RALEIGH – Free speech is, as they say, not free. All actions have costs. In politics, “free speech” often requires the expenditure of significant time and money. Effective campaigns must employ resources to print materials, hold events, tour the jurisdiction, build websites and databases, operate outreach and volunteer efforts, staff the phone banks, and so on.
If campaigns spend money on these functions, they are “speaking.” They are communicating with voters. If campaigns spend less money and rely on volunteered time as a substitute, they may also communicate with voters but probably not as well (and some have more time to give than others, just as some have more money to give than others). If campaigns spend both less money and less time on these functions, because government policymakers have rigged things that way via rules and regulations, then they communicate less with voters. They lose the freedom to speak.
If the government told newspapers and television stations that there was a limit to the advertising they could sell, and thus to the copy or broadcast time they can afford to deliver to their audiences, there would be outrage. Self-proclaimed champions of the First Amendment would cry foul. But when government seeks to do the same thing to other enterprises – to political campaigns, parties, independent funds, businesses, unions, or activist groups – these same champions will often call it “campaign-finance reform.” It’s worth remembering that news organizations have no more freedom under the First Amendment that anyone else does.
At present, we have the spectacle of political candidates and the media exhorting other political candidates to tell independent 527 organizations to shut up. John Kerry wants George W. Bush to tell the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to shut up. Bush wants Kerry to tell George Soros and the MoveOn.org crowd to shut up. Mike Easley and The Charlotte Observer want the Republican Governors’ Association to shut up – or at least to stop saying things that the Easley campaign and the Observer don’t want them to say.
It’s hard to see any heroic figures in this, other than Federal Elections Commissioner Bradley Smith. He was a Bush appointee that Democrats savaged and tried to block. He took office anyway and then argued strongly that Democratic-leaning 527s had an obvious First Amendment right to organize, raise funds, and participate in the political process despite the best efforts of governmental busybodies to silence them and their (less numerous and less-well-funded) Republican mirror-images.
America is a free society. The fundamental concept is that people have the right to say, think, and act however they like consistent with the equal right of other people to do the same. In a free society, you have the right to be right. You have the right to be wrong. You have the right to be polite and frank, or obnoxious and unctuous. You can be conservative, liberal, libertarian, vegetarian, Unitarian, fundamentalist, environmentalist, disinterested, uninterested, or self-interested.
Not only can you think these things and say these things, but you can band together with others to do the same. If you want to say John Kerry is a fraud, or George W. Bush is a buffoon, or Mike Easley is a failure, or Patrick Ballantine is a tyro, you and any individuals or groups who agree with you get to do that.
Sorry, wrong tense. You got to do that. This used to be a free society. Now it, and its politics, have been “reformed.”
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.