People can hear you. The megaphone analogy is, as I said, not accurate. Fox News doesn't "drown out" the various blogs and newsletters and whatever else that exists. And if Fox News did not exist, none of the people writing blogs and newsletters would be in any better position to disseminate their ideas than they are now. So basically, all you want to do is limit how much Fox News is allowed to fill people's heads with their own ideas. I can understand why you would want this, but I am not at all comfortable with the idea. It is censorship in and of itself, to absolutely no purpose except to cut the speech of some organizations down to a quieter level. I don't see how that is much better than the situation we have now. Freedom of Speech is more than an amendment: It's a cultural concept and inherent in that is an element of successful speech. To suggest that we should somehow concern ourselves with equalizing dissemination is a frightening task, and I think ultimately an impossible one.
Anyway, my point is that anyone can hear anyone and Fox News hasn't done a single thing to work against that. Their existence has no negative bearing on Freedom of Speech - for the ability of the less wealthy to disseminate speech, or to be heard. The law shouldn't be concerned with whether or not people want to hear you or choose to listen to you. The government shouldn't ensure that all speech has equal traction in society. That would be impossible. Political discourse as well as art and culture and all other forms of speech are fluid, and society should largely dictate within itself what it listens to. Fox News hasn't eaten up every media pipeline to the point where people have to go through them to speak. And it will never happen, either. So whether society listens to Fox News or they read Shryke's Soliloquies is up to society.
You and others keep arguing the idea that Fox News is standing there with a megaphone blaring out and blanketing all other speech and I see no evidence of it and you have yet to provide any. "People aren't reading blogs" isn't even remotely evidence of this. It just means that Fox News is good at exploiting the basic human need for shiny things, which I don't entirely blame Fox News for, as shitty as they are.
Fox News also only has a viewership of like 2.5-3 million people for its top shows, like O'Reilly and Hannity.
Blago isn't going to jail because of free speech issues. He's going to jail because he was shockingly corrupt, even by Illinois standards.
That's right. Asking for money in return for a senate seat is not a free speech issue. It's a bribery issue. Why is lobbying protected as speech when selling a senate seat is bribery?
Because lobbying isn't protected as speech. It's protected as a form of petition.
Purchasing a product for it's intended use or for it's entertainment value isn't an act of political speech. An employer paying an employee is not done so to garner political influence with the employee or a political institution. Commerce is not speech and the purchase of goods alone does not engender favorable or unfavorable opinions of a product, especially in an environment with overwhelming pressure to purchase pointless products for social reasons.
To go further, it's unreasonable to associate the relatively meager salary of a journalist with that of the dozens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars doled out from the hands of Capital.
So no, I won't consider Modern Man's grossly hyperbolic "What If" situation, especially since the crux of the argument is money specifically being donated to political parties to garner unfair political influence and not money exchanging hands in the course of purchasing tools, entertainment, food, etc, in a non political environment.
Preventing Capital from gaining disproportionate influence does not, ultimately, endanger the spreading of ideas. A view to the contrary is conscious support of institutionalized corruption.
Inequity in trade could simply mean that one person is better at delivering figurative or literal goods than another person, and it's not restricted to monetary systems.
So long as they are not able to literally secure a monopoly on a good? Then that's really fine. Physical goods do have scarcity which is why I think unchecked growth is bad because it enables you to hoard all of any given good and thus create an environment where you no longer are required to be fair as you are the sole person able to distribute something. The presence of a monopoly in any given market is always dictated by the ability for someone with only a better idea or process at performing a given task/function to secure necessary resources free from interference and compete with the mainstream establishment only based upon their merit/effort.
Consider Robert Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain argument; free exchanges will always disrupt any favored patterned of distribution. From Wikipedia: Wilt Chamberlain is an extremely popular basketball player in this society, and Nozick further assumes 1 million people are willing to freely give Wilt 25 cents each to watch him play basketball over the course of a season (we assume no other transactions occur). Wilt now has $250,000, a much larger sum than any of the other people in the society.
Free exchanges can disrupt favored patterns of distribution only when people are not aware of the full impact of their transactions upon a given ecosystem. Suppose one million people in this situation each knew not only that they wanted to give Wilt Chamberlain 25 cents to see him play basketball, but that exactly one million people would do this. This gives a potential for those one million people to come together and collectively decide whether or not they wish to give him a pooled 250,000 as a singular unit versus one million unaware individuals only thinking about their individual transaction.
Imbalance of distribution is created entirely by imbalance of information. Wilt Chamberlain in this hypothetical probably knows how many people will want to see him play basketball within a margin of error and that gives him the ability to adjust the ticket prices so that he secures the most capital from his audience by finding a supply/demand equilibrium which is acceptable to an individual's desire to see him play basketball versus an obviously more fair collective social assessment by his fans as a group as to how much his playing basketball is worth to their social group.
Just exchange money with favors, or agreements to work, or chickens, or whatever. They're less liquid assets, but whatever you're exchanging, suddenly Wilt Chamberlain has way more than most other people. Either everyone is working for him now, or he's the new chicken baron. If you're talking about simply introducing a trade/barter system, I do't think that's relevant to this thread, but I'm willing to talk about it in another thread.
No, I like the liquidity money provides because it enables smoother exchanges. It's just that we need limitations on what can and cannot be valued monetarily, what people should be allowed to "privately own" and therefore barter only as a direct exchange of property, and what should be labeled as public commons which should be socially maintained for all as best as possible. Money's only dangerous when it becomes the sole means of dictating effective power in a society because then accumulation of wealth enables complete social control through behavioral incentive manipulation via the economy and systems of excessive private ownership of all physical materials (with no mandate for their responsible use or distribution.) The biggest thing though that has to change for any of this to work is the fundamental recognition of information as something that in the vast majority of its uses should be considered a free public good.
It's why I tend to be outraged at the state of patents and copyrights as it enables a slavery of ideas by allowing monetization of things only for the purposes of a belief that private individuals are entitled to arbitrarily defined exclusive enrichment. And not the original purpose, which was that anyone who is a creator of sufficiently creative art or sufficiently innovative science should be able to strike a deal with society at large to share their ideas, which hold intangible but not entirely immeasurable value, for things of tangible value, namely the goods/services (whose individual/social utility is more easily defined) needed to survive and enable greater happiness. The problem comes when the belief in arbitrary enrichment because of nebulous concepts of "ownership" creates a situation where information vital to ensuring fairness and equity in trade can be withheld or even misrepresented.
This is why people hate fraud, it's not because the literal act of a lie is a problem alone but rather the practice of deception in trade and in agreement it enables cause profound harms to a free society interested in ensuring fair valuation of all things within it.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Purchasing a product for it's intended use or for it's entertainment value isn't an act of political speech. An employer paying an employee is not done so to garner political influence with the employee or a political institution. Commerce is not speech and the purchase of goods alone does not engender favorable or unfavorable opinions of a product, especially in an environment with overwhelming pressure to purchase pointless products for social reasons.
To go further, it's unreasonable to associate the relatively meager salary of a journalist with that of the dozens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars doled out from the hands of Capital.
So no, I won't consider Modern Man's grossly hyperbolic "What If" situation, especially since the crux of the argument is money specifically being donated to political parties to garner unfair political influence and not money exchanging hands in the course of purchasing tools, entertainment, food, etc, in a non political environment.
Preventing Capital from gaining disproportionate influence does not, ultimately, endanger the spreading of ideas. A view to the contrary is conscious support of institutionalized corruption.
Defined broadly enough, me buying a hamburger is in a sense communicating that the price is acceptable and I want the burger. But okay, that's perhaps not so useful. But you're not addressing the problem the OP presents.
The issue raised in the OP was about the connection between money and censorship: A law saying that “Michael Moore can’t produce or direct any more movies or publish any more books” is different from a law that says "nobody can pay money to buy a Michael Moore book or a ticket to a Michael Moore movie", but it's still an effort to censor Michael Moore and to prevent the spread of Moore's ideas.
We should be able to draw a distinction between money-enabling-speech (michael moore selling a book) and the money-as-speech construction some people are bringing up (campaign donations, or buying a hamburger I guess.)
It's impossible (or at least really hard) to regulate the former without doing harm to the speech involved. In the latter case, we aren't really talking about speech anyway.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Inequity in trade could simply mean that one person is better at delivering figurative or literal goods than another person, and it's not restricted to monetary systems.
So long as they are not able to literally secure a monopoly on a good? Then that's really fine. Physical goods do have scarcity which is why I think unchecked growth is bad because it enables you to hoard all of any given good and thus create an environment where you no longer are required to be fair as you are the sole person able to distribute something. The presence of a monopoly in any given market is always dictated by the ability for someone with only a better idea or process at performing a given task/function to secure necessary resources free from interference and compete with the mainstream establishment only based upon their merit/effort.
Money doesn't necessitate monopoly though, and monopolies aren't exclusive to monetary systems. As such, I'm not sure why you bring it up or make an issue of it.
Consider Robert Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain argument; free exchanges will always disrupt any favored patterned of distribution. From Wikipedia: Wilt Chamberlain is an extremely popular basketball player in this society, and Nozick further assumes 1 million people are willing to freely give Wilt 25 cents each to watch him play basketball over the course of a season (we assume no other transactions occur). Wilt now has $250,000, a much larger sum than any of the other people in the society.
Free exchanges can disrupt favored patterns of distribution only when people are not aware of the full impact of their transactions upon a given ecosystem. Suppose one million people in this situation each knew not only that they wanted to give Wilt Chamberlain 25 cents to see him play basketball, but that exactly one million people would do this. This gives a potential for those one million people to come together and collectively decide whether or not they wish to give him a pooled 250,000 as a singular unit versus one million unaware individuals only thinking about their individual transaction.
Imbalance of distribution is created entirely by imbalance of information. Wilt Chamberlain in this hypothetical probably knows how many people will want to see him play basketball within a margin of error and that gives him the ability to adjust the ticket prices so that he secures the most capital from his audience by finding a supply/demand equilibrium which is acceptable to an individual's desire to see him play basketball versus an obviously more fair collective social assessment by his fans as a group as to how much his playing basketball is worth to their social group.
First, It's not like I'm suddenly less willing to see Kanye West or whoever if I know that other people are also paying however much those tickets go for these days. I'm actually acutely aware that concerts are how a lot of artists make their money, and I choose to support them that way. Assuming I'm reading your claim that "imbalance of distribution is created entirely by imbalance of information" correctly, it seems obviously incorrect.
I'm not seeing what this has to do with your claim that the "difficulty in pursuing alternatives is what enables equity in trade because people are required to be fair to get anything at all". Money doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. If bands are collecting IOUs for favors, or chickens, or whatever, they're simply accumulating less liquid assets, not necessarily less of them, except as perhaps a function of the inefficiency of such a system.
We should be able to draw a distinction between money-enabling-speech (michael moore selling a book) and the money-as-speech construction some people are bringing up (campaign donations, or buying a hamburger I guess.)
It's impossible (or at least really hard) to regulate the former without doing harm to the speech involved. In the latter case, we aren't really talking about speech anyway.
Restricting a person’s ability to obtain money for the purpose of communicating with the public is a means of restricting that person's ability to communicate, though.
The issue raised in the OP was about the connection between money and censorship: A law saying that “Michael Moore can’t produce or direct any more movies or publish any more books” is different from a law that says "nobody can pay money to buy a Michael Moore book or a ticket to a Michael Moore movie", but it's still an effort to censor Michael Moore and to prevent the spread of Moore's ideas.
A law that says "Michael Moore can't ride on planes or trains or drive an automobile" would cripple his ability to make movies and sell books and give talks. Is transportation "basically" speech?
On the one hand, we need to recognize that an activity that facilitates speech is not itself speech - that's an unhelpful and ultimately deleterious conflation. However, that doesn't give a government license to regulate those activities in a way that causes a chilling effect. We need to simultaneously recognize that unfair enforcement of laws regulating these speech-facilitating activities has an unacceptable chilling effect on speech. There is a tension here, but not a direct contradiction.
It's an area that requires nuance, not brute equivocations.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The issue raised in the OP was about the connection between money and censorship: A law saying that “Michael Moore can’t produce or direct any more movies or publish any more books” is different from a law that says "nobody can pay money to buy a Michael Moore book or a ticket to a Michael Moore movie", but it's still an effort to censor Michael Moore and to prevent the spread of Moore's ideas.
