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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it interesting that despite a lot of Sander's voters being against the outcome of Citizens United that his very presence as a viable candidate at this point is in a way a demonstration of the point the Supreme Court made in their majority opinion?

I.e. here we have a guy who's not taking donations from big corporations, but is just as visible as Hillary who is. Money's speech apparently, and either lots from a few big donors or small amounts from lots of small donors counts.

Regardless of what happens with this election I think what's happening so far is indicative of a major change. If things keep going in this direction the 2024 election is going to be very interesting indeed.

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Thousands and thousands of small donors to counterbalance 1 billionaire. That doesn't seem like a one-man-one-vote style democracy.

Also, money is not speech, that's like some kind of 1984 doublespeak. Money is access to popular mass communication channels. Access to popular mass communication channels is not speech and is not addressed in the constitution. Scalia's "originalism" was such a scam.

> 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".

"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.

> 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?

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.

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.

Beyond that, according to the FEC, he's been the biggest recipient of PAC spending.

His stance is that it's okay because he isn't fund-raising for those PACs, and that they are union PACs, not business. I personally don't see a distinction between unions and corporations.

Full disclosure, I think that Citizens United was decided correctly.

Here it says Bernie has received virtually no PAC spending, https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate.php?id=N0000052...

This article cites the FEC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/us/politics/bernie-sanders...

In one sense, it's hard to track the dollars directly. For example, an Anti-Hillary PAC at this point is effectively a pro-Bernie PAC.

Oh, I see it now. It's in OpenSecret's "Total Spent by All Outside Organizations Targeting Sanders". $1,881,017 spent on Bernie, mostly from the nurses.

On Hillary's page it says outside money spent $2,921,391 for Hillary and $4,413,617 against. So NYTime's reporting is probably out of date since it was before the Iowa vote.

Spending is a bad metric this early anyway since most PACs are just starting to ramp up their spending. Looking at spending + warchests, the Nurses have a couple million to play with while Bush, Clinton, Rubio, etc have 10s of millions. https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?chrt=V&...

Possibly. Not sure which is more out of date; the numbers from the FEC didn't jive with OpenSecrets the day the article was published either.

It's just as easy to believe that OpenSecrets has a reporting delay as it is to believe that the FEC is using some legacy software that doesn't update quickly.

Maybe you guys are both correct? In that PACs aren't donating to the campaign, but are advertising on the candidates behalf. Anyway you can get the raw data at:

http://www.fec.gov/data/IndependentExpenditure.do?format=htm...

Not all PACs are Super-PACs.

>> I personally don't see a distinction between unions and corporations.

The only workers' rights you have were gained by unions in spite of corporate opposition

If money really is speech, than can speech only be free to the extent that we don't have income inequality?

Edit: Honest question. Financing campaigns is a difficult and complicated question.

You are presuming that free speech must be equal speech. I see no reason that must be the case. We can have free, but unequal access to amplify our voices even without the influence of money. But that doesn't strike me as inherently wrong. I'd would argue free speech is about preventing coerced limitations on speech and only that.

So if the richest family in the world spends a trillion dollars to convince the majority that Climate Change doesn't exist, and in 50 years the world can no longer sustain life, that's not wrong? Because that's EXACTLY what's happening with the Koch brothers.

What if the world's most convincing liar goes around convincing everyone that climate change doesn't exist, and in 50 years the world can no longer sustain life? Does that mean free speech is wrong?

I don't think political spending should be considered an exercise of 1st amendment rights, but this argument doesn't make any sense.

One convincing liar can be countered by one person with hard data and equally good at persuasion who follows him around.

One super-rich person requires another equally-as-rich person or enough poorer people to band together against said super-rich person. Said super-rich person also, at least in the case of the Koch Brothers, also has a vested interest in the topic at hand, whereas the equally-as-rich person or even the poorer people might not be as interested.

Democracy is about equal opportunity though, and equal voice -- putting money behind speech is like government controlling the media --it's simply wrong, and it's what Hitler did.

Technically I think the news should still have fair-play laws where they were required to give equal time to someone with an opposing view everytime they did an op-ed. I think the news should be more open and accessible--I think when it comes to president ads shouldn't even be allowed, it should ALL be based on debates and nothing else. Because politics shouldn't be manipulated by people with more money than another person..--but that's in an ideal world.

Currently ~6 people have a shot of becoming the president, 4 of them are supported by super-pacs. Money does not care if the president is dem or rep they only want them to execute on their agenda. The odds are stacked against the majority of the population.

