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Rath on 02 May 2012
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Kasz216 said:
Rath said:
A few things Kasz.

1) The comparison between political lobby groups and corporations is wrong. Political lobby groups are groups of individuals working towards a common political goal. Corporations are entities answerable to shareholders, they are not a group of individuals in the same way political groups such as the ACLU are.

2) There is the possibility of maintaining freedom of speech while limiting political campaigning. Many countries simply limit the amount of money allowed to be spent - while corporations can express a political opinion they cannot spend tens of millions of dollars trying to convert other people to share their opinion. While this does put a limit on freedom of speech the limit is not overly stringent and on the balance of things the minor loss of that freedom is worth the major gains in political freedom.

3) It's pretty obvious that quite a few politicians in the USA do answer to corporate lobby groups. For example it's how bills like SOPA, CISPA and PIPA keep popping up - the massive IP lobbies fund the politicians essentially in exchange for bills that protect their interests.


Hell even in NZ we're currently having scandals over campaign funding (of course on a much smaller scale - the corporate donation was only $15,000) and possibly going to end up to entirely tax payer funded political campaigning because of it.


1) Why?  Why are they different?  Political lobby groups have specific political goals.  Coporations have specific economic goals.  Economic goals are political when one group of politcians is going to hurt your buisness enviroment.

Also citizens united effected both equally.

2)  Except... as previously shown... there is no real loss of politcal freedom... and really what is and isn't overly stringent is simply a matter of opinion.  Freedom of speech hsouldn't ever rely soley on opinion.

3)  MANY people on these forums support stuff like SOPA, CISPA and PIPA... are they all in the pockets of corporate lobbying groups?  There are plenty of reasons to support such bills, espiecally if your some older senator who has your staff do 90% of your internet stuff and don't really understand the internet.

1) Corporations are not a collection of people however. They are legally a seperate entity from their members - this gives them certain protections but also certain restrictions. They simply are not legally at all the same as something like the ACLU.

2) Like almost all freedoms it is and should be restricted at the point where it damages other freedoms. This is evident in libel, slander laws for example and also not legal to say things that are likely to cause harm (eg. falsely shout fire in a public theatre). In this case too much free speech destroys political freedom - it is not possible to have free and fair elections when an overwhelming media campaign is launched.

Also your link (the freakonomics one) only contains one actual researcher as far as I can see and his research is contradicted by

http://www.uky.edu/~clthyn2/PS671/Gerber_1998APSR.pdf

http://www.kenbenoit.net/pdfs/Jacobson1978.pdf

Which also contradict each other (but both say that election spending does increase votes) but both recommend spending caps in elections.

3) So you don't think that the corporate lobbying groups huge pockets are influencing these bills at all? I can't prove that there would be much less support in congress for the bills without  their money - but I'm pretty confident that it would be the case.

 

 

Edit: Basically there are two reasons I oppose corporations being able to put huge money into political campaigns.

1. It encourages corruption.

2. It causes an election to no longer be fair.