A law that says "Michael Moore can't ride on planes or trains or drive an automobile" would cripple his ability to make movies and sell books and give talks. Is transportation "basically" speech?
On the one hand, we need to recognize that an activity that facilitates speech is not itself speech - that's an unhelpful and ultimately deleterious conflation. However, that doesn't give a government license to regulate those activities in a way that causes a chilling effect. We need to simultaneously recognize that unfair enforcement of laws regulating these speech-facilitating activities has an unacceptable chilling effect on speech. There is a tension here, but not a direct contradiction.
It's an area that requires nuance, not brute equivocations.
Well as you note, there's a lot of overlap between apparently disparate things like transportation and the things that people say. I don't think there's any good hard-and-fast delineations that can or should necessarily be made. I think brute equivocating is a good deal more helpful than semantic rigidity, given that we know there is overlap, we know there are significant relationships between speech and other activities.
We should be able to draw a distinction between money-enabling-speech (michael moore selling a book) and the money-as-speech construction some people are bringing up (campaign donations, or buying a hamburger I guess.)
It's impossible (or at least really hard) to regulate the former without doing harm to the speech involved. In the latter case, we aren't really talking about speech anyway.
Restricting a person’s ability to obtain money for the purpose of communicating with the public is a means of restricting that person's ability to communicate, though.
Not really. They have the same ability to communicate that everybody else has. If Herman Cain wants to write a book, he can write a book. That is speech. Me giving money to Herman Cain for purpose of electioneering isn't speech.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
If money=speech, because it has a political component, then all human actions are speech, and should therefore be protected.
Murder is an expression of one's hate for an individual and should not be limited.
Many types of non-verbal conduct are protected by the 1st Amendment. Giving a politician the finger would be an example. Something like murder wouldn't qualify, though, because the state has the legal power to outlaw that type of conduct in order to protect other rights.
The government has very limited powers to limit or outlaw written or verbal speech. However, that power increases once you start going from speech, to expressive conduct to pure conduct.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
As a different line of argument, it seems to me that by making money equivalent to speech, thus removing Congress's ability to restrict its transfer, infringes on the Congress's power under the commerce clause, since the majority of commerce is through exchange of money. You could also reach the conclusion that Congress shouldn't be able to tax the population, because taking peoples' money limits their speech.
Of course, slippery slope arguments like this are kind of silly. Just food for though I guess.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
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As a different line of argument, it seems to me that by making money equivalent to speech, thus removing Congress's ability to restrict its transfer, infringes on the Congress's power under the commerce clause, since the majority of commerce is through exchange of money. You could also reach the conclusion that Congress shouldn't be able to tax the population, because taking peoples' money limits their speech.
Of course, slippery slope arguments like this are kind of silly. Just food for though I guess.
You're right that Congress has the power to regulate commercial transactions. But, when those transactions involve the 1st Amendment, that power is more limited than in other instances. Congress can ban entire types of industries (such as the sale of certain narcotics, for example) but that power wouldn't extend to banning industries where there are 1st Amendment implications. Congress couldn't ban newspapers, for example.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
We should be able to draw a distinction between money-enabling-speech (michael moore selling a book) and the money-as-speech construction some people are bringing up (campaign donations, or buying a hamburger I guess.)
It's impossible (or at least really hard) to regulate the former without doing harm to the speech involved. In the latter case, we aren't really talking about speech anyway.
Restricting a person’s ability to obtain money for the purpose of communicating with the public is a means of restricting that person's ability to communicate, though.
Not really. They have the same ability to communicate that everybody else has. If Herman Cain wants to write a book, he can write a book. That is speech. Me giving money to Herman Cain for purpose of electioneering isn't speech.
Making restrictions more universal by applying them to more groups of people doesn't make them less restrictive, it makes them more restrictive, but more fair.
As a different line of argument, it seems to me that by making money equivalent to speech, thus removing Congress's ability to restrict its transfer, infringes on the Congress's power under the commerce clause, since the majority of commerce is through exchange of money. You could also reach the conclusion that Congress shouldn't be able to tax the population, because taking peoples' money limits their speech.
Of course, slippery slope arguments like this are kind of silly. Just food for though I guess.
You're right that Congress has the power to regulate commercial transactions. But, when those transactions involve the 1st Amendment, that power is more limited than in other instances. Congress can ban entire types of industries (such as the sale of certain narcotics, for example) but that power wouldn't extend to banning industries where there are 1st Amendment implications. Congress couldn't ban newspapers, for example.
Yeah, you're right. I was just pointing out that since money is used in almost every transaction, and if money is speech, nearly all transactions are speech, and Congress's power to regulate commerce falls apart.
But again, its a poor slippery slope argument. No one would ever really push this idea to that conclusion.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
We should be able to draw a distinction between money-enabling-speech (michael moore selling a book) and the money-as-speech construction some people are bringing up (campaign donations, or buying a hamburger I guess.)
It's impossible (or at least really hard) to regulate the former without doing harm to the speech involved. In the latter case, we aren't really talking about speech anyway.
Restricting a person’s ability to obtain money for the purpose of communicating with the public is a means of restricting that person's ability to communicate, though.
Not really. They have the same ability to communicate that everybody else has. If Herman Cain wants to write a book, he can write a book. That is speech. Me giving money to Herman Cain for purpose of electioneering isn't speech.
Making restrictions more universal by applying them to more groups of people doesn't make them less restrictive, it makes them more restrictive, but more fair.
I guess I don't understand what you mean by this
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
They have the same ability to communicate that everybody else has.
Making restrictions more universal by applying them to more groups of people doesn't make them less restrictive, it makes them more restrictive, but more fair.
I guess I don't understand what you mean by this
Having "the same ability to communicate that everybody else has" != "not restrictive" or "less restrictive". If everyone is banned from contributing to authors or newsletters or political candidates who address the patent system (for example), everyone has "the same ability to communicate that everybody else has", but it's also incredibly restrictive.
Money doesn't necessitate monopoly though, and monopolies aren't exclusive to monetary systems. As such, I'm not sure why you bring it up or make an issue of it.
Money is one route to monopoly (The other is via force, as one can only own property by enforcing its ownership absolutely via the inevitable application of violent physical force to maintain an unfair concentration of anything.) and it currently is in practice in this world used to great extent to enable a vastly unaccountable oligarchic financial sector which wield what I find a deeply disturbing light form of authoritarian social control through the manipulation of economic incentive structures from the top down. All of this control is enabled by their unfair access to essentially free or otherwise immensely discounted money via the private central banking system which provides an immeasurably large imbalance of power because no other individual or group is able to compete fairly for access to it entirely on the merit of their ideas (and institutional capacity to realize those ideas) to use that capital resource for the purest public good alone. You're either a Fed insider, or you're not, and if you aren't a big investment bank? Good luck getting insider status.
First, It's not like I'm suddenly less willing to see Kanye West or whoever if I know that other people are also paying however much those tickets go for these days. I'm actually acutely aware that concerts are how a lot of artists make their money, and I choose to support them that way. Assuming I'm reading your claim that "imbalance of distribution is created entirely by imbalance of information" correctly, it seems obviously incorrect.
What you're missing here is the deeper question of labor and what is considered a fair reward for labor to incentivize the fulfillment of social needs within a group, collective or greater society. Which cannot be truly answered without establishing firmly what value means and also what utility means. Value is entirely intangible and represents the mental or emotional worth to a person of any given tangible or intangible good or service. It is the satisfaction they receive from making use of it and while a person's valuation of an object can be entirely rational it can also be entirely irrational as well as it only exists as a concept within their minds for assigning worth to things outside of the self. Utility in this case refers to a specific type of valuation which I primarily restrict to objects which are physically tangible and have a physical use in the environment. Food, a wrench and a car are all objects with definable and physically measurable utility as they accomplish a physical task and therefore as they perform entirely physical tasks it is easier to create entirely universal physical metrics to measure their actual valuation. This does not mean that a person's internal valuation of the worth of a car will represent its ability to perform its task of transportation, or even represent it's physical aspect. A person might value a red car so much more than a blue car for entirely no reason and assign within their own minds a higher worth.
But as physical objects exist primarily to perform physical tasks and they also have calculable time and resource costs this establishes a very easy to assign system of fair value to physical objects based entirely upon the cost to create them. They are as valuable as they are difficult to create in relation to the need for a set amount within a given social grouping. However what about ideas? Well that's where things become entirely more difficult. Someone whose primary good or service does not serve a direct physical utility then has a problem when it comes to the assignment of value.
Value though is always intangible, so the only way to asses a fair value for an intangible good or service is to assess first of all who has interest in it and to ask them quite honestly if the choice between having that benefit of an intangible good or service is collectively worth an exchange of X physical resources in return. This is why Kanye's fans should collectively negotiate for the amount of money they wish to give him. Because Kanye obviously needs to eat and needs to pay for the cost of everything which makes his performances possible. So he and his fans have to basically share all of the information they have and then come to a sort of contractual agreement that fans of Kanye will give him X dollars or X goods in return for a performance or series of performances. The price negotiated should be enough to cover his expenses as well as whatever they will agree on is a fair margin. If Kanye thinks the margin is unfair he can not perform and the fans miss out, if they collectively cannot agree that he is worth X margin then as a society they must accept that they obviously truly do not believe that enabling this way of life is worth a resource exchange. At which point the group accepts social responsibility for its choice and may or may not chose to exclude specific members next time if they were interfering in some way with the bargaining process. Alternatively Kanye and the Fans as a group reach a collectively agreed upon dollar value which they both think is fair.
Since again, value is intangible. Fairness can only be established by an entirely voluntary negotiated agreement for exchange of said value, and neither party may be allowed to withhold any relevant information during the negotiation. After this agreement is reached, Fans of Kanye as a group must then determine within their ranks the fairest way to get each individual to contribute to that group price (Typically you'd have done this during negotiations for the collective exchange) and the end result is that all individuals feel they have paid a fair price, as a group they have received what they believe is a fair deal and Kanye himself has received what he believes is fair compensation. This is the only way to establish fair exchange regarding intangibles as fairness may only be determined within one's mind when there is equally available information to decide on an exchange of value.
Now you might think "But how can Kanye live like that?!" But if Kanye believes the price is fair and so does his audience then why is it a crime? If on the other hand however the fans are unable as a group to pay to support his presentations then there has been an obvious social choice. It does not matter what each individual thinks Kanye's worth is unless that individual alone is willing and able to exchange the value necessary to enable his performances, if a group of individuals with a shared interest do not have access to sufficient resources and/or do not collectively value his performance (in accordance with their ability to pool resources) enough to pay for its existence. Well, I'm sorry, but Kanye has no inherent right to be supported in what he does from the labor of other people. He has every right to sing, he has every right to record music but he has no right to make use of either the resources or labor of others unless he is willing and able to make a fair exchange for those.
This is where individual freedom vs freedom of capital comes in. He is individually free to provide for himself either directly through his own labor or through exchanging other tangible or intangible items/services with others so as to enable his life. But what, where's the room for compassion? Ah, I haven't gotten to living standards yet! Obviously while fans of Kanye as a unit may or may not have the collective resources and collective willpower to alone finance his performance that does not mean there aren't other in general more compassionate ways to enable his performances while also being fair exchanges. An entire society of fans, more than just fans of Kanye but fans or Rap, or fans of music in general, or even a larger society may agree that it is fundamentally fair for all people to be able to make a basic standard of living and in doing so naturally decide to donate X resources to establish collective standards of living and/or compensation within that group. This is how you get basic social services that now allow prospective Kanyes to be free from needing to labor to survive and may be free instead to pursue whatever gives them the most emotional satisfaction. From there music or rap fans may layer on top of that additional layers of compensation per agreement for pursuit of enabling greater numbers of people to pursue these artistic lifestyles that rely on exchanges of intangible value for things with tangible utility.
It's not much different than patronage that you used to see in medieval times. Only as we have abolished the authoritarian state and instead established a fair and equitable distribution of power and resources people within this society are individually far more empowered to form voluntary collectives to pursue mutual interests in such a way as to create a modern, urbanized society but one that exists entirely free of the coercion present in today's world. Pooling of resources for collective aims provide natural incentives for every individual to find those they can agree with and to form interest groups with power to provide natural incentive structures to support their interests. But because all contribution in such a system is voluntary and ownership is not a given to all things it also enables the option for individuals who do not wish to make certain agreements to not partake in part or all of a given society with the understandable caveat that they will be responsible for supporting themselves in full depending on how little they are willing to share.
