February 4th, 2010 at 2:21 pm

An UnReasonable Conclusion

Until today I hadn’t read anything at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, my favorite outlet for snarky libertarianism, on the Supreme Court’s atrocious decision to allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.  But I’d assumed that its editors would have been ambivalent about the decision, their eagerness to slash regulation clashing with their concern for an individual liberty, which was inarguably harmed by the ruling, at least politically.

I was mistaken:

One problem, though–they didn’t address the exceptional blow to a real person’s liberty that this ruling handed down, instead offering to the debate , which is a real intellectual and moral battle over what a legal person is (and hence welcomes original thinking), nothing but corporate Republican tropes:

The Citizens United ruling increases freedom of political speech, not simply for powerful, politically connected corporations like Citigroup, AIG, and the companies that run The New York Times and other media outlets, but for small-pocketed nonprofits such as Citizens United too. If you want to get bent out of shape about something, direct your ire at a massive and constantly growing government that has its hands in virtually every aspect of economic and social life in America.

First, that last sentence: it’s a close mirror of the film narrator’s parting line, who says anger at the ruling is misdirected and tells us to instead “turn your ire on a government that is vast and growing and helps or hinders corporations based on political lobbying rather than marketplace forces.  Assuming the writer’s main complaint is that the government ‘helps or hinders corporations based on political lobbying’, what do they have to say for the court majority who went against the institutional tradition to rule as narrowly as possible, breaking a century’s worth of legal precedent when the plaintiff’s case, ruled on narrowly, only called for reversing a decade’s worth?  Given the record of the majority justices’s writings, speeches, and political leanings, it’s obvious that the decision was an ideologically-driven one by a bloc that wants to wield authority while it can.  In other words, it was essentially political.  How is that operatively different than the political lobbying at which Reason would rather have us be angry?

I don’t know how with a clear head and straight face Reason can argue that the average person’s free speech is in fact augmented by the ruling.  If I give you, a person, $10, and a person standing in as a corporation, say, $100, and send you both to the store–which has a limited quantity of goods–to buy as much stuff as you can, who is going to come back with more?  And if I give you each a proportional increase in money?  It’s a dumb exercise, I know–but that’s only because its modeling a dumb argument.

The fact is, free speech is a relatively zero-sum game.  Our national potential to be persuaded by arguments, which is limited by human attention, has a ceiling; at some point there’s no surplus to be gained by ‘increasing’ freedom by allowing more and more money into the market, if you’d like to call it one*.  There can be no imaginary proliferation of attention, here–there’s a real human limit to things.  When one group is given more power, the others suffer an equivalent loss.  It’s that simple, that stark.

The reality, far from being anything to play mock horror music at, will have just as stark consequences for real individual freedom in years to come.

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*Even going with that terminology, such an injection of cash as is sure to come with this ruling would have an inflationary effect, making each word less valuable.  And then those who have only their individual word are worth even less.

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