Let's think about this in numbers. In 08 roughly 112,000,000 people voted. Some estimates say that the total cost of the current election will be $6 billion, or more than $50/vote assuming similar turnout. I think many people would cast a vote for $20-25. We're losing effiency!
This whole thing is no different than straight-up vote buying. In fact, I think at this point that cash payment-style vote buying might actually be more honest than the current system. Talk about judicial activism, legislating from the bench; this takes that to new and unforeseen heights.
In the view of the three Republicans on the FEC, then, Citizen’s United means not only that a corporation or union can deploy money in an independent effort to affect the outcome of an election (including money that rightfully belongs to its shareholders), but that it can deploy any other resources it controls—including its employees’ time, both on and off the clock.
How can this be?
Which is frankly terrifying. It also amusingly plays into the narrative from the far left that wage labor is tantamount to slavery.
That one owns oneself should be the most inalienable right for every person everywhere. All other rights derive from that fact that one is one's own master, and has dominion over himself and his possessions. Any attempt to ascribe ownership of a person to another person is a fundamental violation of the most fundamental human right.
The title made me think of this episode of Community: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYhaTPg8lOE
Absolutely true. Of course governments are quite capable of restrictions of civil rights and historically are the primary sources of such restrictions. I see one major difference: ideologically the purpose of a government is to serve it's citizens while the purpose of a corporation is to serve it's shareholders. Except in the case of coops this, this creates a shareholder/non-shareholder class distinction. It's for this reason I'm aligned with the idea that basic needs should be the domain of government.Libertarians, who believe that only government can restrict freedom, are blind to these [private sector] encroachments on liberty.
"Independent use of its paid workforce." I wonder if anyone considers the type of world we are trying to create. We seem willing to be lead by the nose by a desire for ideological consistency into a swamp of irrational and inhumane madness. Citizen's United represents some of the most blantant rejection of good and common sense so that we can say that we've made a earnest effort to practice materialism in its purest form. Debt slavery is libertarianism practiced right.But its three Republicans argued that because the work was part of an independent effort by the union, and didn’t involve contributions to the campaign itself, the law didn’t apply: A union or corporation’s “independent use of its paid workforce to campaign for a federal candidate post-Citizen's United was not contemplated by Congress and, consequently, is not prohibited by either the Act or Commission regulation.”