"But who will be janitors in such a society, how will we clean toilets?" Well in such a society a Janitor who performs a task which is needed but undesired actually gets paid more than people who do things everyone wants to do. If there is collective need for janitors and collective ability to pay then obviously an equilibrium of compensation can be reached within the same system of structured voluntary agreements to meet a social need within the group or larger collective. But the biggest thing is that if there is not enough will for their to be Janitors? Then people all collectively need to suffer the consequences of that social choice, otherwise they will never understand to be generous enough to provide for their existence.
Alternatively people may decide they don't need or want traditional Janitors. In either case the situation rights itself eventually as people understand and can come to full agreement of terms with all of the knowledge necessary to understand in full the ramifications of a choice to both the individual and the collective ecosystem available to all within such a society. In short, everyone gets the society they want AND the society that they deserve.
Such a system has a fundamental standard of fairness that is universal (because the only way for universal standards are universal agreements within a group of individuals) and does not assign value to all things based primarily upon systems of individual or collective abuse/exploitation. Our current society uses supply/demand to basically set an equilibrium of price that is not actually fair, but rather based on what the maximal amount of material or capital wealth that can be extracted within any given deal is, and it creates incentives for sociopathic and predatory behavior by rewarding deceptive behavior and by making the terms of an agreement "set in stone when you sign" preventing any creation of discincentives once deceptive behavior was discovered because "Hey, you agreed to it!"
I'm not seeing what this has to do with your claim that the "difficulty in pursuing alternatives is what enables equity in trade because people are required to be fair to get anything at all". Money doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. If bands are collecting IOUs for favors, or chickens, or whatever, they're simply accumulating less liquid assets, not necessarily less of them, except as perhaps a function of the inefficiency of such a system.
Money as it is used today enables bad behavior in rather catastrophic ways. The relevance is Kanye West can offer something no one else can, a Kanye West performance. That is a unique but intangible service that can't be found elsewhere. So he has a unique asset to negotiate with and use that to establish the fair value of his performance within a given society or collective. Wilt Chambarlain offers "Wilt Chamberlain playing basketball" as American Idol offers "American Idol" which is the collective production of its organization, etc. These are all unique things that can be offered and if people are not willing to pay then they can be withheld. If withholding them does not cause sufficient displeasure to make people rethink their valuation then obviously people just don't care about American Idol enough to keep it around.
And I find it profoundly unfair that wealth may be extracted from me to pay for only your American Idol. "But Fallout, what if only YOU hate American Idol within the society?!" Well then obviously I'm bargaining not just against American Idol but rather an agreement of reciporacal exchange for all goods and services in a society and not just American Idol and in return for my donation I receive not just American Idol but access to other resources offered within the given social contract. In this case I would not consider the arrangement unfair because it is not just an arrangement for American Idol but an arrangement for whatever society offered.
"But doesn't that exist today?!" Not really, my choices today are "Participate within the current socioeconomic paradigm" or "Slowly starve to death on the street" I have no ability in any capacity to labor for my own survival because access to all resources are now privately owned or collectively owned in a system of nation states which have little to no desire to provide any sort of suitable general welfare for any within it. Because virtually if not all habitable land is now privately owned with no ability for common use this means no individual or group of individuals may go elsewhere. It's why you never see flights of Democrats or Republicans after they lose an election, really, where the hell else can they go and be allowed to live? So again, my choices are comply or die in a prolonged, painful and socially degrading way, which coerces my agreement to many facets of society in ways that are for that reason, not only profoundly unfree but also remarkably dangerous because survival and ability to thrive within the context of our current society can (not definitely but often can) require practicing remarkable amounts of scoiopathy and predatory behavior which leads to the development of irreparably sick and mal-adjusted individuals who believe only in the abuse and exploitation of others for their personal gain.
This can be evidenced both by the study which showed CEOs and African Warlords share similar psychology as well as the funny little anecdote from Wall Street about how they're "Predators and if you kick us out here, we'll kick you out of your jobs."
Now the next question you asked is: "Well what if someone hoards all of the chickens? How will they get a fair exchange!" Well that's where the use of force as a balancing mechanism has to come in. The use of legitimized force within a voluntary society can only be applied as a last ditch effort to right inequity. As there are no centralized units of force such as a modern vast Army that is born and bred for dogmatic unthinking allegiance to authority this enables the application of force into agreements as a disincentive for failure to comply with the process of negotiation and establishment of a fair agreement. If someone owns all chickens in a society and enough people feel the price is unfair they are able to, in essence negotiate first for an exchange with the owner of the chickens for resources so that other chicken breeders can exist and create a price equilibrium and if the owner refuses so as to maintain a monopoly and will not under any circumstances give up a chicken then obviously the society has no other choice but to take some chickens from him.
This does not mean that he goes to jail, this does not mean his house is burned down, or anything else ridiculously barbaric or violent. Merely that a given society if that society feels it is getting an unfair deal due to monopolization, is able to assess all relevant information and then make a judgement in regards to seizure of chickens to enable equilibrium to be established. Really this is no different than a modern court and police system, but in this case after voluntary arrangement fails a formalized plea within the greater collective is made via a formalized court system and if it is decided by all within the society that it is a fair judgement to repossess X number of chickens that this seizure may be made by X group (police) of persons at X time for X purposes whom are equipped to ensure the transfer occurs under favorable terms, and that after this point the individual who tried to hoard the chickens may be free to leave the society if they found the judgement unfair.
In this case they would have agreed beforehand already to be subject to such a system of law, so this would then become a natural consequence and disincentive for predatory behavior. Monopolize the commons somehow or an important resource within a society for your exclusive gain? Eventually that society has the right to repossess it if you are abusing that privilege. "But won't that lead to Mob rule? People burning down houses of people they don't like?" If use of force may only be legitimized by a voluntary agreement of say a 2/3 or 3/4 majority within a given society? (The margins could be tweaked) then I would imagine it would be incredibly hard to get that society (if we assume modern populations of say 500K or so per society) to agree to your burning down the home of someone you dislike.
The only way to authorize use of force is to have a compelling case to make before the whole of society and if the whole of society is able to near universally if not universally agree you are not making good use of your chickens then who are you to make use of their collective labor and resources to enable your use of chickens? "But they're all morons! THEY don't know the value of Chickens! I do! If they would just leave me alone I'd make them all rich!" If everyone else knows what you know, and they decide otherwise then you have no right to claim superiority as you are but one person and the mere existence of the chickens within that society and the greater planet predates you by thousands of years or more. You are not entitled to take anything if it is needed by someone else to live and you just want it to profit.
That is the "Law of the Jungle" talking. And surprisingly enough aligns with many Republican talking points about how it's not fair to "Rob the individual" but it can only be considered robbing if the individual is able to entirely create all of their materials absent of nature and absent of others. You did not make anything, you labored and through your labor turned natural, given resources into something of personal value. But your ability to use nature does not give you the right to covet nature for your exclusive gain. Because within the context of the planet and society you and your labor contribute only a fraction of the full effort that has been put towards the given realization of any value of any property and because of that collective contribution all resources naturally belong to a system of collective AND private ownership to represent both the collective and individual contributions of labor which make society function. Only a megalomaniac thinks they have a right to own the planet just because it's there.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
I basically agree with Modern Man here. A law saying that “Michael Moore can’t produce or direct any more movies or publish any more books” is different from a law that says "nobody can pay money to buy a Michael Moore book or a ticket to a Michael Moore movie", but it's still an effort to censor Michael Moore and to prevent the spread of Moore's ideas.
Making such a law more general might make it more fair. There could be a law banning money being spent on health care related commentary. That seems even worse in many respects though.
Since this is the second time you've made that argument, I feel compelled to point out that it bears absolutely no resemblance to any real-world laws that arguably run afoul of the 1st Amendment such as campaign finance reform laws, the fairness doctrine, or laws against media consolidation.
Not to mention that a law saying making it a crime to spend money on the speech-related products of one specific individual would already be unconstitutional since it's a Bill of Attainder.
Money doesn't necessitate monopoly though, and monopolies aren't exclusive to monetary systems. As such, I'm not sure why you bring it up or make an issue of it.
Money is one route to monopoly and it currently is in practice in this world used to great extent to enable a vastly unaccountable oligarchic financial sector which wield what I find a deeply disturbing light form of authoritarian social control through the manipulation of economic incentive structures from the top down. All of this control is enabled by their unfair access to essentially free or otherwise immensely discounted money via the private central banking system which provides an immeasurably large imbalance of power because no other individual or group is able to compete fairly for access to it entirely on the merit of their ideas to use that capital resource for the purest public good alone. You're either a Fed insider, or you're not, and if you aren't a big investment bank? Good luck getting insider status.
I'm not sure what the significance of your statements are about monopolies is. Money doesn't have any particular relationship to monopolies in the abstract; monopolies are the singular control over a supply, and may or may not involve money.
First, It's not like I'm suddenly less willing to see Kanye West or whoever if I know that other people are also paying however much those tickets go for these days. I'm actually acutely aware that concerts are how a lot of artists make their money, and I choose to support them that way. Assuming I'm reading your claim that "imbalance of distribution is created entirely by imbalance of information" correctly, it seems obviously incorrect.
What you're missing here is the deeper question of labor and what is considered a fair reward for labor to incentivize to fill social needs within a group, collective or greater society.
[...]
Value though is always intangible, so the only way to asses a fair value for an intangible good or service is to assess first of all who has interest in it and to ask them quite honestly if the choice between having that benefit of an intangible good or service is collectively worth an exchange of X physical resources in return. This is why Kanye's fans should collectively negotiate for the amount of money they wish to give him. Because Kanye obviously needs to eat and needs to pay for the cost of everything which makes his performances possible. So he and his fans have to basically share all of the information they have and then come to a sort of contractual agreement that fans of Kanye will give him X dollars or X goods in return for a performance or series of performances. The price negotiated should be enough to cover his expenses as well as whatever they will agree on is a fair margin. If Kanye thinks the margin is unfair he can not perform and the fans miss out, if they collectively cannot agree that he is worth X margin then as a society they must accept that they obviously truly do not believe that enabling this way of life is worth a resource exchange. At which point the group accepts social responsibility for its choice and may or may not chose to exclude specific members next time if they were interfering in some way with the bargaining process. Alternatively Kanye and the Fans as a group reach a collectively agreed upon dollar value which they both think is fair.
Since again, value is intangible. Fairness can only be established by an entirely voluntary negotiated agreement for exchange of said value, and neither party may be allowed to withhold any relevant information during the negotiation. After this agreement is reached, Fans of Kanye as a group must then determine within their ranks the fairest way to get each individual to contribute to that group price (Typically you'd have done this during negotiations for the collective exchange) and the end result is that all individuals feel they have paid a fair price, as a group they have received what they believe is a fair deal and Kanye himself has received what he believes is fair compensation. This is the only way to establish fair exchange regarding intangibles as fairness may only be determined within one's mind when there is equally available information to decide on an exchange of value.
Now you might think "But how can Kanye live like that?!" But if Kanye believes the price is fair and so does his audience then why is it a crime? If on the other hand however the fans are unable as a group to pay to support his presentations then there has been an obvious social choice. It does not matter what each individual thinks Kanye's worth is unless that individual alone is willing and able to exchange the value necessary to enable his performances, if a group of individuals with a shared interest do not have access to sufficient resources and/or do not collectively value his performance (in accordance with their ability to pool resources) enough to pay for its existence. Well, I'm sorry, but Kanye has no inherent right to be supported in what he does from the labor of other people. He has every right to sing, he has every right to record music but he has no right to make use of either the resources or labor of others unless he is willing and able to make a fair exchange for those.
How can Kanye live like what? You seem to think your audience is sharing your assumptions. It sounds an awful lot like he'd still be a fabulously wealthy individual under what you're talking about.
A note about your method of composition: It's not suited to a message board format. The more you type, the more a reader needs to either chop up what you say into little pieces to dispute it, or to just ignore the bulk of it to focus on key points of interest to be extracted.
