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Kalman posted:Articulate a standard that separates the two, then. If you're going to complain that coordination is unworkable, then you need to provide a workable way to distinguish between the Kochs buying a paper and publishing all the ads they want and you buying an SA sub and posting. I did? The general tax on all advertising spending sidesteps this conundrum neatly. If I buy an SA advert, taxed at 2%; if I just post, no tax; if someone is paying me to post, they pay 2%. Unpaid editorial, no tax; paid editorial, 2% tax. Unpaid speech isn't taxed under this proposal, obviously. If the Kochs buy a paper, it's taxed at 2% of revenue just like all other newspapers. We ignore all questions of intent and just focus on whether the speech is paid or unpaid. Beauty of it is, it generates enough revenue to fund all elections via public financing, it scales with spending, and it's only a de minimis burden on even paid speech. Edit: we phrase it as an income tax on income from paid speech and it's constitutional under the 16th Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:17 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 19:06
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I did? The general tax on all advertising spending sidesteps this conundrum neatly. If I buy an SA advert, taxed at 2%; if I just post, no tax; if someone is paying me to post, they pay 2%. Unpaid editorial, no tax; paid editorial, 2% tax. Unpaid speech isn't taxed under this proposal, obviously. I've already gone into why a general tax on speech is completely unconstitutional. I know you think it's a great idea but you're wrong. That said, I'm clearly not going to convince you you aren't being an idiot on the topic, and it's not worth my time to continue - my position is clear.
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May 4, 2016 19:23
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Aww, cmon, the 16th amendment argument is new! That's at least worth a rambling paragraph about statutory construction and giving effect to each part or something
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May 4, 2016 19:29
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You guys have now conflated political speech with political campaign contributions with corporate political spending with 501 entity political spending. It's like I've fallen into a horrifying nexus of disconnected policy intuitions. I, too, am done. Can we have a new SCOTUS thread, please?
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May 4, 2016 22:55
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How about we talk about something more uplifting like the trump camp saying they're going to make Ted Cruz attorney general and then nominate him for the supreme court.
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May 5, 2016 00:22
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Discendo Vox posted:You guys have now conflated political speech with political campaign contributions with corporate political spending with 501 entity political spending. It's like I've fallen into a horrifying nexus of disconnected policy intuitions. I, too, am done. Can we have a new SCOTUS thread, please? You're arguing about law with non-lawyers and getting frustrated when they don't talk or think as rigorously about law as lawyers?
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May 5, 2016 00:33
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Deteriorata posted:The problem is where you draw the line. If standing on a street corner and extolling the virtues of your favorite candidate is OK, but spending money out of your own pocket for TV ads is not, you have to come up with a rationalization for why one is acceptable and not the other. Why should some people have access to more political speech just because they have more money? That seems like it would obviously undermine a representative democracy if the goal is to represent people rather than capital. The ability for any individual or organization to effect more political influence than another based on the depth of their bank account does in fact corrupt the results of the political process away from a legitimately representative process.
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May 5, 2016 03:30
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Munkeymon posted:You're arguing about law with non-lawyers and getting frustrated when they don't talk or think as rigorously about law as lawyers? There are attorneys on both sides of this debate. The legal side of this dispute is between competing philosophies of constitutional interpretation. I don't really want to use the terms "liberal" and "conservative" because they're only peripherally applicable and even then only in a philosophical sense, but a lot of it is about how broadly or narrowly you think the Constitution should be read. This was something even the Founders disagreed on (for example, Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed on whether or not the "necessary and proper" clause was enough to justify a national bank).
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May 5, 2016 03:33
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Why should some people have access to more political speech just because they have more money? That seems like it would obviously undermine a representative democracy if the goal is to represent people rather than capital. The ability for any individual or organization to effect more political influence than another based on the depth of their bank account does in fact corrupt the results of the political process away from a legitimately representative process. Why do some people get to own newspapers or TV stations and others don't? Just because they have more money? Actually, yes. More money = more speech is exactly how it works. It's why political parties exist and other political organizations. People can pool their resources for a common goal and shout as loudly as they like. I have no idea how you would regulate political speech so that no one gets any more than anyone else. It would require such an onerous level of government scrutiny and censorship that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like living in such a country.
