Let's explore the wisdom of publicly funded elections

Great Debates
41

Wolfpup, I don’t disagree with your statement as a whole, but I disagree on a few points:

This is overstated. While the US is #35 the difference between the US and Monaco (#1) is less than 5 years of age. We’ve been gaining expectancy as our levels of violence have been decreasing. We had a fairly large drop in the early 1990’s when we had a rash of violence, especially in gangs that caused younger people to die, skewing our life expectancy quite a bit. We’ve been on the mend since that, er, “epidemic” died down.

This is less due to medical reasons and more to do with social ones. Americans, especially the middle class, are far more likely to warehouse our elderly in group home situations than to care for them as a member of the family. Other cultures tend to do this less than we do and only send them to a group home when they absolutely can’t be taken care of by the family. Combine this with the American innate sense of “cheap = betterer” and you find a cheaper place that cuts corners to save your family money - which leads to a lesser quality of life.

This is also due in some part to factors that aren’t medical. First, American hospitals will tend to go to any length to save a fetus, even very early ones. If you are a mother with child and you get fatally injured in a car wreck, your child will be delivered and attempted to be kept alive as a preemie much earlier than a lot of other countries.

Second, we report deliveries as immediate (I’ve heard it described as “it breathed air, so it’s a delivery”) while other countries only report it as a delivery if the infant survives a certain amount of time after delivery, which varies.

As for Universal Health Care, I’m with you. But I don’t think the ACA is the answer and I agree with the sentiments that it costs six arms and fourteen legs, precisely because it concentrates on what makes the insurance companies money (electronic records, P4P, and so forth) and not what other countries have done to save money overall while also providing good care.

The sentiment of Americans for Prosperity is right, even if their plans are worse than the ACA. But I’m less than shocked that bad political ideas would get wrapped up in whatever Americans have a current issue with.

42

I have to admit there are few things in the world funnier than someone who quotes Thomas Jefferson while advocating the suppression of political speech that he doesn’t like.

The very purpose of the First Amendment was to protect the right of US citizens to promote their political beliefs and to lobby government officials to address their beliefs.

One last question Wolfpup, and this time please answer instead of refusing.

Since you do seem to admit to wanting an anti-Clinton documentary banned(it’s difficult to tell since your answer is about as clear as Boston Harbor) do you also think the movie Fahrenheit 911 should also have been forbidden to be shown during the 2004 Presidential election?

43

Social and political policies need to be approached pragmatically. First, we identify problems. Then we explore for solutions. Solutions may be difficult, but debating them is pointless if we don’t agree on the problems we seek to solve.

Others approach political thought like Euclid’s Geometry, deriving “theorems” from “axioms.”
[ul][li]“It is an axiom that free speech is good. Therefore it follows that the Koch Brothers can and should exert disproportionate influence on elections.”[/li][li]“It is an axiom that free market is good. Therefore government regulations are always bad.”[/li][li]“The Second Axiom ensures the Right to Bear Arms. Therefore limitations on magazine sizes are surely wrong.”[/li][/ul]

The pragmatic approach makes more sense than the “axiomatic” approach. Start a thread in BBQ Pit if you don’t understand why.

Some in the thread raise “Gotchas!” If one candidate is a peanut farmer, do we need to ban peanut advertisements during a campaign? It is hard to “draw the lines” perfectly. And it isn’t fair to ask Dopers who perceive problems and outline solutions to draw all the lines and dot all the i’s. That’s a matter for the give-and-take of negotiating experts.

But other countries and even 20th-century America have found a way to address the problems. Limits on media concentration and campaign contributions have been reversed recently in America; many think this has adversely affected the quality of voters’ choices. (I think America has other problems affecting elections’ quality, but those are separate topics.)

So I ask supporters of the Court majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission whether or not they agree that the decision tends to move power from citizens to corporations, whether that’s a good thing, and whether they feel Congresspeople are of a “quality” comparable to those of the 20th century.

Sincere question: Do you consider corporations to be “citizens”?

44

Sincere question: What is the point of your question?

Are you under the impression that the First Amendment only applies to US citizens?

Are you under the impression that, for example, that it didn’t apply to Japanese immigrants during WWII, so it’s ridiculous to whine about the 38% of all internees in “detention facilities” during WWII who were barred by law since they weren’t “free white persons”(which one had to be in order to be naturalized as a US citizen until 1952)?

