OpinionJournal has an important article about freedom of speech.
Bloggers of every political stripe know McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform for the totalitarian wedge it is. The MSM doesn’t get it because they think the “press exemption” actually protects them. As President Clinton taught us about the word “is”, that depends on the definitions of “press” and “exemption.”
Shut Up, They Explained
The left’s regulatory war against free speech.…The ultimate pipe dream of the reformers is a rigidly egalitarian society, where government makes sure that every individual’s influence over politics is exactly the same, regardless of his wealth. Scrutinize the pronouncements of campaign-finance reform groups like the Pew-backed Democracy 21, and you’ll see how the meaning of “corruption” morphs into “inequality of influence” in this sense. This notion of corruption–really a Marxoid opposition to inequality of wealth–would have horrified the Founding Fathers, who believed in private property with its attendant inequalities, and who trusted to the clash of factions to ensure that none oppressed the others. The Founders would have seen in the reformers’ utopian schemes, in which the power of government makes all equally weak, the embodiment of tyranny.
To eradicate “corruption,” leading theorists of campaign-finance reform, such as Ohio State University law professor (and former Ohio state solicitor) Edward Foley, Loyola law prof Richard Hasen, and radical redistributionist philosopher Ronald Dworkin, want to replace privately financed campaigns with a system in which government would guarantee “equal dollars per voter,” as Foley puts it, perhaps by giving all Americans the same number of political “coupons,” which they could then redeem on the political activities of their choice. This superpowerful government would ban all other political expenditures and require all political groups to get operating licenses from it, with stiff criminal penalties for violators.
This will require spying on citizens’ speech; the justification for which is preserving incumbency. If there were any real commitment to reform, it would start with federally elected politicians eschewing the ability to bribe us with our own money by reducing their power to spend it.
Read the whole thing.