His fellow citizens are treated to his well-reasoned proclamations. The result of either plan would be the same. But he instead decides to take funds from his paycheck to buy a bus ticket. He considers walking to the town square to regale passersby with his opinions. But every service we receive, however it may come to us, requires a sacrifice from someone for its performance.Ĭonsider the interplay of money, service, and sacrifice in the hypothetical case of a young idealist who wishes to exercise his right to free speech. Services can exist independently of money, as in a barter system or when we perform a service directly for ourselves. I expect to be able to use that dollar to induce another person to make a sacrifice on my behalf. If I have a dollar, then I have made a sacrifice (assuming it was not a gift or loot. Even when we purchase a good, all we pay for is the service of the raw materials having been located, gathered, altered, combined, and then brought to a location convenient to us. Though reams of learned text have been devoted to the topic, most economists agree on the very basics of what money is. The nature of the speaker-individual, group, or corporation-was apparently of no matter to the framers.īut putting aside the merits of the Court’s ruling, what relationship does it cast between money and speech? abridging the freedom of speech.” Note that the clause concerns itself solely with its subject-Congress. The ruling is consonant with the text of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause, “Congress shall make no law. In Citizens United the Court went beyond Buckley, ruling that the federal government may not limit corporate or union spending on independent political expression. A shocking number of scholarly texts and newspaper citations assert that in Buckley the Court ruled that “money is a form of speech.” (Even Wikipedia’s open-source entry for Buckley claimed this at the time of writing.) Buckley overturned restrictions on independent political spending by citizens and associations, and on candidates’ personal spending. The widespread mischaracterization likely stems from an earlier widespread mischaracterization, that of the ruling in Buckley v. And the last thing America needs is to misunderstand the Court when it is actually doing its job: protecting constitutional freedoms from a meddlesome Congress. For those who push the idea to the public that the Court has ruled as such-opinion leaders who should (and maybe do) know better-the phrase serves to caricature the Court’s reasoning on campaign finance issues vis-à-vis the First Amendment. It would be hard to take the Court seriously if it had.īut the phrase is not just a throwaway idiom. Fortunately, the Court never actually made such an absurd equation. Proponents of campaign finance regulation have thrown this trope around freely since 2010’s landmark Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. “The Supreme Court said that money equals speech!”
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