Are you also under the impression that Citizens United said anything about “corporate personhood”?

Are you unaware that “corporate personhood” wasn’t settled in the 19th Century?

Finally, do you think that the First Amendment doesn’t protect the right of the Ku Klux Klan to stage a march in black neighborhoods in Illinois since the Ku Klux Klan is a corporation?

If your position to the last question is “yes, the KKK can march through largely African-Americans because the First Amendment protects such behavior” then why should we declare the First Amendment doesn’t also protect the rights of groups to criticize political candidates that white progressives like?

Why is “fight crime, kill a nigger!” is protected speech while “Hillary Clinton would make a terrible President isn’t!”?

As I said, Citizens United was a great victory for free speech advocates against the book burners who were left beaten, whipped and whimpering.

How one felt about the group behind Citizens United is irrelevant.

I’ve always found it telling that people who supported the way the Supreme Court decided to spank the book burners in Citizens United are expected to be defenders of the people behind the anti-Hillary documentary while the lawyers who defended the Nazis in Skokie are not assumed to be supporters of Nazis to be quite telling.

When you answer those questions and thereby explain the relevance of your question to me, I’ll be happy to answer.

45

Hi, Ibn Warraq.

So you completely ignore the substance of my post – which addresses most of the misconceptions you’ve demonstrated in this thread – in order to quote my question to you, just so that you could … refuse to answer it. :dubious:

Why do you refuse to answer? Something about Ku Klux Klan speech is good … or bad … or something. I’m afraid I didn’t grasp your point. To save you the effort of rephrasing, I’ll exercise my own free speech (Mods permitting :smack:) to say I don’t care to parse your comment, and am not sure I still care what your answer to my question would be. Now my curiosity is: Why are you afraid to answer the simple question?

46

Er… I asked you to explain your question because it doesn’t make much sense since the First Amendment applies both to citizens and non-citizens.

To give an obvious example, foreign nationals working in US colleges have the same rights in regards to not being censored as US citizens.

I’ll humor you though and say “no”, I don’t think that corporations are citizens.

Now, since I’ve answered your question perhaps you can answer mine.

First, do you think the First Amendment doesn’t protect the KKK from being allowed to march through black neighborhoods because they’re a corporation?

Second, do you think the US government should be allowed to censor books or movies that are designed to influence how people vote in an election?

Third, do you think that the First Amendment doesn’t protect The New York Times, Fox News, and Regnery Publishing because they are all corporations?

Thank you in advance.

47

So Septimus posts a cogent commentary and asks you meaningful questions and you keep going around the same nonsensical circles.

It’s mind-boggling that you imagine that has anything whatsoever to do with the present conversation.

Why does “censorship” keep getting introduced into this conversation? Do you even know what censorship is? It has absolutely nothing to do with campaign finance laws that seek to limit the power of money in politics – anybody’s money – a principle that has been well established in the US and in democracies all over the world for more than a century.

But the specific question about books or movies has already been answered – that it might be deemed by a court to fall under campaign laws such as McCain-Feingold if they were deemed to be electioneering rather than journalism or entertainment, but in most cases probably wouldn’t. That was what CU was supposed to have decided about one specific instance of one specific movie; instead, Roberts & friends turned it into a stunning enactment of judicial activism that reversed a century of progress.

Here I would highlight another conceptual problem similar to the “censorship” one, and I would ask whether you fully appreciate what “journalism” is. If you do, then you will surely recognize how completely irrelevant that question is.

Now we come to the best part. It’s more the question of whether they are “persons”, but actually it goes even beyond that. In the CU ruling the court declared (I believe Scalia wrote this) that the First Amendment guarantees “free speech” without specifying that the speaker necessarily need be a person; in point of fact, he says it can be anything that seems capable of speech. This convenient fiction used to throw open the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending is astutely dissected in this Atlantic article, of which this is the first few paragraphs:

And one of the key questions asked by Septimus remains unaswered: So I ask supporters of the Court majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission whether or not they agree that the decision tends to move power from citizens to corporations.

48

While going too deeply into health care is a bit off topic here, I do want to address the points you made. I was of course using health care as an example of the corrupting influence of money in politics, which in this case has given Americans a health care system that is inordinately expensive compared to the rest of the world, leaves millions uninsured or under insured, drives many others to bankruptcy, directly kills thousands of people every year, and is highly profitable to the corporations that exploit it – and to them, this is all that matters.

