Until the supremes work out and declare that (soft) money is not protected speech, America will be an absolute, undemocratic plutocracy. Sigh. I can use my mo

Until the supremes work out and declare that (soft) money is not protected speech, America will be an absolute, undemocratic plutocracy. Sigh. I can use my money for political speech as I see fit. You and I could pool our money for political speech as we jointly see fit. At what point do you advocate that we should lose our right to cooperate, pooling our money to reach more of the electorate? Sure, it's a cliche by now, but America isn't designed to be a democracy[1]. It's overarching architecture is that of a constitutional republic, only granting limited powers to the government. It just uses democracy to fill in the details. The problem is that the people have complacently ceded to the government too much power (and you're advocating that we cede even more![2]). The government now has the power to determine who is going to succeed, who is going to get rich, and who is going to be destroyed. But, as I've said elsewhere, the problem is with public choice economics, and rationally-irrational voters. Because we've allowed the government's power to grow so greatly, it now wields sufficient power that it's (very) cost effective to woo the legislators for special privileges and rent seeking. On the other hand, while voters collectively could wield power to counter this, it's diffuse, and any one particular voter has approximately zero influence, and thus has little incentive to make the significant investment in educating himself about what's going on. Thus, the electorate is generally ignorant (and rationally so), and does not know about (most of) the shenanigans going on with their government. [1] There are 3 equal branches to the US federal government. The SCOTUS is appointed, not democratically elected, so that's 1/3. The President is elected by the electoral college, not the populace, that's another 1/3. The legislature is made up of two houses. The Representatives are elected democratically, but until the 17th Amendment, the Senate was appointed by the State legislatures -- not democratic. So that's another 1/6. Thus, 5/6ths of the US government's power was determined non-democratically as designed at the time the Constitution was ratified. Only 1/6 was democratic. So it's tough to say that we're supposed to be a democracy. [2] Indeed, you seem to be trying to give the government more power, not keep it for the liberty of the people. In (1a) you advocate controlling speech, which obviously entails having the goverment decide whose speech is legal and whose isn't. And in (2) you further advocate prior restraint on speech, deciding in advance that someone seems to have the intent to say something bad. It looks to me like you're trying to build a "democracy" with absolute control over us. (I'll leave the ultimate invocation of Godwin to the reader)