Koch makes one of the best arguments I ever heard for taxing people like him at 95%. If we dont do that, they will buy government. They will set all policy. Theres nothing democratic about it and only a complete ASSHOLE equates money with speech. Whoops, did I say they will buy government? They already have. Call your senators and congressman and demand that they produce and pass legislation to nullify Citizens United and McCutcheon. The system of “free and open debate” Koch envisions is one in which the volume of your voice is determined by the amount of money you have, but no matter how loud that voice, you are exempted from any direct criticism. That would be a privilege only the wealthy would want or need. Think about it this way. Nobody is going to run an ad saying, “Barack Obama got a ten dollar contribution from Betty Lundegard of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Just how much do we know about Betty Lundegard? What’s her agenda?” The reason is that it couldn’t possibly matter, so no one cares. But if you pour $400 million into a campaign, then it does matter, and people will care. Betty Lundegard isn’t affecting very many people’s votes, elected officials won’t jump to take Betty’s calls. Furthermore, Betty won’t have the luxury of publishing op eds in the Wall Street Journal defending herself. So freedom from criticism over your political spending is a freedom only the wealthy would need. Yes, there have been issues in the past about the privacy of non-profit groups’ donors. In one key case from the civil rights era, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Alabama’s effort to get access to the NAACP’s donor list was invalid, because the donors would likely be subject to intimidation and even violence. But Charles Koch isn’t worried for his personal safety. He wants to wield maximal influence with minimal criticism. Similarly, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court are deeply, deeply concerned about the ways that ”speech” rights, i.e. the right to use your money to influence politics, are restricted at the upper end. In yesterday’s decision, they continued to weaken those restrictions. With the McCutcheon decision, there is a way in which the sum total of liberty in America has been expanded. But do you feel freer? Unless you’ve got a few hundred million in the bank, the answer is certainly no. In a strict sense, Charles Koch and I both have the “freedom” to donate a few million dollars directly to candidates. But in the actual world, only one of us has that freedom. Both John Roberts and the Kochs are doing everything they can to create a zone of freedom that keeps growing upward, with new kinds of liberty that only the wealthiest Americans can access.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 17:30:17 +0000
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