But to your critiques of the points I made, which were that people under de facto single-payer systems live longer, have better quality of life in old age, and experience lower infant mortality.

While you do raise good points about factors other than the health care system that contribute to this, I have in fact seen statistics attributing these factors directly to the nature of single-payer universal health care. Let’s take quality of life in old age as an example.

I’ve read that the average American on retirement with only Medicare to rely on should have on the order of $150,000 in reserve for medical expenses, above and beyond his normal savings. This is because of coverage gaps and payout limits in Medicare plus all the other out-of-pocket medical costs. The corresponding amount under single-payer systems is basically zero. You cite cultural differences whereby families tend to look after the elderly at home rather than sending them off to nursing homes. That may be, but I can tell you from personal experience that one of the enabling factors for this is the variety of home services that are provided at no cost to the patient: home nursing care, home visits by a personal care assistant, home visits by a dietician, home oxygen services if needed – basically a plethora of services that make living at home possible and affordable for many who otherwise couldn’t do it, and accessible to all because none of it costs them a dime. This is partly where the quality of life in old age comes from.

Likewise, while you raise good points about other factors affecting life expectancy and infant mortality, the fact remains that inadequate health care and lack of proper preventative care is a major factor in the health of the uninsured, the under insured, and even the adequately insured who have difficulty meeting out-of-pocket costs imposed by often onerous deductibles and co-pays.

49

Wolfpup, please define “electioneering” and tell us if you think Fahrenheit 911 and Hillary: The Movie constituted it.

The four book burners on the court who dissented felt that the US government had the right and duty to censor Hillary: The Movie. Do you agree or disagree with them?

50

Ibn Warraq, please define “book burning” and tell us which works of art (books or otherwise) members of the Supreme Court have advocated destroying (by fire or other means).

Alternatively you might notice the difference between an extremely temporary limitation on exhibiting a work of art for the purpose (wisely or no) of electoral equitableness and the permanent outlawing of a work of art, often with the ceremonial destruction of copies, because it is determined to be morally offensive.

51

“Limitation”? Heh. That’s a nice euphemism.

Beyond that, you would consider the banning of the movie Fahrenheit 911 during 2004 and the banning Hillary: The Movie during 2008 “extremely temporary.”

Beyond that, as Ray Bradbury said “there are many ways to burn a book” and he made it clear he meant far more than the burning of a book.

So yes, people who advocate the banning of a book or movie criticizing political candidate during an election cycle is a book burner.

Beyond that, being a book burner doesn’t make one stupid or evil. It just means you think for the greater good some ideas and some speech need to be suppressed.

In a thread in the cafe society someone said they were shocked to read Fahrenheit 451 and find out the government who banned the books weren’t stupid or evil but merely trying protect people from dangerous ideas.

That’s always been the case when it comes to censors.

Also, thank you for being polite and reasonable.

This is a heated topic which can become extremely personal and lots of people, including myself have not exactly been Emily Post.

Now, if you don’t mind, would you mind answering a couple of questions.

Do you think the ACLU(a corporation) should be sanctioned if during the 2016 election season they take out ads in newspapers criticizing a candidate who endorses using “enhanced interrogation methods” when dealing with “terrorist detainees”?

Do you think if the Sierra Club(a corporation) takes out newspaper ads criticizing a candidate’s environmental record they should be sanctioned.

Do you think if Stephen Speilberg(an individual) takes out an ad in The New York Times endorsing Hillary Clinton that should be considered a “donation” to Hillary Clinton’s campaign?

If Tina Fey(an individual) on Saturday Night Live calls for people to vote for Hillary Clinton because “bitches get things done” and says “c’mon Ohio and Texas” that she and/or NBC should be sanctioned?

52

Good point! The guy who throws around terms like “book burning” and “censorship” wants a definition of “electioneering”! :stuck_out_tongue:

The discussion would be a lot more productive if some would stop throwing around this kind of intentionally provocative absurdity.

No one in his right mind would advocate “banning” either of those movies, and that kind of hyperbolic accusation is typical of how the right likes to derail arguments for their ideological ends. The one (and only) potential problem with the Hillary movie is that it might have been in violation of the McCain-Feingold prohibition against running TV commercials for or against a presidential candidate within 30 days of primaries. The FEC ruled that it was, in fact, such a commercial and thus in violation of the 30-day rule. Instead of addressing the appeal, Roberts maneuvered the case to an incalculably wider scope, as already discussed.