Suffice it to say that I do not agree entirely with Fallout2man, but... okay, a hypothetical, Loren Michael. Suppose that (for whatever reason) private wealth is distributed in a way unrelated to individual worth or desert, perhaps because society is ruled by a mad dictator who seizes property at will. Freedom of expression in the media is nonetheless unrestricted, because the mad dictator madly wills it so.
Accept, for the sake of argument, that private wealth can buy an audience but not necessarily acceptance of the message (as is generally the case where the message is "buy my stuff", aka commercial advertising). In such a society, would you assert that all individuals have an equal franchise even if private wealth is both highly unequal and unjustly distributed?
Does it matter if it turns out that buying an audience can shift political opinions in the aggregate (in, perhaps, the same way well-designed commercial advertising shifts consumer tastes)? Or does individual sovereignty always legitimize the shift in opinion, even if the shift is funded by a, for the sake of argument, imperfectly just wealth.
(the point here is whether your stance is depending on some notion of individual desert of private wealth in making the attendant claim that said individuals have an unrestricted right to use that wealth as they see fit in making speech. I'm not sure what your precise argument is, honestly)
Another (related) point. Suppose society is somewhat democratic, in that the mad dictator defers to the electorate in some issues, because he just doesn't care about those. In the normal process of commerce I might not care if you prefer or despise apples, which has no effect on me, but in the process of politics I might reasonably care if the electorate is voting on a proposal to ban apples and I like apples - democracy in practice has an inherently illiberal and coercive tendency which is not perfectly restrained, after all. Sometimes people vote in a coercive manner. We don't live in a classically liberal utopia.
Say I learn that a pear monopoly seeks to back the proposal to prohibit apples. Take it as given that buying an audience can shift political opinion. It would be coercive to limit the ability of the owner-operator of the monopoly to support this proposal in the media. It would also be coercive if the electorate votes to ban apples. Must the former be necessarily more repellent than the latter?
(does it matter if the pear monopoly is 'deserved' by some individual accomplishment rather than being, say, the mad dictator's nephew? Even if individuals are so sovereign that the we are to take their expressed opinions as given even if we regard their opinions as manipulated, don't we restrict the outcome of democratic impulses anyway?)
Suffice it to say that I do not agree entirely with Fallout2man, but... okay, a hypothetical, Loren Michael. Suppose that (for whatever reason) private wealth is distributed in a way unrelated to individual worth or desert, perhaps because society is ruled by a mad dictator who seizes property at will. Freedom of expression in the media is nonetheless unrestricted, because the mad dictator madly wills it so.
Accept, for the sake of argument, that private wealth can buy an audience but not necessarily acceptance of the message (as is generally the case where the message is "buy my stuff", aka commercial advertising). In such a society, would you assert that all individuals have an equal franchise even if private wealth is both highly unequal and unjustly distributed?
Does it matter if it turns out that buying an audience can shift political opinions in the aggregate (in, perhaps, the same way well-designed commercial advertising shifts consumer tastes)? Or does individual sovereignty always legitimize the shift in opinion, even if the shift is funded by a, for the sake of argument, imperfectly just wealth.
(the point here is whether your stance is depending on some notion of individual desert of private wealth in making the attendant claim that said individuals have an unrestricted right to use that wealth as they see fit in making speech. I'm not sure what your precise argument is, honestly)
It seems pretty unequal to me.
I'm not sure what my exact position is. I saw MM's rebuttal and it reminded me of a conversation that I have been interested in in the past. I think that the effect of a lot of regulation really does overlap with regulation of speech, but I also think that such regulation isn't necessarily unreasonable.
There is an assumption most clearly recently displayed in posniallo's tongue-in-cheek post, that speech and the like needs to be protected, and as such we need to define speech such that it is always protected. This seems misguided to me. Fitting our definitions to what we find most desirable - "money isn't speech because we need to restrict the influence that concentrated wealth has on politics", to paraphrase one view - it's not providing an honest accounting of the trade-offs that must occur.
Another (related) point. Suppose society is somewhat democratic, in that the mad dictator defers to the electorate in some issues, because he just doesn't care about those. In the normal process of commerce I might not care if you prefer or despise apples, which has no effect on me, but in the process of politics I might reasonably care if the electorate is voting on a proposal to ban apples and I like apples - democracy in practice has an inherently illiberal and coercive tendency which is not perfectly restrained, after all. Sometimes people vote in a coercive manner. We don't live in a classically liberal utopia.
Say I learn that a pear monopoly seeks to back the proposal to prohibit apples. Take it as given that buying an audience can shift political opinion. It would be coercive to limit the ability of the owner-operator of the monopoly to support this proposal in the media. It would also be coercive if the electorate votes to ban apples. Must the former be necessarily more repellent than the latter?
(does it matter if the pear monopoly is 'deserved' by some individual accomplishment rather than being, say, the mad dictator's nephew? Even if individuals are so sovereign that the we are to take their expressed opinions as given even if we regard their opinions as manipulated, don't we restrict the outcome of democratic impulses anyway?)
Yeah, there are a lot of trade-offs with respect to democratic rule. I'm not sure how to address them in a general sense; the particulars of the political system are important, as is the culture of the electorate. I don't have a particularly concrete or passionate view about democracy, be it as an intrinsic good or as being particularly necessary to providing for good and stable outcomes. I'm sympathetic to some libertarian views with respect to keeping the state out of the regulatory business except as it applies to keeping people safe from physical and financial harm, but I'm not sure how such an idealized system would be maintained in conjunction with a democratic rule.
In a voice vote we do not generally encourage yelling, even if some are naturally blessed with louder voices than others. Or even if some work hard to train a fine baritone.
There is, if you like, a tension between the harm principle and recognizing that we would like the process of politics to aggregate beliefs in a certain fashion, especially since democratic legitimacy must come from somewhere and regrettably it does not fall as manna from heaven.
Now in practice I suspect we are overestimating the impact of money spent as speech as explicit appeals to the public and underestimating the impact of money spent on relatively indirect ways to shape policy, e.g., drafting detailed policy proposals that make a senator's job easier or funding someone else's culture war effort as a quid pro quo. The public simply doesn't pay enough attention to the fine details of most policy; Prop 8 referanda don't happen as often as bog-standard lobbying. The mechanism by which organized wealth affects policy is not primarily via the soap-box, even if our choice of conceptual metaphor is to describe it as 'speech'. That is merely the class of rights invoked to defend the action.
So this is a theoretical point. I happen to think it's quite a solid theoretical point, and that the theoretical case for non-restriction is rather weak when there is no accompanying theory of desert or political economy, but it is theoretical all the same. We might be obsessing over the wrong things in this thread.
I'm not sure what my exact position is. I saw MM's rebuttal and it reminded me of a conversation that I have been interested in in the past. I think that the effect of a lot of regulation really does overlap with regulation of speech, but I also think that such regulation isn't necessarily unreasonable.
There is an assumption most clearly recently displayed in posniallo's tongue-in-cheek post, that speech and the like needs to be protected, and as such we need to define speech such that it is always protected. This seems misguided to me. Fitting our definitions to what we find most desirable - "money isn't speech because we need to restrict the influence that concentrated wealth has on politics", to paraphrase one view - it's not providing an honest accounting of the trade-offs that must occur.
The tradeoff is a prohibition on some set of actions, presumably (plus, you know, attendant enforcement errors and so on. But that does not seem to be decisive here). But possibly I am misunderstanding you.
I'm not sure what the significance of your statements are about monopolies is. Money doesn't have any particular relationship to monopolies in the abstract; monopolies are the singular control over a supply, and may or may not involve money.
Monopoly is singular control over the supply of an item, yes. But your ability to maintain singular control of a supply of anything is dependent on your ability to take and keep control of the supply. You can only do this in any combination of two possible ways. 1: Voluntary agreements that it is yours. 2: Involuntary use of force against anyone tries to take it, and anyone who tries to jeopardize item 1 by being successfully able to convince others you no longer should have this item.
So for your control over a monopoly to remain stable you first need to secure enough force to prevent people from stealing it. But beyond a very basic level the requirement of force to defend your right to monopoly will proceed along a continuum based on how unfairly you intend to make use of your supply of an item. The more you hoard and the more unfairly you distribute it (in relation to how important that supply is to others) the more force you need to control your monopoly from an ever growing pissed off populace.
So the first type of monopoly you need before you can secure perpetual control of anything is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Of course the legitimacy of force is only granted within the mind of the observer, but in general our modern social contract system states the only legitimate uses of force are via the military and police within a nation state system which are supposed to enforce the system of laws within that society. So we already have this.
Money only leads to monopoly after this if the state grants monopoly over the printing of legal tender and the money is distributed incredibly unfairly by whoever controls that monopoly. Which again, the Fed loans to big banks for nothing and does not loan to individuals who would actually spur the economy by spending it on something. So in our current climate there is a severe problem over how our money supply has been distributed by the owner of the monopoly of legal tender. Shoveling money only at the Rich, who will not spend it, rather than trying to equalize capital wealth so as to spur economic growth.
How can Kanye live like what? You seem to think your audience is sharing your assumptions. It sounds an awful lot like he'd still be a fabulously wealthy individual under what you're talking about.
I try to answer any possible rebuttals to my points before someone can make them, sometimes I do better than others at predicting what those might be. ^_^;; Either way if society decides collectively and voluntarily Kanye is worth that much? Then yes by all means let him be fabulously wealthy. Something tells me though that within such a society he would not be quite as fabulously wealthy or rather everyone would be living within enough of their own definition of fabulously wealthy that Kanye's respective wealth would not appear quite as monolithically unequal as it does today to the majority of the world.
A note about your method of composition: It's not suited to a message board format. The more you type, the more a reader needs to either chop up what you say into little pieces to dispute it, or to just ignore the bulk of it to focus on key points of interest to be extracted.
This is why I chop up replies to people and I'd encourage you to do the same. To really espouse my ideas I often need to spend a lot of time making a series of interdependent points to express an ideology and every part of it which would inform my belief in its soundness. If I leave things out it gives the opportunity for others to project or assume things into what I'm saying that I might not be intending. This is why I take effort to proactively counteract any possible rebuttals before they can occur so as to provide every reason for something (and yes that can be exhaustive.)
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
In a voice vote we do not generally encourage yelling, even if some are naturally blessed with louder voices than others. Or even if some work hard to train a fine baritone.
There is, if you like, a tension between the harm principle and recognizing that we would like the process of politics to aggregate beliefs in a certain fashion, especially since democratic legitimacy must come from somewhere and regrettably it does not fall as manna from heaven.
Now in practice I suspect we are overestimating the impact of money spent as speech as explicit appeals to the public and underestimating the impact of money spent on relatively indirect ways to shape policy, e.g., drafting detailed policy proposals that make a senator's job easier or funding someone else's culture war effort as a quid pro quo. The public simply doesn't pay enough attention to the fine details of most policy; Prop 8 referanda don't happen as often as bog-standard lobbying. The mechanism by which organized wealth affects policy is not primarily via the soap-box, even if our choice of conceptual metaphor is to describe it as 'speech'. That is merely the class of rights invoked to defend the action.
So this is a theoretical point. I happen to think it's quite a solid theoretical point, and that the theoretical case for non-restriction is rather weak when there is no accompanying theory of desert or political economy, but it is theoretical all the same. We might be obsessing over the wrong things in this thread.
My concerns in this thread are largely regarding what should constitute speech in our conceptions of it; I'm taking, as @Feral noted, a pretty broad view, and I suppose that might lend itself to the notion that I'm particularly supportive of a very hands-off agenda. I'm more supportive of what I would regard as a more honest accounting of the tensions that there are in restrictions on money as they apply to speech. That is, my objection isn't to any particular policy, it's to the notion that money isn't speech and therefore its restriction shouldn't be cause for concern. I think a broader conception of speech is more appropriate. My advocacy is in relation to a better understanding of the ideas of money and speech; I'm not advocating any particular legislation.
I'm personally in favor of less restriction, but that's not something I've invested enough thought into to be particularly passionate about, to be particularly immovable on, or to have particularly cogent views on. I was hoping to develop my ideas along with this discussion. In this thread at least, I am not advocating an argument for un-restriction. (Yet?) Again: I think that the effect of a lot of regulation really does overlap with regulation of speech, but I also think that such regulation isn't necessarily unreasonable.
I'm not sure what my exact position is. I saw MM's rebuttal and it reminded me of a conversation that I have been interested in in the past. I think that the effect of a lot of regulation really does overlap with regulation of speech, but I also think that such regulation isn't necessarily unreasonable.
