The only way out of this long term, is to take money out of politics, repeal citizens united, revolving doors and other methods of lining politicians' pockets.
So you think it should be illegal to make documentaries critical of Hillary Clinton? Because that's what Citizens United was about, but most people who are against Citizens United don't seem to understand what the case was actually about.
Reconciliation: Companies aren't human entities.
Non-human entities aren't entitled to 1st amendment protections.
Campaign finance is equally simple: run your campaign on public funding. Give all candidates who meet a threshold equal amounts of money.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument about what benefit a democracy receives from campaigns having different amounts of funding. That feels like the tail wagging the dog (your supporters fund you, so you can spend that money to buy more supporters).
Even the small film maker or newspaper is usually going to be organized as an LLC, even if it is just a single person trying to submit their film to a festival or something. These should be subject to governmental regulation if they touch on political topics? I think this is significantly thornier than you're making it out to be.
> Campaign finance is equally simple: run your campaign on public funding. Give all candidates who meet a threshold equal amounts of money.
Right, where it gets tricky is with unaffiliated individuals and what counts as a campaign expense versus speech or normal business.
If you mandate that non-human entities have an 1st amendment right, you cannot have meaningful campaign finance limits.
Ergo, because it's worth having campaign finance limits, in the interest of allowing the best candidate / idea to win, I think it's worth threshing through stripping 1st amendment rights from non-human entities.
Regarding how one weighs what sort of speech would then be allowed and disallowed is a difficult problem, but the above needs to happen before it can even be started on.
Now, we have a frankensystem where reality (unlimited finance) and policy (limited finance) differ, which is never a healthy state.
Human individuals would still have a right to speak whatever they feel.
And arguably, I'd extend that onto platforms above a certain size that can verify human identity (ideally anonymized after verification).
IMHO, newspapers/printmakers/movies do need to be regulated.
They deserve rights, but those rights should look very different than individual 1st amendment right.
Which seems reasonable -- nobody would ever confuse Alphabet-the-company with me-the-individual-person in terms of capability and capital.
I guess that's where we disagree.
To me, democracy starts from elections with equality of opportunity.
Anything shy of that corrupts the very foundations, and we've been trending shyer for a long time.
Is it any surprise we get increasingly concentrated wealth (world wars aside) with a set of policies that allow spending unlimited money to buy votes?
The vast majority of speech that needs to remain protected for speech to remain meaningfully free happens through non-human entities. Removing that protection is an absolutely insane step.
What we have now is the worst of both worlds:
- Individual speech is censored at whim by non-government platforms that are unavoidable.
- While giant companies are empowered to speak anything they want (speaking as the company).
That doesn't seem ass-backwards?
We should be prioritizing individual speech / power, and disempowering corporate speech.
If limited liability is a concern... we can just create that for individuals.
I'm not convinced that Meta also needs the right to do whatever it wants, for the sake of aspiring indie filmmakers.
LLC et al. liability didn't just exist in a tablet given to humanity from god.
It was designed for a purpose, and we could design the same thing for people if we wanted, instead of granting legal corporations individuals' rights.
> laughs in lawyer
In other words, it seems impossible to run for president without breaking the law.
This is not okay. One of the issues here is that by making candidates break a law, you basically now have some kind of weird leverage over them. You can make threats to prosecute or fine further and thus have them by the proverbial balls. You also naturally push away people who would be wanting to follow the law, which I argue is sorely needed in Washington DC.
This opens the door to a lot of bad bad bad blackmail opportunities.
If no party and no candidate is able to stage a presidential campaign without being fined, ranging from Trump's chaotic, high energy campaigns to Clinton's 'proper' campaign with lots of decorum to Biden's bring-back-normal campaign, then I think something is seriously the matter with campaign finance laws.
Ideally, fines are a rare occurrence.
Sources:
1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/30/politics/clinton-dnc-steele-d...
2. https://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/obama-2008-campaign-f...
3. https://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/07/17/biden.campaign.fine/... (Biden's 2010 campaign... 2020 campaigns seem to be under investigation)
3. Of course, everyone knows about Trump