Using money to amplify your speech is just the nature of the world. Buying ads, or buying speakers are just different ends of the money axis.
> Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once wrote: “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”
We lost. And we're going to keep losing as free speech continues to become a Pay-to-Play arena.
I'm a limited bandwidth scenario, you literally abridge the speech of the person with less money when the law equates money and speech.
By restricting the megaphone size you avoid or at least reduce the problem.
Absolutely no one is arguing for this or anything even vaguely like it.
Just some common sense limits to prevent big players completely drowning out everything else.
They could easily conceive of the cost of printing pamphlets.
As financial inequality grows, if the use of money to amplify ones liberty is not curtailed, then the new aristocratic class will be able to drown out the liberty of the rest. The economy is not a zero-sum game, but power is. This is what the founders did not solve, and consciously left it as an exercise for their descendants.
A republic if you can keep it, is what they gave us. They did not feel the need to foresee what would happen in 200 years. They expected us to make the changes necessary to keep it. They did not want us to hold them up as godlike figures from whose mouths came the One True Word.
It is a constitution, not divine scripture - we have an amendment process to make the changes we need, but first we need to agree that such changes are necessary, particularly in the realms of lobbying and campaign finance. These are the greatest vectors for corruption in government.