Why is that so important to you?
Why is what so important to me?
Being able to spend unlimited amounts of personal money to support political candidates?
Let’s take this to the other extreme: As a multimillionaire, you can spend a million bucks buying airtime for a candidate during the Superbowl. Another $20 million making a series of books and documentaries attacking them. Another $15 million hiring college kids to go door to door for you campaigning for their opponent, and another $10 million hiring lobbyists to wine & dine and win over lobbyists to your cause, let’s say textile industry regulations.
Come election day, your candidate wins by a landslide and passes a rider that grants your industry a huge reduction in trade tariffs and several new deductions for your tax bracket. They also roll back ethics rules, textbook oversight, DMV staffing, and clean water protections to help pay for those new breaks. You walk away $20 million richer than last year net, but the general public has suffered from your actions. Meanwhile, some dude in a small town is ecstatic that the tyrannical government didn’t stop him from printing 400 t-shirts instead of 150, with another 100 yard signs thrown in as a “fuck you”.
How is that good for democracy?
Because there’s no limit to the potential costs of producing and spreading political ideas? What if I want Michael Bay to produce and direct my summer blockbuster about Donald Trump? What if I want to air an ad critical of Congress during the Superbowl? What if I want to put a billboard up by every interstate highway on-ramp urging people to vote pro-choice? What if I want to buy every American a t-shirt that supports the Republican party? How can you justify banning those activities while claiming to support free speech?
It’s not good for democracy … but it’s very good for capitalism …
I think you might have your ratios a bit wrong … if I spend $46m to get a candidate elected, and I only get back $66m in tax savings … I would look for a better candidate … I want a 10 to 1 return … that $46m should get me $460m in tax relief …
I’m creating minimum wage jobs in the luxury aircraft industry after all …
Citizens freely voted for the candidate in your hypothetical. You’ll have a hard time convincing them that they have suffered. Either you trust the voters to make decisions for themselves or you don’t. Regardless of how they came to make those decisions. I’d say casting doubt on their decision, just because someone convinced them to vote differently than you would have liked them to, is a good deal more antithetical to democracy than spending personal money to get your ideas heard.
Because Meg Whitman didn’t get elected.
It’s true that unlimited spending is not exactly good (nor bad) for democracy. No one really likes it. But it’s a side effect of the 1st Amendment, not it’s goal.
In order to stop spending, you’d have to get rid of the 1st Ad, and that would be bad.
Or add a new Amendment … “Donation of money for political purposes can be regulated” … the problem is that the folks who are gaining the most under the current system are the very folks who have to initiate such an Amendment … perhaps a flaw in the US Constitution? …
If, at one extreme, the wealthy control the lion’s share of political promotion, then only the interests of the wealthy will be represented in the public sphere of ideas.
This strikes many as a greater threat to democracy than curbing the ability of the wealthy to spend their own money on whatever they want.
In an ideal world, absolute control over political promotion ought not to make a difference, as we ought to trust the voters to make up their own minds no matter how much they are bombarded with promotion. We do not live in that ideal world, as evidenced by the efforts made to spend as much as possible on promotion.
Yet Americans are able to regulate (say) obscenity, without abolishing the 1st amendment.
Seems like the solution would be for opponents to spend as much as they like to counter the spending of the rich guy they disagree with. Rather than to ban his speech, which is just shooting themselves in the foot. I’m unsure why “the solution to bad speech is more speech” is the right idea when it comes to the KKK and Illinois Nazis, but not when it comes to politicians and campaigning?
Mostly only kiddie porn, and that is because in order to have kiddie porn, a child must have been harmed. You’re comparing child rape to people spending their own money how they wish.
So the poor ought to just spend as much as the rich? I see a … minor … structural issue with that.
It is akin to saying “a law prohibiting sleeping rough under bridges applies equally to rich and destitute alike”. 
The concern is that, without limits, in the Darwinian struggle of politics the wealthy will simply capture the field and then pass laws to benefit themselves - eventually damaging the very things that make capitalist democracy “good” - namely, social mobility based on merit. What you risk is ending up getting is a permanent aristocracy of the wealthy.
We set limits in other areas - such as control of monopolies - for exactly this reason. Why not consider limits on political spending?
Well, that’s a stretch.
