3 ms·
In a world where you have to pay for things, the ability to freely use your money is necessary for most rights. Unless everyone can will themselves TV and radio
by amalcon 17y ago
In a world where you have to pay for things, the ability to freely use your money is necessary for most rights. Unless everyone can will themselves TV and radio time and wish pamphlets and websites into existence, restriction of spending for political speech is a questionable proposition at best.
Though, to be fair, everyone will likely be able to do these things (or their equivalents) in the distant-but-not-too-distant future.
- Semiapies 17y agoAt that point, they will use different justifications to try to restrict political speech.
- joubert 17y agoAnd how will they be able to do these things? Using technology established with government funds perhaps?
- Semiapies 17y agoI assume he means "nanotech makes everything happens with a poof of magic smoke."
- amalcon 17y agoTV and radio time? Those things are going to the internet rapidly. This makes the amount of bandwidth used dependent on the number of listeners (i.e. not a pure broadcast medium), which means that there are by definition enough resources to go around. There's only a social difference between "buying airtime" and "putting a video on YouTube." Pamphlets won't go away until everyone has a smartphone, which could take a while, but once it happens, that's it for the medium. It gets replaced by the "website." And you pretty much can will a website into existence. FrontPage is decidedly unpopular here, but I know people who have built adequate websites to their purposes just using FrontPage. We just need the free alternatives to catch up.
- Semiapies 17y agoAnd then you still have money to spend - unless you're going with purely free and out-of-the-box solutions, someone's going to have to spend time designing the website. At the very least, someone will have to spend time writing what will be on that website. Even if nobody pays you a dime to do those things, you've just done something that can be priced under "in-kind" campaign finance regulations.
- amalcon 17y agoYou have to spend time thinking of what to say, whenever you want to say it. Fortunately, everyone has the same amount of time (well, per unit time anyway). A corporation is somewhat handicapped in this regard, in that it doesn't actually have any time: it can only buy it from others. This does not strike me as a problem.