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May 5, 2016 03:37
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Clearly if we can't solve every problem with a given rule it's better to just do nothing at all, that's the philosophy behind sound regulation right? Maybe it takes a slight bit more investment and time and effort to set up yet another news corporation to play pro-tobacco propaganda or whatever all day every day than it does to hand out checks to congressmen right before a vote, and every single last person you stop from doing the latter won't necessarily be willing and able to achieve the same goals by doing the former. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:47 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 03:43
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I did? The general tax on all advertising spending sidesteps this conundrum neatly. If I buy an SA advert, taxed at 2%; if I just post, no tax; if someone is paying me to post, they pay 2%. Unpaid editorial, no tax; paid editorial, 2% tax. Unpaid speech isn't taxed under this proposal, obviously. We need some way to know if these people have paid their advertising tax. We need to mark them laid somehow. Maybe a stamp of some kind.
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May 5, 2016 03:54
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Ron Jeremy posted:We need some way to know if these people have paid their advertising tax. We need to mark them laid somehow. Maybe a stamp of some kind. a Yodatar
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May 5, 2016 04:01
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There are attorneys on both sides of this debate. The legal side of this dispute is between competing philosophies of constitutional interpretation. I don't really want to use the terms "liberal" and "conservative" because they're only peripherally applicable and even then only in a philosophical sense, but a lot of it is about how broadly or narrowly you think the Constitution should be read. This was something even the Founders disagreed on (for example, Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed on whether or not the "necessary and proper" clause was enough to justify a national bank). I'm aware of all of that - I've read every page of this argument and there are great arguments on both sides, as much as I hate to admit that there's a good argument behind (at least parts of) CU 
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May 5, 2016 04:40
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VitalSigns posted:Clearly if we can't solve every problem with a given rule it's better to just do nothing at all, that's the philosophy behind sound regulation right? VitalSigns posted:Maybe it takes a slight bit more investment and time and effort to set up yet another news corporation to play pro-tobacco propaganda or whatever all day every day than it does to hand out checks to congressmen right before a vote, and every single last person you stop from doing the latter won't necessarily be willing and able to achieve the same goals by doing the former.
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May 5, 2016 16:50
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Dead Reckoning posted:You can't say, "Well, we can just make it illegal in this narrow instance, precedent and consistency don't matter. I'm sure the courts and congress can sort out the grey area between good free speech and mean free speech," If only there were a test for how the government can restrict speech in the interest of compelling (or possibly legitimate) government interest. ...or, for that matter, a history of making blackmail or extortion illegal that could be analogized to. Dead Reckoning posted:So you're perfectly fine with infringing on other citizens' rights as long as it maybe saves just one life? Should every car come equipped with an ignition interlock as a requirement? That's a hell of a jump from an assertion that certain actions are, in fact, not citizens' rights.
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May 5, 2016 17:58
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Dead Reckoning posted:So you're perfectly fine with infringing on other citizens' rights as long as it maybe saves just one life? Should every car come equipped with an ignition interlock as a requirement? drug adverts tend to be highly regulated in any case so I guess society says yes?
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May 5, 2016 18:16
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ulmont posted:If only there were a test for how the government can restrict speech in the interest of compelling (or possibly legitimate) government interest. Comparing campaign financing or political speech to extortion or blackmail is dumb tho. They're not even close, let some analogous. quote:drug adverts tend to be highly regulated in any case so I guess society says yes? EwokEntourage fucked around with this message at 18:25 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 18:20
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EwokEntourage posted:Comparing commercial advertising to politicos speech is bad too Except I'm pretty sure political commercial advertising being speech is like, the entire point of CU?
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May 5, 2016 18:40
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Nevvy Z posted:Except I'm pretty sure political commercial advertising being speech is like, the entire point of CU? No? CU lets corporations spend all the money they want on political speech. That doesn't make drug advertisements political speech. "Political commercial advertising" doesn't even make sense. Are you trying to argue that advertisements for shoes or coca cola are political speech?