There is an assumption most clearly recently displayed in posniallo's tongue-in-cheek post, that speech and the like needs to be protected, and as such we need to define speech such that it is always protected. This seems misguided to me. Fitting our definitions to what we find most desirable - "money isn't speech because we need to restrict the influence that concentrated wealth has on politics", to paraphrase one view - it's not providing an honest accounting of the trade-offs that must occur.
The tradeoff is a prohibition on some set of actions, presumably (plus, you know, attendant enforcement errors and so on. But that does not seem to be decisive here). But possibly I am misunderstanding you.
Well, sure. I'm just not sure what the optimal mix might be, or what exactly I'd prefer. i think that the desire to disassociate money from conceptions of speech makes the discussion less accurate about the changes and trades of various freedoms that different mixes would entail, and that is where I'm largely intending to come from.
You want people to explicitly acknowledge that that they are, in fact, advocating restricting speech, even if they assert that is a justifiable restriction? Is that it?
Because, well, okay. :P But learning to suppress hesitation in biting bullets takes some practice, perhaps.
I'm not sure what the significance of your statements are about monopolies is. Money doesn't have any particular relationship to monopolies in the abstract; monopolies are the singular control over a supply, and may or may not involve money.
Monopoly is singular control over the supply of an item, yes. But your ability to maintain singular control of a supply of anything is dependent on your ability to take and keep control of the supply. You can only do this in any combination of two possible ways. 1: Voluntary agreements that it is yours. 2: Involuntary use of force against anyone tries to take it, and anyone who tries to jeopardize item 1 by convincing others you no longer should have this item.
So for your control over a monopoly to remain stable you first need to secure enough force to prevent people from stealing it. But beyond a very basic level the requirement of force to defend your right to monopoly will proceed along a continuum based on how unfairly you intend to make use of your supply of an item. The more you hoard and the more unfairly you distribute it (in relation to how important that supply is to others) the more force you need to control your monopoly from an ever growing pissed off populace.
So the first type of monopoly you need before you can secure perpetual control of anything is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Of course the legitimacy of force is only granted within the mind of the observer, but in general our modern social contract system states the only legitimate uses of force are via the military and police within a nation state system which are supposed to enforce the system of laws within that society. So we already have this.
Money only leads to monopoly after this if the state grants monopoly over the printing of legal tender and the money is distributed incredibly unfairly by whoever controls that monopoly. Which again, the Fed loans to big banks for nothing and does not loan to individuals who would actually spur the economy by spending it on something. So in our current climate there is a severe problem over how our money supply has been distributed by the owner of the monopoly of legal tender. Shoveling money only at the Rich, who will not spend it, rather than trying to equalize capital wealth so as to spur economic growth.
With respect to your first three paragraphs, "monopoly" doesn't imply anything about perpetuity. Monopolies can be brief, or they can exist for an extended period of time. The notion doesn't imply either. It also doesn't suggest anything about how one might go about maintaining a monopoly. In the Smurf Village, Baker Smurf enjoys a monopoly on baked goods, and there's no particular monetary or force incentive to keep it that way.
Your last paragraph doesn't inform any view about how money leads to monopoly, it only shows how money isn't distributed equally in society and in response to a crisis, and problems that may or may not be associated with that.
How can Kanye live like what? You seem to think your audience is sharing your assumptions. It sounds an awful lot like he'd still be a fabulously wealthy individual under what you're talking about.
I try to answer any possible rebuttals to my points before someone can make them, sometimes I do better than others at predicting what those might be. ^_^;; Either way if society decides collectively and voluntarily Kanye is worth that much? Then yes by all means let him be fabulously wealthy. Something tells me though that within such a society he would not be quite as fabulously wealthy or rather everyone would be living within enough of their own definition of fabulously wealthy that Kanye's respective wealth would not appear quite as monolithically unequal as it does today to the majority of the world.
You'll forgive me for not taking "something tells me" seriously. Something tells me otherwise.
You want people to explicitly acknowledge that that they are, in fact, advocating restricting speech, even if they assert that is a justifiable restriction? Is that it?
Because, well, okay. :P But learning to suppress hesitation in biting bullets takes some practice, perhaps.
Yes. I can forgive politicians for needing to grease the wheels of legislation with things that aren't honest. I don't think it has any place in an ostensibly honest debate though.
*I* will be there to make people bite bullets. Let me find my Rorschach mask...
You want people to explicitly acknowledge that that they are, in fact, advocating restricting speech, even if they assert that is a justifiable restriction? Is that it?
Because, well, okay. :P But learning to suppress hesitation in biting bullets takes some practice, perhaps.
Pretty much, by requiring money to purchase rights to effective speech and enabling vastly unequal capital wealth and therefore vastly unequal ability to pursue popularization of speech our money system currently massively restricts speech. This is not quite authoritarian but certainly authoritarian lite. Its control can be massively exercised against vast numbers of individuals or groups of people, although it's not literal 100% total control of the right to express yourself. So before you can make speech truly free you must divorce money from the ability to disseminate and popularize speech.
Otherwise in systems of vastly unequal wealth the wealthy wield incredibly powerful social control through this restriction of speech. The bigger problem is I try to make five or six points at once (often without realizing it) and just begin to just go one by one in describing all the current ways our society is messed up or could be run better through analogy. -_-;; I tend to think rather non-linearly and this is why if anyone's watched the thread I've had to submit more than a dozen edits to most of my posts to try and make them more legible.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
It's not terribly obvious that restricting the ability of wealth to buy an audience automatically ensures that acquiring an audience in other ways becomes easier; sometimes the audience goes away instead (political disengagement, erosion of civil society, etc.). You need to fill in that bit. Or advocate subsidizing media channels which ration their audience in non-monetary ways rather than invoking an unpredicted substitution by the audience.
You have the supply side of the market of ideas but not the demand side, more generally.
It's not terribly obvious that restricting the ability of wealth to buy an audience automatically ensures that acquiring an audience in other ways becomes easier;
Well what wealth also enables you to buy is not just the bullhorn to reach the audience but also to, in multiple ways, buy the trust of the audience in what you have to say. Because buying a bullhorn and buying the ability to build a brand around your bullhorn and to keep that brand running for generations enables a you to buy a trusted social identity. If the ability to buy and retain this type of trust depends entirely on your ability to acquire or maintain wealth then that gives wealth an immediate and unfair advantage in the field of not just distributing speech but also popularizing it as well.
sometimes the audience goes away instead (political disengagement, erosion of civil society, etc.).
Well the problem isn't that the audience is legitimately disagreeing. It's that News institutions exist which have built generational brands around the News, which is defined culturally as the relentless pursuit of impartial truth. Yet the Brand of the News and what news organizations actually do is quite contrary. But this contrary image is accepted and so people watch the news believing they got the full, unadulterated story when more often then not they did not. This means either we need to stop allowing news organizations to imply they are interested in telling the truth or we need to prevent their ability from distorting it.
The problem isn't outright lies but rather various forms of distortion and misrepresentation of events, ideas or viewpoints which allow that audience, who you've bought and whose trust you've bought, to be slowly lead into the likely belief of whatever you have said if you paint a slow picture of events over a given course of time. Take how culturally certain political words like Communism, Socialism, or Redistribution even will mentally evoke violent connotations of Soviet Gulags or torture in the minds of many people. This sort of mimetic response can be conditioned if associations are always subtly placed by the trusted organization which lead the uninformed to believe they exist.
You need to fill in that bit. Or advocate subsidizing media channels which ration their audience in non-monetary ways rather than invoking an unpredicted substitution by the audience.
You have the supply side of the market of ideas but not the demand side, more generally.
Well the best way I thought was again, fairness doctrine requirements. If the News wants to report on something let's just ensure they must give a full and fair representation to the views that are discussed in some way. This prevents the buying of audiences and the buying of trust from being used exclusively to indoctrinate an audience to propaganda. If both sides are fairly represented and people have all the information I'm sure they'll make the best decisions.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
that the freedom to say what you want is irrelevant without someone to hear it.
Yes, and since Fox News is not preventing anyone from hearing anything...
And you completely miss the point. Speech is not speech if no one hears it. As such, the ability to have your speech heard (and from that, the ability to have your speech heard by a certain number of people) is a fundamental property of speech itself.
I don't fundamentally miss the point. I've argued this myself. Tirelessly. However in this context, you are making a silly argument since speech is not being limited in any way. Nothing in the context of this argument factors into speech not being heard.
I haven't missed the point. You haven't made one. You have to explain how speech is being limited. "Someone is speaking louder than me" is not proof of that. I keep saying this. You keep ignoring it. Stop ignoring it. Explain how Fox News is actively limiting anyone's speech, or anyone's ability to hear anyone else's speech. They. Are. Not. What they are doing is dancing to a tune people apparently want to listen to. So people listen to it.
Your argument literally astounds me. You keep repeating the same thing without explaining why you think this thing. How many times do I have to directly refute your claim and ask for your train of thought in this matter before you actually answer me?
I've already said it multiple times. You just miss it. Hence me saying that.
An audience is a limited quantity. At it's most extreme, there are a finite number of people in the world and a finite number of hours in the day leading to a finite amount of communication that can occur since people cannot infinitely multitask.
And thus the more you speak (and remember speaking isn't just you saying, it's someone else listening), the more you engage an audience, the less someone else can. You are using up a finite resource.
And this resource only gets more finite as you consider that people can't listen all the time and must do things like "sleep" and "work" and "shit" and all that stuff.
There's only so many times I can repeat the same argument in a different format.
A political prisoner in solitary confinement can say anything he wants, but because no one can hear it cause he's locked up, we say his "right to free speech" or some such thing has been violated.
Since the ability to have your speech heard is a necessary component of this idea of "free speech" and money is a huge factor in having it heard, money buys free speech. With more money, your speech is "more free".
Now we're getting somewhere at least.
There is no such thing as "more free." With more money, you can disseminate your speech easier. That is not "more free" than someone who doesn't have the ability to disseminate as freely as you. Is a blogger with 100,000 subscribers "more free" than someone with 10,000 subscribers?
No, these two bloggers are equally free. Perhaps the blogger with 100,000 subscribers is a better writer. Or has more money and time to advertise the blog. Or all of those things, or perhaps some other reason. But regardless of the reason, they are both as free to speak as anyone else. And the rest of society is as free to listen as anyone else.
Suggesting that people who are not Fox News are "less free" to disseminate ideas suggests that Fox News itself, or maybe just the existence of Fox News, is somehow suppressing free speech, or that the market itself does. Noting that people with more money have a greater ability to advertise ideas - an issue I don't disagree with - says nothing to the "free-ness" of one's speech.
Also, the ability to have one's voice heard is not suppressed or diminished by not having money. It is enhanced by having more money. Or more connections. Or a better ability to write, or think, or reason. Those things enhance one's ability to disseminate ideas and attract readers. It works in one direction, it doesn't work backwards. Corporation A having money doesn't make speech less free for people that don't until they actually prevent people from speaking. Which they have no power to do. Not having money is not the same thing as being locked in a cage where no one can hear you.
These are the same thing. Speech is relative. There are only so many listeners with so much time.
Again, once you've established that speech must be heard to be meaningful (which is pretty trivial to do and I gave an easy example in the part you quote here), you must always come back to the question of who is hearing that speech. How many people. Which people.
How is the ability to disseminate your speech easier not making your speech "more free"?
Where "free" really means "more heard" or something of that sort. Frankly, the ludicrousness of "more free" comes not from the idea, but from the fact that "free speech" doesn't really mean jack-shit. What does "free" entail here? It's not just the freedom to say what you want, it's the freedom to say what you want to whom you want or something of that sort. And since money buys access to people, more money makes you ... more "free".
With more money, you can more easily reach people. And since reaching people is the point of "free speech", money buys you better "freer" speech.
You are hung up on this idea of censorship. As if speech is only silenced when it's stopped. Speech is as easily silenced by louder noise, hence the bullhorn analogy. But you are missing the point. The guy with the bullhorn isn't deliberately trying to drown anyone else out. They aren't trying to silence the guy next to them. They are just trying to reach more people. And they are doing it better because they've got the money. And because people can only listen to one person at once ... they are de facto silencing everyone else.