And if you go one level below the presidential race you can easily buy seats in the house / senate with huge contributions because people do not care that much as they do now.

Overall this is not a problem in the USA alone if you have the media/papers on your side, who are usually owned by a small amount of people/families, the chance of winning an elections grows exponential.

Hopefully we see a change with this election as people realize they are getting gamed and start to research online. That`s one of the reasons Sanders will have a very good chance of winning because you can lookup 20+ year old videos and he is consistent.

> And if you go one level below the presidential race you can easily buy seats in the house / senate with huge contributions because people do not care that much as they do now.

A number of people who have put their money where your mouth is on that claim have lost quite a lot of money without ending up with the house / senate seat that is supposedly easy to buy.

Necessary vs sufficient conditions. Ideally, it wouldn't be either.

I agree with what you're saying but think you haven't considered the correct counterfactual.

Right now we live in a world where candidates raise oodles of cash. Why? Mostly to pay for marketing and media pushes. Money gets you TV ads, radio spots, etc.

Let's say we wave our magic Citizens United wand and heavily restrict campaign financing in some way. Restrict how much they can raise. Restrict how much they can spend. Restrict where they can get money. Doesn't matter, just imagine that the end result is that candidates raise a few million instead of a few billion.

What happens now? You hit the nail ont he head right there

> Overall this is not a problem in the USA alone if you have the media/papers on your side the chance of winning an elections grows exponential.

The media is biased. It's biased because it's ultimately run by humans and humans aren't robots. Media owners have politicians they favour. Media employees have political leanings.

Right now, in a world with essentially unlimited campaign spending, this media bias largely doesn't matter, because they are more than happy to take any politician's money in exchange for ad space

This changes in a world where politicians can't spend enough money to buy ad space. In this world, who gets the TV spots? The people with connections. The candidates leverage personal friendships and ideological biases to get "heavily discounted" airtime while the less well connected, or less institutionally popular candidates get nothing.

We all look at campaign financing and see the bad parts, but consider the alternative. In this world, Sanders can still run TV spots because he can crowdsource money from grassroots sources and pay what ads cost. In a world with that door closed to him, all he can do is fall back on connections and hope for the best. And for someone for whom being an outsider is so core to his branding, I wouldn't count on those connections to amount to much

Take a look at Germany for example every TV stations has to give an even amount of air time to every party running in an election.

You cant kill the bias but its possible to make it fairer on this side.

But how do you do that where parties don't get to choose/appoint a candidate? Give equal access to candidates themselves? What's the cutoff? Signatures? Who pays for the canvassing to get signatures? Polling? Who pays for the robocalls and advertising?

So this works better during a general election rather than in primaries. I mean would we give all original 12 Republican candidates the same time allotment as the three Dem candidates, what if an IND had only one candidate?

How hard is it to start a party in Germany? Literally anyone in the US can decide they're running for office independently or form their own party - the only hurdle is getting on the ballot, which usually takes a certain number of signatures, and which becomes a lot easier if you can spam the airwaves beforehand.

All six candidates are supported by super PACs; not all are supported by PACs. Super PACs don't coordinate with candidates and can't donate to campaigns but do spend money to influence elections, whereas PACs collect money for candidates or political campaigns.

> All six candidates are supported by super PACs; not all are supported by PACs.

I think you have that backwards; in any case, as you have phrased this it is impossible, as Super PACs are a subset of PACs, so every candidate supported by a SuperPAC is also supported by a PAC.

So in that Venn diagram, what about poor minorities? Why should they have less of a voice than rich minorities?

Yes. Likewise Jeb Bush has raised far more money than any other Republican candidate, mostly via super PACs, and look where that's gotten him. (See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/electio...)

The point of being against Citizen's united is -- that money is lopsided as a tool for speech, and Company's aren't citizens and aren't protected under the laws of free speech, a company should have no say in an election, what's next - giving them the power to vote and making 1 vote from a company worth 10,000 votes from normal voters?

You also have to factor in all the voters donating to Bernie because of Citizens United, and his stand against it.

The contrast between what the money wants and what the people want will only become even more obvious, so its not like there is even a time limit on progressive action in relation to Citizens United like Sanders suggests when he says "we may already be too late". To late looks a lot different than what I'm seeing in the political scene these past 12 months

Sorry, you got things backwards. It's Hillary that, despite being supported financially by only a very small amount of people, has the same visibility of a candidate that is supported by many thousands. Which proves that you need just a few big donors to present yourself as a viable candidate and completely offset the balance of the elections.

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