Hear hear! I am a nonprofit tech professional, and a monthly call with ~40 similar folks yesterday started with a discussion of Dolly's passing. At first I thought it was just about loving her music and/or personality, but it was also the fact that several folks, at different nonprofits with varied missions, had received significant funding from the many foundations Dolly had set up over the years.

> It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.

That money did go somewhere, so it probably did “help” quite a number of people less rich than Sergey Brin.

(That’s just a side comment, not an argument that any single person should own that much money.)

People and corporations? Come on.

The US has now in one decade nearly doubled its military budget from ~$630 Billion to ~$1.2 Trillion.

ICE alone has received tens of billions in funds in the past year.

What's really interesting is when you look at how much good they could do without ever actually affecting their lifestyle at all. What actually is $100 million to a trillionaire? What could he do with 1,000,000,000,000 that he can't do with 999,900,000,000?

Omg great question you're so smart!

Any fix needs to start with impeachment and removal by Congress. I’d love to see bribes treated as treason.

Doesn't the FEC already regulate contribution limits? The debate is where the line is and when the line comes into play. Society is a constant negotiation between individual freedoms and collective safety/social order. You have already ceded some rights in this vein. It is not controversial to see an unfairness in some citizens/their vehicles having many magnitudes more influence over the common citizen. Citizens United is a conduit to a standard that can be hacked by money. Arguably, the dilution of your own political leverage in this paradigm is a greater inhibition to your rights than a stricter contribution limit ever could be, in the long term.

The issue is "Is a corporation a person with all rights assigned to people"

Makes me wonder if LLM's are going to be granted citizenship by this court.

And then, individual transistors.

Except in your world the person with the most resources is the one that wins by default because they simply outspend everyone else, how is that righteous? Especially when we're not talking about individuals here, we're talking about corporations.

Besides your premise is flawed to begin with, you most certainly cannot freely rent out a billboard and put anything you want on there, or a radio ad, or a book printing. Restrictions on content already exist, and I see no reason why an exception should be made for political parties.

A lot of very effective democracies work better by making it so that one individual is does not have a disproportionately larger voice, so the idea that you can spend arbitrary amounts on speech just because it's speech doesn't really follow.

You shouldn't have the right to spend disproportionately more on influencing an election than other people. That's not democratic. It very much favors the interests of the extremely wealthy.

What would be most democratic is if tax money funded campaigns. Every candidate gets the same amount for that office. Take money out of the equation. It should not be a reason someone gets elected. That's corrupting and makes candidates beholden to monied interests.

> Revenue, not profit, is your income.

If this was implemented, it would destroy almost all companies. Grocery store net profit margins are 2-4%, if they sell $1B and make $40M and you tax them on 25% of $1B, their loss for the year would be $210M.

Apple and NVidia might survive, but any company with profit margins less than 25% or so would lose money simply by operating.

Liquidating everything or selling the business outright is the only move if you lose money by operating your business, only everyone else is trying to liquidate their assets since operating a business is guaranteed to lose money so there are no buyers.

"Money is speech" is a reddit-ism. The argument is closer to "limiting spending can be tantamount to limiting speech."

Should the president of the US (regardless of party) be able to restrict your ability to spend money on a web server because it hosts a forum about humanrights/guns/birthcontrol/etc? Or to run a news channel/blog that focuses on a particular perspective?

If not, little prevents the most endowed campaigns from changing their form factor from ads to propoganda platforms. And buying out news platforms becomes more enticing.

Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it? And would it actually solve the problem?

I agree in spirit, but if not courts, and government, who is the one who gets to decide on it? Since it's a democratic country, if people disagreed or had a strong opinion about it, then would've voted accordingly.

Free speech is when I scream so loud, no one else can even be heard. Its your fault anyway. Maybe if you cared you should have spent your life learning how to scream louder.

> Corporations are only people when it comes to rights and profits. When it comes to responsibilities they revert to being nebulous entities whose behaviors are emergent phenomena that no one can actually be held accountable for.

You do have a point here. Corporate shareholders do have special protections based on the legal principle of "corporate veil", meaning that corporate owners are usually not personally responsible for the corporation’s debts or legal misdeeds.

But they do get to influence elections from behind the veil, as to further grow their privileges, it's a slippery slope indeed.

maybe the downvotes should instead state their arguments as to why Citizens United is a good idea

I think the idea that we should also be able to hide our large donations started here, but got reenforced by later decisions. ok, it's your money, you get to send it to whoever you like. but you shouldn't be able to hide. companies shouldn't act as cover for their owners, and if a candidate is largely propped up by the billionaire class then shouldn't voters at least be aware? shouldn't we be allowed to connect the dots and say 'wow, so you're removing protection for these wetlands because this guy threw you a couple million to get elected'?