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May 5, 2016 18:51
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EwokEntourage posted:Comparing campaign financing or political speech to extortion or blackmail is dumb tho. They're not even close, let some analogous. Blackmail and extortion are examples of areas where certain truthful speech - or restraint from making certain truthful speech - is made criminal by the government. These laws pose similar theoretical concerns to campaign finance (trust me, much ink has been spilled over the constitutionality of blackmail statutes), and yet the republic has not collapsed for their existence.
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May 5, 2016 20:22
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EwokEntourage posted:Are you trying to argue that advertisements for shoes or coca cola are political speech? Isn't every advertisement an implicit assertion that whatever is being sold is a good thing and that it's important for people to be able to buy them? To run with the Coca-Cola example: are cigarette ads political speech, since they inevitably take a position on the public health effects of smoking? Is there a meaningful distinction between nicotine and any other addictive drug that gets put in products linked to cancer and other long-term illnesses? Zoran fucked around with this message at 20:29 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 20:26
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ulmont posted:If only there were a test for how the government can restrict speech in the interest of compelling (or possibly legitimate) government interest. ulmont posted:Blackmail and extortion are examples of areas where certain truthful speech - or restraint from making certain truthful speech - is made criminal by the government. These laws pose similar theoretical concerns to campaign finance (trust me, much ink has been spilled over the constitutionality of blackmail statutes), and yet the republic has not collapsed for their existence.  Those aren't even remotely comparable. The reason blackmail and extortion are illegal is due to the element of coercion, not because of their content. Even then, political speech is a different animal. You can straight up tell people "adopt my preferred policies, or I won't vote/campaign for you" because candidates don't have any sort of right to be elected to the office they are running for.ulmont posted:That's a hell of a jump from an assertion that certain actions are, in fact, not citizens' rights. Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 20:35 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 20:33
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Zoran posted:To run with the Coca-Cola example: are cigarette ads political speech, since they inevitably take a position on the public health effects of smoking? Is there a meaningful distinction between nicotine and any other addictive drug that gets put in products linked to cancer and other long-term illnesses?
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May 5, 2016 20:40
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twodot posted:Cigarette ads aren't political speech. They're promoting a commercial transaction. Arguably there's a built in political statement of "Cigarette ads also shouldn't be illegal", but cigarette ads don't give a gently caress if smoking bans exist in restaurants or whatever. Obviously you can deduce that the people who produce cigarette ads probably have certain policy preferences, but they aren't being expressed in the ads. Although advertisers certainly sell an image as part of their product that their target consumers are likely to identify with, and often that image includes political/ideological messages. The Marlboro Man was obviously an appeal to anti-government boot-strappers, for example. Or this:  which is obviously trying to sell the granola as part of a more liberal image. So is the inclusion of the wind mill political speech? Overlaps like that can get hard to sort out.
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May 5, 2016 20:48
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Deteriorata posted:Although advertisers certainly sell an image as part of their product that their target consumers are likely to identify with, and often that image includes political/ideological messages. The Marlboro Man was obviously an appeal to anti-government boot-strappers, for example. Or this:
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May 5, 2016 20:53
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twodot posted:I don't understand what's hard about this. That ad is selling a product. Even if you argue it's promoting wind power, that's still a product. Wind power is a controversial subject with some people. They will accuse the ad of promoting a political message that they disagree with. The advertiser is using their money to promote a political issue along with their product. If this is allowed, it will be a back door for all sorts of political messaging in the guise of a product advertisement. "Eat Trump Waffles!" Would you ban that? What if the maker's name was actually Fred Trump?
