics?

And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it?

> And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it?

Honestly, does it even matter? Everybody knows all politicians are liars. It's common knowledge; it's beyond being a trope and basically a synonym. But then somehow a large part of the population still cares about what politicians have to say. They know that the politician they oppose is full of shit, and yet they feel obliged to engage with said politician's arguments. And they support another politician, conveniently forgetting that... he is a politician too, so he won't make good on their promises.

Basically, everyone got the memo. Those who were to heed it have already done so.

This is something that confuses me about humanity. The amount of denial and cognitive dissonance going on in general population's interaction with politics is so great you could fuel a power plant with it.

>Honestly, does it even matter?

It matters because, if Trump says he wants to deport all Muslims, I should be able to say thats a terrible idea without fear of reproach.

Despite the fact that all politicians may be lairs (although I personally believe thats horseshit), there are people who take the word of them very seriously.

>The amount of denial and cognitive dissonance going on in general population's interaction with politics is so great you could fuel a power plant with it.

Bull fucking shit. Just because Obama didn't end up closing Guantanamo, doesn't mean its all a farce. Political groups have a real effect, or we wouldn't be talking about this. Were the people who fought for gay rights for the past 20-odd years, living in denial? Are those pushing for marijuana reform, living in denial? Are the lobbyist pumping billions of dollars into the system living in denial?

Despite the fact that the system moves a snails pace (which may or may not be the intended goal of the system), the system does have very real effects that are caused by the tiniest nudges in certain directions.

I understand that it's common for a politician to commit to some action during his campaign, and for it not to happen when he's later elected. To that extent, I agree that it's common for politicians to be liars.

But I tend to think that it's not so much that they were planning to con everyone all along, but rather that they tried to push their ideas and failed to convince the rest of the legislature to go along with it. Maybe it died out because nobody cared about it in that year's Congress, and then the politician gets busy with other things while another year passes until the next legislature.

I imagine it's the same mechanism at work in large companies: Haven't you ever had a new manager come on board, go gung-ho on changing a couple widely visible organizational thing and getting everyone's feedback, and then calm down a year or two later once they're busy with their work? I've probably seen that at least 5 times.

However, there's a key difference: In the above situation, I would expect a politician to keep to the same general platform even if he fails to perform some specific action. The simpler statement 'all politicians are liars' leaves open the possibility that he might completely change his platform and starts actively pushing for things that he never mentioned. I don't know that I actually believe that about all or most politicians.

You act as if the problem is solely because of the politicians. In a large democracy such as the United States, many people are unfortunately simple minded and politicians that regular espouse nuance and contemplation in their campaigns are rarely successful, so the people are really getting the sort of discourse they want.

I would decide that NO corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech. I am 100% comfortable with political discourse taking the form of (volunteer) blog posts, etc... rather than major motion pictures (even if "crowd" funded). Money is not speech. Speech is Speech!

A consistent point of view, but you'll have to apply it to newspapers, book publishers, and television too, just for starters. Money in politics is going to migrate towards any method of advertising that it isn't completely banned from.

I'm not convinced that content-based restrictions can be easily applied, either, even putting aside one's confidence in the regulators. To take the above example of a documentary attacking Reagan, it would be easy for it to have the subtext of "and don't vote for Mitt Romney this year, he's just like that Reagan jerk."

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