Audiences are limited commodities. They are bought and sold in the marketplace of speech (political, artistic, whatever). And like in any market, more money buys you more shit.
To make this point even clearer, to get to the heart of the issue: Speech is already regulated. It's always regulated. Speech, because it requires a listener to matter, is a finite quantity. And because the that, it's regulated by some sort of market.
The question is, in what way is it being regulated and is that way optimal for what we, as a society, desire?
But free doesn't mean "more heard." And it certainly doesn't mean it with regard to the concept of "Freedom of Speech." I wouldn't even want all peoples in society having an equal voice. I think that's silly and wasteful. A racist should be able to say whatever he wants up to inciting hate and violence, but I don't think society needs to give him an equal berth in listening to him.
I frankly don't think you comprehend either Freedom of Speech or even "freedom" on a basic, fundamental level. I'm not trying to be a dick here but the idea that free = "more heard" as if that is somehow a relevant definition in this context is bizarre and wrong.[/quote]
No, I think you don't actually think about what you are saying.
Again, what does "Free Speech" even mean? It doesn't just mean the ability to say what you want, it means the ability to say it to WHO you want. Because a restriction on people being able to hear your speech is itself a restriction on speech. This is blindly obvious and if it isn't, reread my example of the political activist in solitary confinement and come back when you can explain how his "right to free speech" has not been restricted.
And once you've finally realised that an audience is a core component of free speech, maybe you will suddenly see why I'm talking about WHO is listening and not just what is being said.
As for "more free", let's think about this for a second. If "Free speech" is not on a gradient, what's the cut-off? Where's it suddenly go from "Not Free" to "Free"? 3 people? 10? What's the number? Or are we, as I said, talking about speech being on a gradient. One that is heavily influenced by money. (which is the point)
Money buys speech. Money enables speech. Money makes one person's speech "more free" then anothers because money lets that person better reach the people he wants to. A man with a TV show's speech is more free because there are less restrictions on his ability to speak to whomever he wants.
And yes, that last part does matter. Because speech requires a listener.
Posts
Fox News also only has a viewership of like 2.5-3 million people for its top shows, like O'Reilly and Hannity.
My mistake.
No, because it's a laughable false equivalency.
Purchasing a product for it's intended use or for it's entertainment value isn't an act of political speech. An employer paying an employee is not done so to garner political influence with the employee or a political institution. Commerce is not speech and the purchase of goods alone does not engender favorable or unfavorable opinions of a product, especially in an environment with overwhelming pressure to purchase pointless products for social reasons.
To go further, it's unreasonable to associate the relatively meager salary of a journalist with that of the dozens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars doled out from the hands of Capital.
So no, I won't consider Modern Man's grossly hyperbolic "What If" situation, especially since the crux of the argument is money specifically being donated to political parties to garner unfair political influence and not money exchanging hands in the course of purchasing tools, entertainment, food, etc, in a non political environment.
Preventing Capital from gaining disproportionate influence does not, ultimately, endanger the spreading of ideas. A view to the contrary is conscious support of institutionalized corruption.
So long as they are not able to literally secure a monopoly on a good? Then that's really fine. Physical goods do have scarcity which is why I think unchecked growth is bad because it enables you to hoard all of any given good and thus create an environment where you no longer are required to be fair as you are the sole person able to distribute something. The presence of a monopoly in any given market is always dictated by the ability for someone with only a better idea or process at performing a given task/function to secure necessary resources free from interference and compete with the mainstream establishment only based upon their merit/effort.
Free exchanges can disrupt favored patterns of distribution only when people are not aware of the full impact of their transactions upon a given ecosystem. Suppose one million people in this situation each knew not only that they wanted to give Wilt Chamberlain 25 cents to see him play basketball, but that exactly one million people would do this. This gives a potential for those one million people to come together and collectively decide whether or not they wish to give him a pooled 250,000 as a singular unit versus one million unaware individuals only thinking about their individual transaction.
Imbalance of distribution is created entirely by imbalance of information. Wilt Chamberlain in this hypothetical probably knows how many people will want to see him play basketball within a margin of error and that gives him the ability to adjust the ticket prices so that he secures the most capital from his audience by finding a supply/demand equilibrium which is acceptable to an individual's desire to see him play basketball versus an obviously more fair collective social assessment by his fans as a group as to how much his playing basketball is worth to their social group.
No, I like the liquidity money provides because it enables smoother exchanges. It's just that we need limitations on what can and cannot be valued monetarily, what people should be allowed to "privately own" and therefore barter only as a direct exchange of property, and what should be labeled as public commons which should be socially maintained for all as best as possible. Money's only dangerous when it becomes the sole means of dictating effective power in a society because then accumulation of wealth enables complete social control through behavioral incentive manipulation via the economy and systems of excessive private ownership of all physical materials (with no mandate for their responsible use or distribution.) The biggest thing though that has to change for any of this to work is the fundamental recognition of information as something that in the vast majority of its uses should be considered a free public good.
It's why I tend to be outraged at the state of patents and copyrights as it enables a slavery of ideas by allowing monetization of things only for the purposes of a belief that private individuals are entitled to arbitrarily defined exclusive enrichment. And not the original purpose, which was that anyone who is a creator of sufficiently creative art or sufficiently innovative science should be able to strike a deal with society at large to share their ideas, which hold intangible but not entirely immeasurable value, for things of tangible value, namely the goods/services (whose individual/social utility is more easily defined) needed to survive and enable greater happiness. The problem comes when the belief in arbitrary enrichment because of nebulous concepts of "ownership" creates a situation where information vital to ensuring fairness and equity in trade can be withheld or even misrepresented.
This is why people hate fraud, it's not because the literal act of a lie is a problem alone but rather the practice of deception in trade and in agreement it enables cause profound harms to a free society interested in ensuring fair valuation of all things within it.
Defined broadly enough, me buying a hamburger is in a sense communicating that the price is acceptable and I want the burger. But okay, that's perhaps not so useful. But you're not addressing the problem the OP presents.
The issue raised in the OP was about the connection between money and censorship: A law saying that “Michael Moore can’t produce or direct any more movies or publish any more books” is different from a law that says "nobody can pay money to buy a Michael Moore book or a ticket to a Michael Moore movie", but it's still an effort to censor Michael Moore and to prevent the spread of Moore's ideas.
It's impossible (or at least really hard) to regulate the former without doing harm to the speech involved. In the latter case, we aren't really talking about speech anyway.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Money doesn't necessitate monopoly though, and monopolies aren't exclusive to monetary systems. As such, I'm not sure why you bring it up or make an issue of it.
First, It's not like I'm suddenly less willing to see Kanye West or whoever if I know that other people are also paying however much those tickets go for these days. I'm actually acutely aware that concerts are how a lot of artists make their money, and I choose to support them that way. Assuming I'm reading your claim that "imbalance of distribution is created entirely by imbalance of information" correctly, it seems obviously incorrect.
I'm not seeing what this has to do with your claim that the "difficulty in pursuing alternatives is what enables equity in trade because people are required to be fair to get anything at all". Money doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. If bands are collecting IOUs for favors, or chickens, or whatever, they're simply accumulating less liquid assets, not necessarily less of them, except as perhaps a function of the inefficiency of such a system.
Restricting a person’s ability to obtain money for the purpose of communicating with the public is a means of restricting that person's ability to communicate, though.
A law that says "Michael Moore can't ride on planes or trains or drive an automobile" would cripple his ability to make movies and sell books and give talks. Is transportation "basically" speech?
(This is an actual ethical issue that has come up a lot around here in the last couple of years as the San Francisco Bay Area subway system shuts down stations in response to political protests.)
On the one hand, we need to recognize that an activity that facilitates speech is not itself speech - that's an unhelpful and ultimately deleterious conflation. However, that doesn't give a government license to regulate those activities in a way that causes a chilling effect. We need to simultaneously recognize that unfair enforcement of laws regulating these speech-facilitating activities has an unacceptable chilling effect on speech. There is a tension here, but not a direct contradiction.
It's an area that requires nuance, not brute equivocations.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Murder is an expression of one's hate for an individual and should not be limited.
Well as you note, there's a lot of overlap between apparently disparate things like transportation and the things that people say. I don't think there's any good hard-and-fast delineations that can or should necessarily be made. I think brute equivocating is a good deal more helpful than semantic rigidity, given that we know there is overlap, we know there are significant relationships between speech and other activities.
If we're assuming that all speech should be protected, that's true.
Well, murder is theft of agency.
Spending money to directly influence politics is just unfair.
Not really. They have the same ability to communicate that everybody else has. If Herman Cain wants to write a book, he can write a book. That is speech. Me giving money to Herman Cain for purpose of electioneering isn't speech.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Not unfair.
Disenfranchising.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
The government has very limited powers to limit or outlaw written or verbal speech. However, that power increases once you start going from speech, to expressive conduct to pure conduct.
Rigorous Scholarship
Of course, slippery slope arguments like this are kind of silly. Just food for though I guess.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I guess that's a better word for it, yeah.
Rigorous Scholarship
Making restrictions more universal by applying them to more groups of people doesn't make them less restrictive, it makes them more restrictive, but more fair.
Yeah, you're right. I was just pointing out that since money is used in almost every transaction, and if money is speech, nearly all transactions are speech, and Congress's power to regulate commerce falls apart.
But again, its a poor slippery slope argument. No one would ever really push this idea to that conclusion.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I guess I don't understand what you mean by this
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Having "the same ability to communicate that everybody else has" != "not restrictive" or "less restrictive". If everyone is banned from contributing to authors or newsletters or political candidates who address the patent system (for example), everyone has "the same ability to communicate that everybody else has", but it's also incredibly restrictive.
Money is one route to monopoly (The other is via force, as one can only own property by enforcing its ownership absolutely via the inevitable application of violent physical force to maintain an unfair concentration of anything.) and it currently is in practice in this world used to great extent to enable a vastly unaccountable oligarchic financial sector which wield what I find a deeply disturbing light form of authoritarian social control through the manipulation of economic incentive structures from the top down. All of this control is enabled by their unfair access to essentially free or otherwise immensely discounted money via the private central banking system which provides an immeasurably large imbalance of power because no other individual or group is able to compete fairly for access to it entirely on the merit of their ideas (and institutional capacity to realize those ideas) to use that capital resource for the purest public good alone. You're either a Fed insider, or you're not, and if you aren't a big investment bank? Good luck getting insider status.
What you're missing here is the deeper question of labor and what is considered a fair reward for labor to incentivize the fulfillment of social needs within a group, collective or greater society. Which cannot be truly answered without establishing firmly what value means and also what utility means. Value is entirely intangible and represents the mental or emotional worth to a person of any given tangible or intangible good or service. It is the satisfaction they receive from making use of it and while a person's valuation of an object can be entirely rational it can also be entirely irrational as well as it only exists as a concept within their minds for assigning worth to things outside of the self. Utility in this case refers to a specific type of valuation which I primarily restrict to objects which are physically tangible and have a physical use in the environment. Food, a wrench and a car are all objects with definable and physically measurable utility as they accomplish a physical task and therefore as they perform entirely physical tasks it is easier to create entirely universal physical metrics to measure their actual valuation. This does not mean that a person's internal valuation of the worth of a car will represent its ability to perform its task of transportation, or even represent it's physical aspect. A person might value a red car so much more than a blue car for entirely no reason and assign within their own minds a higher worth.
But as physical objects exist primarily to perform physical tasks and they also have calculable time and resource costs this establishes a very easy to assign system of fair value to physical objects based entirely upon the cost to create them. They are as valuable as they are difficult to create in relation to the need for a set amount within a given social grouping. However what about ideas? Well that's where things become entirely more difficult. Someone whose primary good or service does not serve a direct physical utility then has a problem when it comes to the assignment of value.
Value though is always intangible, so the only way to asses a fair value for an intangible good or service is to assess first of all who has interest in it and to ask them quite honestly if the choice between having that benefit of an intangible good or service is collectively worth an exchange of X physical resources in return. This is why Kanye's fans should collectively negotiate for the amount of money they wish to give him. Because Kanye obviously needs to eat and needs to pay for the cost of everything which makes his performances possible. So he and his fans have to basically share all of the information they have and then come to a sort of contractual agreement that fans of Kanye will give him X dollars or X goods in return for a performance or series of performances. The price negotiated should be enough to cover his expenses as well as whatever they will agree on is a fair margin. If Kanye thinks the margin is unfair he can not perform and the fans miss out, if they collectively cannot agree that he is worth X margin then as a society they must accept that they obviously truly do not believe that enabling this way of life is worth a resource exchange. At which point the group accepts social responsibility for its choice and may or may not chose to exclude specific members next time if they were interfering in some way with the bargaining process. Alternatively Kanye and the Fans as a group reach a collectively agreed upon dollar value which they both think is fair.