53

So I take it then you do believe that the movie Fahrenheit 911 should have been temporarily banned during the 2004 election?

Do you also think the book Unfit For Command, published in 2004, which was clearly designed to convince people not to vote for John Kerry should have been enjoined from being published until after the election?

Finally, your comparison of the phrases is ridiculous.

“Electioneering” is a legal term.

Please give your personal definition of it?

54

It requires a definition.

I dare you to do it without violating the First Amendment.

  1. I’m a liberal. Just like the ACLU, which supported the Citizens United decision. Don’t make the ideological.

  2. The lawyers for the FEC said that under the law, they had the power to ban any book that spoke in favor or against a candidate that was published by a corporation.

Please explain why that’s wrong. Please explain why a book should be treated differently from a TV ad.

If you find this absurd, it’s only because your position is absurd, and we are exposing the absurdity of it.

Then discuss the Hillary movie and why it should have been banned. I dare you to justify that. It couldn’t be more obvious a violation of the First Amendment.

55

The decision didn’t give corporations any power at all.

Influence is not power. The voters have all the power. The voters choose what to listen to and what to believe, just as with all speech. There is simply no way you can justify banning spending on speech without questioning freedom of speech and its purpose and justification.

Of course not. And no court has ever ruled that they are.

CU didn’t even mention the idea of corporate personhood. That’s a myth. In fact, the court acknowledged that they are NOT persons. It simply said it doesn’t matter - speech is protected, regardless of the source. And that’s obvious - if only people had speech rights, political parties, for instance, would have no right to speak about politics. Really?

56

I think you missed the cultural difference I was attempting to define: Let’s say that every medical cost is now $0 in the US. You will still have those same people attempting to warehouse their elderly rather than care for them at home, even if it costs them $0 extra dollars in medical care, food, or otherwise. The US has a culture of living for one’s self. “Live for the moment,” “Live each day like it’s your last,” and “YOLO” are all deeply ingrained into our culture. You can’t #YOLO at a party at 1:30 AM when mom or grandma needs someone to care for her.

Now, I would grant that it’s possible (depending on how we treat our public workers, primarily, but that’s a further derail) that the quality of life would go up without an emphasis on cost, but it still wouldn’t be a huge increase as being near loved ones and feeling useful are two of the most important parts of a person’s life. One of the two most common thoughts to those that are suicidal are that no one needs them (often phrased as “cares about” or “would notice”). The other is a sense of complete helplessness. If you are old and rickety, are you going to try and keep yourself feeling good if your children never call and only acknowledge your existence with a check every month that you don’t even see?

I’m not convinced of the infant mortality and probably won’t be until everyone reports the data in the same way.

Life expectancy is largely cultural as not only my previously noted youth die-off causes changes, but cultural habits in general also do. If you never go to the doctor for any reason whatsoever - you’ll likely die earlier than someone who goes to the doctor when they are sick. And if everyone goes to the doctor at the first sniffle, truly sick people won’t get the help they need because they can not only be overlooked as “I’ve seen a hundred people with runny noses, today.” but also it takes them longer to see a care provider due to traffic. Culture can play as big or more a role in life expectancy as medical care. I mean, look at it this way: Upto 15% of our population (45 m) is more or less ignored medically and only treated in emergency situations and we are still less than 5 years behind #1 on the LE scale. If health care itself caused that significant a difference in Life Expectancy, 15% of the population would drop us way behind and not just marginally behind the leader.

If we want a life expectancy increase we can do as much benefit to ourselves by changing our culture away from a “me me me” and toward something more in service of society as a whole. We can’t solve social problems via social reforms that target a symptom (eg offering UHC with group/home care for free) of the larger social problem. We have proven that through our War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and War on Terrorism.

ETA: Rechecked my posted source for life expectancy. We are 6.7 years behind #1. My apologies.