First, no, obscenity - including child porn - isn’t based on actually raping children; for example, cartoon child porn is outlawed in the US. Proof:
I don’t see any necessity for the rape of an actual child in order to produce such materials: an obscene “cartoon” is, of necessity, not an actual depiction of a (living) child.
Point here is that. somehow, US law makers have been able to live with limitations on free speech in other areas without utterly abolishing the 1st Amendment.
So, clearly, an “argument from necessity” must be invalid.
There’s a lot more poor people than rich people though. A million poor people spending a dollar can buy as much as one rich guy spending a million dollars. There’s also the fact that those million people can cast a million votes, whereas Mr. Millionaire only gets one vote.
This can be illustrated by looking at the federal budget. The vast majority of which is spent on things like Medicare and Social Security, things that average voters want, while comparatively little (though still huge in absolute numbers) is spent on things like tax breaks and corporate welfare.
Besides, of all the ways the poor have it worse than the rich, I’m not sure “they can spend more money on commercials” is the one I have the most sympathy for.
And finally, doesn’t the passage of campaign spending limits by itself pretty definitively prove that the rich can’t buy whatever legislative outcomes they desire? I mean, if the problem were as severe as some have made it out to be, those laws couldn’t be passed in the first place.
No, you’re just taking the discussion to an absurd extreme. Child pornography is hardly the only thing suppressed under the guise of banning obscenity. And that’s hardly the only exception to our “freedom of speech.” The fact is that US law infringes on speech rights as much as the laws of most democracies - just in different ways.
I believe that during the Quebec referendum, that would not have been allowed. You can argue that till the end of time, but that was the law. How it could have been enforced is a different matter.
I appreciate the “absurd extreme” comment, but your two examples go further as to be irrelevant … I’m not going to read that Alabama statute just to find out that, no, it does not outlaw publicly claiming the law is wrong and should be repealed … I can still put a sign in my front yard saying “Free the sex toys” … the second example doesn’t even concern the Constitution, but rather the UCMJ … but we can use the local VA hospital as an example, we have to agree to not make public any private information we find in the records room, or the VA won’t let us into the records room … that won’t stop us from demanding these medical records be made public, just we ourselves can’t release them … breech of contract is not nitpicking …
This is very true from what I understand … kinda surprised more people haven’t jumped to the defense of their country’s Free Speech rights … many mature democracies have extensive rights regarding speech … perhaps only different in what Citizens United allows … how other democracies get around it is their Supreme Court says they can, SCOTUS says we can’t …
In Canada, the leading Supreme Court case is Harper v Canada (Attorney General). (The plaintiff, Harper, was Stephen Harper, who at the time the action started in the late 1990s was a private citizen with a conservative think-tank. He later became Prime Minister.)
Harper challenged the federal electoral law which imposed spending limits in federal elections. The law limited third party spending to $3000 in a given electoral district and $150,000 nationally. He argued that the limitations infringed the Charter’s guarantee of freedom of expression.
The Court upheld the restrictions. It recognized that restrictions on spending did amount to a limitation on freedom of expression. However, that was not the end of the analysis. The Charter also contains a constitutional guarantee of the right of each citizen to vote. The restriction on spending had to be considered in light of the constitutional commitment to equality of citizens in the electoral process. The purpose of spending limits is to further that goal of equality of participation in the electoral process, by preventing those with money from drowning out those without money. That constitutional guarantee of voter equality provided strong support for the restrictions: the guarantee of freedom of expression could not be read in isolation. The two constitutional provisions had to be read together, and the constitutional principle of voter equality supported the restrictions on spending.
Note as well that the limits only apply to direct support or opposition for a candidate or a party. The limits don’t apply to advertising on specific issues. So for instance, if you oppose abortion, you can spend as much as you like on signs that say “Abortion should be banned”. That’s not supporting or opposing any particular candidate or party, so is not subject to the spending limits. Same for any other issue. It’s only if you want to say: “Vote for Candidate Smith because she opposes abortion” that your spending is subject to the limit.
Another point is that the federal law also provides that only living, breathing individuals can donate to a political party. Corporations, unions and other such groups cannot contribute to political parties. This part of the law wasn’t challenged in Harper, but is tied to the constitutional principle that only real people get to vote, so only real people can contribute to the political parties.