Since again, value is intangible. Fairness can only be established by an entirely voluntary negotiated agreement for exchange of said value, and neither party may be allowed to withhold any relevant information during the negotiation. After this agreement is reached, Fans of Kanye as a group must then determine within their ranks the fairest way to get each individual to contribute to that group price (Typically you'd have done this during negotiations for the collective exchange) and the end result is that all individuals feel they have paid a fair price, as a group they have received what they believe is a fair deal and Kanye himself has received what he believes is fair compensation. This is the only way to establish fair exchange regarding intangibles as fairness may only be determined within one's mind when there is equally available information to decide on an exchange of value.
Now you might think "But how can Kanye live like that?!" But if Kanye believes the price is fair and so does his audience then why is it a crime? If on the other hand however the fans are unable as a group to pay to support his presentations then there has been an obvious social choice. It does not matter what each individual thinks Kanye's worth is unless that individual alone is willing and able to exchange the value necessary to enable his performances, if a group of individuals with a shared interest do not have access to sufficient resources and/or do not collectively value his performance (in accordance with their ability to pool resources) enough to pay for its existence. Well, I'm sorry, but Kanye has no inherent right to be supported in what he does from the labor of other people. He has every right to sing, he has every right to record music but he has no right to make use of either the resources or labor of others unless he is willing and able to make a fair exchange for those.
This is where individual freedom vs freedom of capital comes in. He is individually free to provide for himself either directly through his own labor or through exchanging other tangible or intangible items/services with others so as to enable his life. But what, where's the room for compassion? Ah, I haven't gotten to living standards yet! Obviously while fans of Kanye as a unit may or may not have the collective resources and collective willpower to alone finance his performance that does not mean there aren't other in general more compassionate ways to enable his performances while also being fair exchanges. An entire society of fans, more than just fans of Kanye but fans or Rap, or fans of music in general, or even a larger society may agree that it is fundamentally fair for all people to be able to make a basic standard of living and in doing so naturally decide to donate X resources to establish collective standards of living and/or compensation within that group. This is how you get basic social services that now allow prospective Kanyes to be free from needing to labor to survive and may be free instead to pursue whatever gives them the most emotional satisfaction. From there music or rap fans may layer on top of that additional layers of compensation per agreement for pursuit of enabling greater numbers of people to pursue these artistic lifestyles that rely on exchanges of intangible value for things with tangible utility.
It's not much different than patronage that you used to see in medieval times. Only as we have abolished the authoritarian state and instead established a fair and equitable distribution of power and resources people within this society are individually far more empowered to form voluntary collectives to pursue mutual interests in such a way as to create a modern, urbanized society but one that exists entirely free of the coercion present in today's world. Pooling of resources for collective aims provide natural incentives for every individual to find those they can agree with and to form interest groups with power to provide natural incentive structures to support their interests. But because all contribution in such a system is voluntary and ownership is not a given to all things it also enables the option for individuals who do not wish to make certain agreements to not partake in part or all of a given society with the understandable caveat that they will be responsible for supporting themselves in full depending on how little they are willing to share.
"But who will be janitors in such a society, how will we clean toilets?" Well in such a society a Janitor who performs a task which is needed but undesired actually gets paid more than people who do things everyone wants to do. If there is collective need for janitors and collective ability to pay then obviously an equilibrium of compensation can be reached within the same system of structured voluntary agreements to meet a social need within the group or larger collective. But the biggest thing is that if there is not enough will for their to be Janitors? Then people all collectively need to suffer the consequences of that social choice, otherwise they will never understand to be generous enough to provide for their existence.
Alternatively people may decide they don't need or want traditional Janitors. In either case the situation rights itself eventually as people understand and can come to full agreement of terms with all of the knowledge necessary to understand in full the ramifications of a choice to both the individual and the collective ecosystem available to all within such a society. In short, everyone gets the society they want AND the society that they deserve.
Such a system has a fundamental standard of fairness that is universal (because the only way for universal standards are universal agreements within a group of individuals) and does not assign value to all things based primarily upon systems of individual or collective abuse/exploitation. Our current society uses supply/demand to basically set an equilibrium of price that is not actually fair, but rather based on what the maximal amount of material or capital wealth that can be extracted within any given deal is, and it creates incentives for sociopathic and predatory behavior by rewarding deceptive behavior and by making the terms of an agreement "set in stone when you sign" preventing any creation of discincentives once deceptive behavior was discovered because "Hey, you agreed to it!"
Money as it is used today enables bad behavior in rather catastrophic ways. The relevance is Kanye West can offer something no one else can, a Kanye West performance. That is a unique but intangible service that can't be found elsewhere. So he has a unique asset to negotiate with and use that to establish the fair value of his performance within a given society or collective. Wilt Chambarlain offers "Wilt Chamberlain playing basketball" as American Idol offers "American Idol" which is the collective production of its organization, etc. These are all unique things that can be offered and if people are not willing to pay then they can be withheld. If withholding them does not cause sufficient displeasure to make people rethink their valuation then obviously people just don't care about American Idol enough to keep it around.
And I find it profoundly unfair that wealth may be extracted from me to pay for only your American Idol. "But Fallout, what if only YOU hate American Idol within the society?!" Well then obviously I'm bargaining not just against American Idol but rather an agreement of reciporacal exchange for all goods and services in a society and not just American Idol and in return for my donation I receive not just American Idol but access to other resources offered within the given social contract. In this case I would not consider the arrangement unfair because it is not just an arrangement for American Idol but an arrangement for whatever society offered.
"But doesn't that exist today?!" Not really, my choices today are "Participate within the current socioeconomic paradigm" or "Slowly starve to death on the street" I have no ability in any capacity to labor for my own survival because access to all resources are now privately owned or collectively owned in a system of nation states which have little to no desire to provide any sort of suitable general welfare for any within it. Because virtually if not all habitable land is now privately owned with no ability for common use this means no individual or group of individuals may go elsewhere. It's why you never see flights of Democrats or Republicans after they lose an election, really, where the hell else can they go and be allowed to live? So again, my choices are comply or die in a prolonged, painful and socially degrading way, which coerces my agreement to many facets of society in ways that are for that reason, not only profoundly unfree but also remarkably dangerous because survival and ability to thrive within the context of our current society can (not definitely but often can) require practicing remarkable amounts of scoiopathy and predatory behavior which leads to the development of irreparably sick and mal-adjusted individuals who believe only in the abuse and exploitation of others for their personal gain.
This can be evidenced both by the study which showed CEOs and African Warlords share similar psychology as well as the funny little anecdote from Wall Street about how they're "Predators and if you kick us out here, we'll kick you out of your jobs."
Now the next question you asked is: "Well what if someone hoards all of the chickens? How will they get a fair exchange!" Well that's where the use of force as a balancing mechanism has to come in. The use of legitimized force within a voluntary society can only be applied as a last ditch effort to right inequity. As there are no centralized units of force such as a modern vast Army that is born and bred for dogmatic unthinking allegiance to authority this enables the application of force into agreements as a disincentive for failure to comply with the process of negotiation and establishment of a fair agreement. If someone owns all chickens in a society and enough people feel the price is unfair they are able to, in essence negotiate first for an exchange with the owner of the chickens for resources so that other chicken breeders can exist and create a price equilibrium and if the owner refuses so as to maintain a monopoly and will not under any circumstances give up a chicken then obviously the society has no other choice but to take some chickens from him.
This does not mean that he goes to jail, this does not mean his house is burned down, or anything else ridiculously barbaric or violent. Merely that a given society if that society feels it is getting an unfair deal due to monopolization, is able to assess all relevant information and then make a judgement in regards to seizure of chickens to enable equilibrium to be established. Really this is no different than a modern court and police system, but in this case after voluntary arrangement fails a formalized plea within the greater collective is made via a formalized court system and if it is decided by all within the society that it is a fair judgement to repossess X number of chickens that this seizure may be made by X group (police) of persons at X time for X purposes whom are equipped to ensure the transfer occurs under favorable terms, and that after this point the individual who tried to hoard the chickens may be free to leave the society if they found the judgement unfair.
In this case they would have agreed beforehand already to be subject to such a system of law, so this would then become a natural consequence and disincentive for predatory behavior. Monopolize the commons somehow or an important resource within a society for your exclusive gain? Eventually that society has the right to repossess it if you are abusing that privilege. "But won't that lead to Mob rule? People burning down houses of people they don't like?" If use of force may only be legitimized by a voluntary agreement of say a 2/3 or 3/4 majority within a given society? (The margins could be tweaked) then I would imagine it would be incredibly hard to get that society (if we assume modern populations of say 500K or so per society) to agree to your burning down the home of someone you dislike.
The only way to authorize use of force is to have a compelling case to make before the whole of society and if the whole of society is able to near universally if not universally agree you are not making good use of your chickens then who are you to make use of their collective labor and resources to enable your use of chickens? "But they're all morons! THEY don't know the value of Chickens! I do! If they would just leave me alone I'd make them all rich!" If everyone else knows what you know, and they decide otherwise then you have no right to claim superiority as you are but one person and the mere existence of the chickens within that society and the greater planet predates you by thousands of years or more. You are not entitled to take anything if it is needed by someone else to live and you just want it to profit.
That is the "Law of the Jungle" talking. And surprisingly enough aligns with many Republican talking points about how it's not fair to "Rob the individual" but it can only be considered robbing if the individual is able to entirely create all of their materials absent of nature and absent of others. You did not make anything, you labored and through your labor turned natural, given resources into something of personal value. But your ability to use nature does not give you the right to covet nature for your exclusive gain. Because within the context of the planet and society you and your labor contribute only a fraction of the full effort that has been put towards the given realization of any value of any property and because of that collective contribution all resources naturally belong to a system of collective AND private ownership to represent both the collective and individual contributions of labor which make society function. Only a megalomaniac thinks they have a right to own the planet just because it's there.
Since this is the second time you've made that argument, I feel compelled to point out that it bears absolutely no resemblance to any real-world laws that arguably run afoul of the 1st Amendment such as campaign finance reform laws, the fairness doctrine, or laws against media consolidation.
Not to mention that a law saying making it a crime to spend money on the speech-related products of one specific individual would already be unconstitutional since it's a Bill of Attainder.
I'm not sure what the significance of your statements are about monopolies is. Money doesn't have any particular relationship to monopolies in the abstract; monopolies are the singular control over a supply, and may or may not involve money.
How can Kanye live like what? You seem to think your audience is sharing your assumptions. It sounds an awful lot like he'd still be a fabulously wealthy individual under what you're talking about.
A note about your method of composition: It's not suited to a message board format. The more you type, the more a reader needs to either chop up what you say into little pieces to dispute it, or to just ignore the bulk of it to focus on key points of interest to be extracted.
Accept, for the sake of argument, that private wealth can buy an audience but not necessarily acceptance of the message (as is generally the case where the message is "buy my stuff", aka commercial advertising). In such a society, would you assert that all individuals have an equal franchise even if private wealth is both highly unequal and unjustly distributed?
Does it matter if it turns out that buying an audience can shift political opinions in the aggregate (in, perhaps, the same way well-designed commercial advertising shifts consumer tastes)? Or does individual sovereignty always legitimize the shift in opinion, even if the shift is funded by a, for the sake of argument, imperfectly just wealth.
(the point here is whether your stance is depending on some notion of individual desert of private wealth in making the attendant claim that said individuals have an unrestricted right to use that wealth as they see fit in making speech. I'm not sure what your precise argument is, honestly)
Another (related) point. Suppose society is somewhat democratic, in that the mad dictator defers to the electorate in some issues, because he just doesn't care about those. In the normal process of commerce I might not care if you prefer or despise apples, which has no effect on me, but in the process of politics I might reasonably care if the electorate is voting on a proposal to ban apples and I like apples - democracy in practice has an inherently illiberal and coercive tendency which is not perfectly restrained, after all. Sometimes people vote in a coercive manner. We don't live in a classically liberal utopia.