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May 5, 2016 20:57
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EwokEntourage posted:Are you trying to argue that advertisements for shoes or coca cola are political speech? No I just read "commercial advertisement" and was confused because political speech includes advertisements. But I was reading 'commercial' colloquially. As in "I'm tired of all these political commercials". Just a brain fart. Though I'm glad to have accidentally inspired some interesting thoughts. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 21:06 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 21:03
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It kind of reminds me of that weird line of thought that was being pushed against unions, in that pretty much every single action a public union takes is at least conceivably political therefore union dues are compulsory speech or something like that. I'd like to see some drug advertiser try to make the push that censorship of commercial ads is limiting their ability to make political speech or is otherwise equivalent to political censorship; someone with enough of a sense of sophistry could probably carry that torch quite a while, although nobody in government would be so stupid as to agree with it. There's a point where the legal, uh, narrative about money == speech gets sort of absurd if you follow the thread too literally.
Tiler Kiwi fucked around with this message at 21:14 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 21:10
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Discendo Vox posted:You guys have now conflated political speech with political campaign contributions with corporate political spending with 501 entity political spending. It's like I've fallen into a horrifying nexus of disconnected policy intuitions. I, too, am done. Can we have a new SCOTUS thread, please? People could just make a campaign finance thread and leave this one alone instead. It'd be nice to see 50+ posts and not have it be 48-50 posts of non-SCOTUS chat. Though it's not 2015 anymore so a new thread would be cool too of a new title for this one. Mr. Nice! posted:How about we talk about something more uplifting like the trump camp saying they're going to make Ted Cruz attorney general and then nominate him for the supreme court. When was this? The last time Trump was asked about SCOTUS stuff he named two right-wing judges, one of whom Bush jr recess appointed after the nomination was blocked.
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May 5, 2016 21:10
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Deteriorata posted:Wind power is a controversial subject with some people. They will accuse the ad of promoting a political message that they disagree with.
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May 5, 2016 21:12
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Tiler Kiwi posted:It kind of reminds me of that weird line of thought that was being pushed against unions, in that pretty much every single action a union takes is political therefore union dues are compulsory speech or something like that. There's a point where the legal, uh, narrative about money == speech gets sort of absurd if you follow the thread too literally. Yeah, that was sort of my point. We've seen this sort of argumentation before. The definition of "political speech" is itself a political issue. What's political to one person is not to another. People don't notice things they agree with, but pick out hidden message they don't in a hurry. Perhaps there is a way of demarcating this particular slippery slope, but I'm not comfortable wading into it. Once you start drawing lines it gets rather complicated.
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May 5, 2016 21:16
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Evil Fluffy posted:When was this? The last time Trump was asked about SCOTUS stuff he named two right-wing judges, one of whom Bush jr recess appointed after the nomination was blocked. It was something that came from Friend Ben as the plan for Cruz in a trump presidency.
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May 5, 2016 23:17
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Dead Reckoning posted:Those aren't even remotely comparable. The point is that the First Amendment is messy all over the place, and that, while there are difficult lines to draw on occasion, the republic has nonetheless been able to function even with restrictions placed on truthful speech based on its content.
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May 6, 2016 03:19
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Dead Reckoning posted:That's not what anyone has argued. In this case, doing something is worse than doing nothing, so "nothing" is the best solution we have. The cure is worse than the disease. Think about those websites that aggregate arrest records. It's scummy, but there is nothing to be done about it without either making it possible for the police to hold people without revealing their identities, or by making it illegal to publish embarassing but true information. You can't say, "Well, we can just make it illegal in this narrow instance, precedent and consistency don't matter. I'm sure the courts and congress can sort out the grey area between good free speech and mean free speech," because the entire reason the Bill of Rights exists is that governments have historically been unwilling to check their own power. Once the camel gets its nose under the tent, soon you have the whole camel inside. I don't really buy your slippery slope to tyranny prediction here, do you have anything to support the idea that campaign finance restrictions lead to censorship of anti-government opinions and criminalization of unpopular political opinions? Because I can point to a whole bunch of liberal democracies with stronger campaign finance restrictions than ours and public financing of campaigns and they haven't done any of the things you're talking about. For that matter, there is no constitutional check already on the government's power to completely end campaign financing: a 100% income tax is absolutely constitutional but somehow this hasn't happened despite the "camel's nose" already in the tent with a 39% top tax rate. Come to think of it, the government banned speech it didn't like already with the Alien and Sedition Acts, but go figure those acts were really unpopular, the next presidential candidate denounced them and blew away the federalists in the next election as a result and they expired. So I'm not really seeing any historical or contemporary evidence that making it harder for the rich to buy legislatures will make the voters vote to ban themselves from criticizing the government. E: Dead Reckoning posted:So you're perfectly fine with infringing on other citizens' rights as long as it maybe saves just one life? Should every car come equipped with an ignition interlock as a requirement? No, I don't think this infringement on everyone's privacy (assuming you had the strict enforcement it would require to keep everyone from just disabling it) would be worth it. But campaign finance reform doesn't even affect the 99% of Americans who don't have the money to buy legislative elections anyway, and for the 1% it does affect they still have all the same means to express themselves politically available to them that the common people do. It's almost like we can balance regulation vs outcome and decide on a case-by-case basis whether a given rule has benefits that outweigh the problems. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 05:02 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 04:09
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VitalSigns, we weren't talking about campaign finance before you arrived. We were talking about independent expenditures. Do you understand how those are different.
