Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

There was nothing about that movie that was related to "Money" per se. This wasn't the Koch brothers conspiring with George Soros. This was a couple of goofballs editing together some news footage and dubbing over some scary narration. That is, shit that happens on youtube every day. You know, speech. After the FEC has silenced all the little guys who dare criticize a candidate, do you really think the Kochs will be reduced to normal private citizens?

View on HN

> After the FEC has silenced all the little guys who dare criticize a candidate, do you really think the Kochs will be reduced to normal private citizens?

Exactly. People vastly misunderstand Citizens United.

Fox News is Rupert Murdoch buying airtime in bulk for his political speech. Unless you propose to shut it down along with every other privately owned media company, money is speech.

If laws were made with the philosophy that they must perfectly solve all aspects of a problem, there would either be no laws, or there would be complete totalitarianism. Thankfully, people rarely subscribe to absolutist philosophies once you actually get them to think about a topic.

So what practical solution are you proposing? Rupert Murdoch gets as much speech as he can afford to buy but some smaller entity can't buy more than some arbitrarily set small amount of airtime preceding an election?

The rules were limited to corporations, associations and unions. Individuals were not restricted in this type of speech. Citizens United was a nonprofit corporation.

Yes, which was the heart of the CU decision: if individual are unlimited, and corporations, associations, and unions are collections of individuals, then how can those be limited?

Put another way, the CU decision argued that individuals do not give up their right to free expressions just because they decided to pool their money in a particular way.

The case was all about money. CU wanted to pay to advertise and broadcast it on TV. How the movie was made is immaterial.

Remind us again, what's the problem with money and politics? Is the problem really that some people make money by commenting on politics? I guess you're thinking of like, Rush Limbaugh? Maybe Jon Stewart? Really? Please think more carefully.

If money is like cooties, in that it ruins everything it touches, no matter what actual role it plays in the situation, then everything in this world is screwed up forever. But, that's not the case. The real problem with money in politics is the corruption of political, regulatory, administrative, and legislative decisions. When you fixate on stupid shit like some movie some dudes made, that idiocy is quite useful for those who benefit by that corruption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com