Money is Not Speech

“Money is Not Speech”: I know the argument against campaign finance reform is that the Supreme Court declared money to be tantamount to speech and thus protected under the first amendment. That’s wrong. Here’s my proof:

1) Bribery is giving money in exchange for political influence.

2) Bribery is wrong & illegal.

3) Speaking to politicians can influence their politics.

4) Speaking to politicians must not only be legal but is necessary in a democracy.

5) If “money is speech” then giving money to influence politics would have to be legal (q.v. “Transitive Property”). But that conflicts with point 2) Bribery is wrong & illegal. Therefore “Money is Not Speech”. QED.

One cannot simultaneously contend that “bribery is illegal” and “money is speech”.

Someone intent on believing that “money is speech” and therefore that there should be no controls on it (on first amendment grounds) should be intellectually consistent and simply accept that bribery should be legal. Good luck on that.

And let me also make the obvious case for why bribery should be considered wrong & illegal. If it’s ok to bribe then there would be a bidding war for every money-related vote. Why should a politician vote for a billion dollar pork-project to go to Briber “A” when Briber “B” is willing to give a bigger bribe? Then all political votes would be vulnerable to being solely at the discretion of the bribe-market. When would a politician ever vote for the environment or the poor? And now let’s play this scenario out to its logical conclusion. With a trillion dollar government budget at stake the bribes could easily exceed billions of dollars. Conceivably, the biggest corporations could buy up all of the media companies (TV, radio, print, internet) and never report (or minimize the reporting) of the rampant bribery so that the electorate would never know the truth. Now we don’t want that scenario. Do we? Or do we already have it?