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May 6, 2016 05:30
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There was discussion of campaign finance, there were people defending Boehner handing out lobbyist checks on the floor of the house right before a vote. But no, I don't really see a difference between independent expenditures and campaign finance, every dollar a superPAC spends on ads is one less dollar the politician needs to spend. And I don't see any problem with caps on independent expenditures.
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May 6, 2016 05:52
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ulmont posted:You want me to pick other examples of difficult First Amendment line-drawing and permissible government regulation? How about in drug promotion, where truthful speech about the effects of drugs in treating non-approved conditions is nonetheless barred? Arguing that some restrictions on speech exist and therefore your pet restriction should be constitutionally permissible is like arguing that, since the exigent circumstances exception exists, a proposal that the police not need a warrant to search an Asian person's house is probably permissible under the Fourth Amendment, because clearly the 4th is not absolute. VitalSigns posted:I don't really buy your slippery slope to tyranny prediction here, do you have anything to support the idea that campaign finance restrictions lead to censorship of anti-government opinions and criminalization of unpopular political opinions? Because I can point to a whole bunch of liberal democracies with stronger campaign finance restrictions than ours and public financing of campaigns and they haven't done any of the things you're talking about. I especially like "the Alien and Sedition Acts were no big deal, because we got it right eventually." I'm sure that Japanese-Americans understood that 1798 was a crazy time, and that setting the precedent of the government having authority to detain "aliens" didn't have any harmful consequences. Really, their detention was just an inconvenience while we conducted a balancing test on whether letting them have civil rights outweighed the potential problems. You either need to propose a consistent set of rules that will get your preferred outcomes without criminalizing important lawful behavior, or you should just admit that your argument rests on judges and elected officials being good actors who will use their expanded discretion to enforce outcomes you find preferable. VitalSigns posted:It's almost like we can balance regulation vs outcome and decide on a case-by-case basis whether a given rule has benefits that outweigh the problems.
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May 6, 2016 06:32
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Dead Reckoning posted:Again, you can't really compare commercial speech to political speech. Dead Reckoning posted:Arguing that some restrictions on speech exist and therefore your pet restriction should be constitutionally permissible is like arguing that, since the exigent circumstances exception exists, a proposal that the police not need a warrant to search an Asian person's house is probably permissible under the Fourth Amendment, because clearly the 4th is not absolute. Dead Reckoning posted:Deciding whether to apply rules on a case-by-case basis rather than applying pre-agreed, universally applicable rules is basically decision making by emotional sentiment and no better than mob rule.
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May 6, 2016 14:03
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Mr. Nice! posted:It was something that came from Friend Ben as the plan for Cruz in a trump presidency. Has there been any evidence that the actual Trump camp listens to anything that comes out of Ben's mouth?
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May 6, 2016 14:07
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Mors Rattus posted:Has there been any evidence that the actual Trump camp listens to anything that comes out of Ben's mouth? He's a part of the Trump team and is currently the lead of the VP search team.
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May 6, 2016 14:11
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