Say I learn that a pear monopoly seeks to back the proposal to prohibit apples. Take it as given that buying an audience can shift political opinion. It would be coercive to limit the ability of the owner-operator of the monopoly to support this proposal in the media. It would also be coercive if the electorate votes to ban apples. Must the former be necessarily more repellent than the latter?
(does it matter if the pear monopoly is 'deserved' by some individual accomplishment rather than being, say, the mad dictator's nephew? Even if individuals are so sovereign that the we are to take their expressed opinions as given even if we regard their opinions as manipulated, don't we restrict the outcome of democratic impulses anyway?)
It seems pretty unequal to me.
I'm not sure what my exact position is. I saw MM's rebuttal and it reminded me of a conversation that I have been interested in in the past. I think that the effect of a lot of regulation really does overlap with regulation of speech, but I also think that such regulation isn't necessarily unreasonable.
There is an assumption most clearly recently displayed in posniallo's tongue-in-cheek post, that speech and the like needs to be protected, and as such we need to define speech such that it is always protected. This seems misguided to me. Fitting our definitions to what we find most desirable - "money isn't speech because we need to restrict the influence that concentrated wealth has on politics", to paraphrase one view - it's not providing an honest accounting of the trade-offs that must occur.
Yeah, there are a lot of trade-offs with respect to democratic rule. I'm not sure how to address them in a general sense; the particulars of the political system are important, as is the culture of the electorate. I don't have a particularly concrete or passionate view about democracy, be it as an intrinsic good or as being particularly necessary to providing for good and stable outcomes. I'm sympathetic to some libertarian views with respect to keeping the state out of the regulatory business except as it applies to keeping people safe from physical and financial harm, but I'm not sure how such an idealized system would be maintained in conjunction with a democratic rule.
Wherefore the argument for unrestriction, then?
In a voice vote we do not generally encourage yelling, even if some are naturally blessed with louder voices than others. Or even if some work hard to train a fine baritone.
There is, if you like, a tension between the harm principle and recognizing that we would like the process of politics to aggregate beliefs in a certain fashion, especially since democratic legitimacy must come from somewhere and regrettably it does not fall as manna from heaven.
Now in practice I suspect we are overestimating the impact of money spent as speech as explicit appeals to the public and underestimating the impact of money spent on relatively indirect ways to shape policy, e.g., drafting detailed policy proposals that make a senator's job easier or funding someone else's culture war effort as a quid pro quo. The public simply doesn't pay enough attention to the fine details of most policy; Prop 8 referanda don't happen as often as bog-standard lobbying. The mechanism by which organized wealth affects policy is not primarily via the soap-box, even if our choice of conceptual metaphor is to describe it as 'speech'. That is merely the class of rights invoked to defend the action.
So this is a theoretical point. I happen to think it's quite a solid theoretical point, and that the theoretical case for non-restriction is rather weak when there is no accompanying theory of desert or political economy, but it is theoretical all the same. We might be obsessing over the wrong things in this thread.
The tradeoff is a prohibition on some set of actions, presumably (plus, you know, attendant enforcement errors and so on. But that does not seem to be decisive here). But possibly I am misunderstanding you.
Monopoly is singular control over the supply of an item, yes. But your ability to maintain singular control of a supply of anything is dependent on your ability to take and keep control of the supply. You can only do this in any combination of two possible ways. 1: Voluntary agreements that it is yours. 2: Involuntary use of force against anyone tries to take it, and anyone who tries to jeopardize item 1 by being successfully able to convince others you no longer should have this item.
So for your control over a monopoly to remain stable you first need to secure enough force to prevent people from stealing it. But beyond a very basic level the requirement of force to defend your right to monopoly will proceed along a continuum based on how unfairly you intend to make use of your supply of an item. The more you hoard and the more unfairly you distribute it (in relation to how important that supply is to others) the more force you need to control your monopoly from an ever growing pissed off populace.
So the first type of monopoly you need before you can secure perpetual control of anything is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Of course the legitimacy of force is only granted within the mind of the observer, but in general our modern social contract system states the only legitimate uses of force are via the military and police within a nation state system which are supposed to enforce the system of laws within that society. So we already have this.
Money only leads to monopoly after this if the state grants monopoly over the printing of legal tender and the money is distributed incredibly unfairly by whoever controls that monopoly. Which again, the Fed loans to big banks for nothing and does not loan to individuals who would actually spur the economy by spending it on something. So in our current climate there is a severe problem over how our money supply has been distributed by the owner of the monopoly of legal tender. Shoveling money only at the Rich, who will not spend it, rather than trying to equalize capital wealth so as to spur economic growth.
I try to answer any possible rebuttals to my points before someone can make them, sometimes I do better than others at predicting what those might be. ^_^;; Either way if society decides collectively and voluntarily Kanye is worth that much? Then yes by all means let him be fabulously wealthy. Something tells me though that within such a society he would not be quite as fabulously wealthy or rather everyone would be living within enough of their own definition of fabulously wealthy that Kanye's respective wealth would not appear quite as monolithically unequal as it does today to the majority of the world.
This is why I chop up replies to people and I'd encourage you to do the same. To really espouse my ideas I often need to spend a lot of time making a series of interdependent points to express an ideology and every part of it which would inform my belief in its soundness. If I leave things out it gives the opportunity for others to project or assume things into what I'm saying that I might not be intending. This is why I take effort to proactively counteract any possible rebuttals before they can occur so as to provide every reason for something (and yes that can be exhaustive.)
My concerns in this thread are largely regarding what should constitute speech in our conceptions of it; I'm taking, as @Feral noted, a pretty broad view, and I suppose that might lend itself to the notion that I'm particularly supportive of a very hands-off agenda. I'm more supportive of what I would regard as a more honest accounting of the tensions that there are in restrictions on money as they apply to speech. That is, my objection isn't to any particular policy, it's to the notion that money isn't speech and therefore its restriction shouldn't be cause for concern. I think a broader conception of speech is more appropriate. My advocacy is in relation to a better understanding of the ideas of money and speech; I'm not advocating any particular legislation.
I'm personally in favor of less restriction, but that's not something I've invested enough thought into to be particularly passionate about, to be particularly immovable on, or to have particularly cogent views on. I was hoping to develop my ideas along with this discussion. In this thread at least, I am not advocating an argument for un-restriction. (Yet?) Again: I think that the effect of a lot of regulation really does overlap with regulation of speech, but I also think that such regulation isn't necessarily unreasonable.
Well, sure. I'm just not sure what the optimal mix might be, or what exactly I'd prefer. i think that the desire to disassociate money from conceptions of speech makes the discussion less accurate about the changes and trades of various freedoms that different mixes would entail, and that is where I'm largely intending to come from.
Because, well, okay. :P But learning to suppress hesitation in biting bullets takes some practice, perhaps.
With respect to your first three paragraphs, "monopoly" doesn't imply anything about perpetuity. Monopolies can be brief, or they can exist for an extended period of time. The notion doesn't imply either. It also doesn't suggest anything about how one might go about maintaining a monopoly. In the Smurf Village, Baker Smurf enjoys a monopoly on baked goods, and there's no particular monetary or force incentive to keep it that way.
Your last paragraph doesn't inform any view about how money leads to monopoly, it only shows how money isn't distributed equally in society and in response to a crisis, and problems that may or may not be associated with that.
You'll forgive me for not taking "something tells me" seriously. Something tells me otherwise.
Yes. I can forgive politicians for needing to grease the wheels of legislation with things that aren't honest. I don't think it has any place in an ostensibly honest debate though.
*I* will be there to make people bite bullets. Let me find my Rorschach mask...
Pretty much, by requiring money to purchase rights to effective speech and enabling vastly unequal capital wealth and therefore vastly unequal ability to pursue popularization of speech our money system currently massively restricts speech. This is not quite authoritarian but certainly authoritarian lite. Its control can be massively exercised against vast numbers of individuals or groups of people, although it's not literal 100% total control of the right to express yourself. So before you can make speech truly free you must divorce money from the ability to disseminate and popularize speech.
Otherwise in systems of vastly unequal wealth the wealthy wield incredibly powerful social control through this restriction of speech. The bigger problem is I try to make five or six points at once (often without realizing it) and just begin to just go one by one in describing all the current ways our society is messed up or could be run better through analogy. -_-;; I tend to think rather non-linearly and this is why if anyone's watched the thread I've had to submit more than a dozen edits to most of my posts to try and make them more legible.
You have the supply side of the market of ideas but not the demand side, more generally.
Well what wealth also enables you to buy is not just the bullhorn to reach the audience but also to, in multiple ways, buy the trust of the audience in what you have to say. Because buying a bullhorn and buying the ability to build a brand around your bullhorn and to keep that brand running for generations enables a you to buy a trusted social identity. If the ability to buy and retain this type of trust depends entirely on your ability to acquire or maintain wealth then that gives wealth an immediate and unfair advantage in the field of not just distributing speech but also popularizing it as well.
Well the problem isn't that the audience is legitimately disagreeing. It's that News institutions exist which have built generational brands around the News, which is defined culturally as the relentless pursuit of impartial truth. Yet the Brand of the News and what news organizations actually do is quite contrary. But this contrary image is accepted and so people watch the news believing they got the full, unadulterated story when more often then not they did not. This means either we need to stop allowing news organizations to imply they are interested in telling the truth or we need to prevent their ability from distorting it.
The problem isn't outright lies but rather various forms of distortion and misrepresentation of events, ideas or viewpoints which allow that audience, who you've bought and whose trust you've bought, to be slowly lead into the likely belief of whatever you have said if you paint a slow picture of events over a given course of time. Take how culturally certain political words like Communism, Socialism, or Redistribution even will mentally evoke violent connotations of Soviet Gulags or torture in the minds of many people. This sort of mimetic response can be conditioned if associations are always subtly placed by the trusted organization which lead the uninformed to believe they exist.
Well the best way I thought was again, fairness doctrine requirements. If the News wants to report on something let's just ensure they must give a full and fair representation to the views that are discussed in some way. This prevents the buying of audiences and the buying of trust from being used exclusively to indoctrinate an audience to propaganda. If both sides are fairly represented and people have all the information I'm sure they'll make the best decisions.
I've already said it multiple times. You just miss it. Hence me saying that.
An audience is a limited quantity. At it's most extreme, there are a finite number of people in the world and a finite number of hours in the day leading to a finite amount of communication that can occur since people cannot infinitely multitask.
And thus the more you speak (and remember speaking isn't just you saying, it's someone else listening), the more you engage an audience, the less someone else can. You are using up a finite resource.
And this resource only gets more finite as you consider that people can't listen all the time and must do things like "sleep" and "work" and "shit" and all that stuff.
There's only so many times I can repeat the same argument in a different format.
But free doesn't mean "more heard." And it certainly doesn't mean it with regard to the concept of "Freedom of Speech." I wouldn't even want all peoples in society having an equal voice. I think that's silly and wasteful. A racist should be able to say whatever he wants up to inciting hate and violence, but I don't think society needs to give him an equal berth in listening to him.
I frankly don't think you comprehend either Freedom of Speech or even "freedom" on a basic, fundamental level. I'm not trying to be a dick here but the idea that free = "more heard" as if that is somehow a relevant definition in this context is bizarre and wrong.[/quote]
No, I think you don't actually think about what you are saying.
Again, what does "Free Speech" even mean? It doesn't just mean the ability to say what you want, it means the ability to say it to WHO you want. Because a restriction on people being able to hear your speech is itself a restriction on speech. This is blindly obvious and if it isn't, reread my example of the political activist in solitary confinement and come back when you can explain how his "right to free speech" has not been restricted.
And once you've finally realised that an audience is a core component of free speech, maybe you will suddenly see why I'm talking about WHO is listening and not just what is being said.
As for "more free", let's think about this for a second. If "Free speech" is not on a gradient, what's the cut-off? Where's it suddenly go from "Not Free" to "Free"? 3 people? 10? What's the number? Or are we, as I said, talking about speech being on a gradient. One that is heavily influenced by money. (which is the point)
Money buys speech. Money enables speech. Money makes one person's speech "more free" then anothers because money lets that person better reach the people he wants to. A man with a TV show's speech is more free because there are less restrictions on his ability to speak to whomever he wants.
And yes, that last part does matter. Because speech requires a listener.