57

“Limitation” is the proper term. Hillary the Movie was never banned. Say it with me. Never. Banned. Ever. “Banned” means that it is forbidden. The government never prohibited any individual from viewing the film. They only restricted the Citizens United group from paying television stations to advertise or even air the movie outright. I’ve never seen the film but assuming that its purpose was anti-Hillary electioneering as was determined by the courts then buying air time for it is essentially the same as the already regulated practice of buying campaign ads. It makes no sense to regulate one and not the other since people would simply form bogus movie companies to make their campaign ads. This is hardly a theoretical issue. The Citizens United group after all was formed in the wake of the failure of Republicans to get the government to restrict advertising for Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004.

And this restriction was extremely limited. Only 30 days before the primary and general elections. The movie is six years old. So for 2 of those 72 months there was a was a restriction on buying television coverage of it. As time goes on the work of art, as a work of art, continues to exist and be freely available. It’s only as an electioneering device that those particular 2 months are key.

Presumably Bradbury was talking about actual attempts to restrict art and not your misleading use of the term. The purpose was not to protect people from dangerous ideas. The ideas the courts believe this movie represented were allowed on television. Anti-Hillary campaign ads, which the courts ruled this work of art was the equivalent of, were regulated to balance the money spent on them against the money spent on pro-Hillary ads.

I don’t have enough information to determine if the ACLU is in the wrong. Certainly I am not opposed to sensible campaign finance laws that could lead to this outcome.

Again I’m not sure but depending on the specifics of the case but certainly the Sierra Club doesn’t deserve an exception to sensible campaign finance rules.

Again, maybe. I realize that these probably aren’t very satisfying answers for you but without knowing more I can’t be sure if I should support any of these situations. I certainly don’t think any of these are clearly situations which do not call for regulation.

No. It’s the money that I think we should be regulating and not the speech. SNL produces art and that should be protected. But that shouldn’t extend to them allowing someone to pay them for the opportunity to come on the show and electioneer.

58

Fine, so the ads were BANNED.

Buying campaign ads is NOT REGULATED. Say it with me. Never. Regulated.

There are NO RESTRICTIONS on who can buy an ad or how much they can spend. Such restrictions were struck down decades ago as a violation of the First Amendment in Buckley v. Valeo.

An “extremely limited” violation of the First Amendment is still a violation.

Which is a violation of the First Amendment. No limits on spending on speech are allowed. No such “balancing” or rationing of speech or the ability to get access to more speech is allowed. This was established long ago in Buckley.

Nor is the ACLU. But this was not even a campaign finance law. It was about speech independent of the campaigns.

The Sierra Club has free speech rights though, don’t you agree?

You can try all you want, but you can’t separate the two. The ONLY REASON you want to regulate the money is the speech it brings. The ONLY REASON you think it need regulating is because you think those who spend it get “too much” speech from it.

59

His answer was directly on point.

OF COURSE it is censorship. It is an attempt to limit speech. If the money didn’t involve speech, you wouldn’t care about regulating it.

The difference is irrelevant. The government may no regulate electioneering any more than journalism or entertainment. They are all speech, and all protected. In fact, political speech enjoys the highest level of protection.

Waaah. It’s not activism to strike down an entire law based on one case. That’s normal.

And it didn’t “reverse a century of progress.” No federal law had limited spending on speech, in any way, until McCain-Feingold in 2003 (except for one that was struck down in 1976).

Fiction?

If only persons have speech rights, that would mean political parties, labor unions, religious groups, non-profits, clubs, etc. have no speech rights. Does that even make sense to you?

It does not move power from citizens to corporations. The right to speech is not a power, it is a right. Speech has no power. The voters have all the power over who is elected. They also have all the power over whether they want to be influence by any speech.

The idea that you can regulate certain speakers because you think they have “too much” influence violates the fundamental idea between democracy and freedom of speech - the presumption that citizens are entitled to hear any speech they want, are entirely capable of deciding what speech to believe or accept, and entirely capable of acting accordingly with their vote or other actions. ANY suggestion that certain speech shouldn’t be heard, or shouldn’t be heard as often, is a fundamental violation of that principle.

60

What a wonderful statement! I love pronouncements like that, which brazenly contradict two thousand years of history in a single canard of just four words. Whose stunningly wrong-headed audacity is made all the more humorous by the spirited defense you’ve mounted for the unconditional protection of said powerless free speech.

If we were arguing a court case, I would close my argument right here. :stuck_out_tongue:

As already said, freedom is never absolute and speech isn’t free when only one side with vested interests has dominant control, a fact that has historically been recognized in the US and throughout the world. No democracy in the world believes in the kind of absolutism that you advocate: