Our Freedom of Expression Is Killing Us

[Jim Lane]

227. I disagree with all three foreign laws you mention. Citizens United is a different matter.

Yes, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany are all reasonably free countries -- as is the United States. None is perfect.

The foreign laws you cite go too far. To the extent that they're proper (banning the immediate incitement of violence), that's already illegal in the United States, as others have mentioned.

Most of your post has to do with banning speech if the content fails some (fairly amorphous) test of what you personally consider acceptable. Citizens United didn't have to do with content. There's plenty of big corporate money influencing elections without insulting minority religious groups or the like.

Heck, we'd have a problem even if the big-money advertisers were restricted to demonstrably true content, like "under President Obama, we've had (fill in number) consecutive months of unemployment over 8 percent." Even though that's true, and one valid point in the national debate, the problem is that one side's points get much more exposure.

The real flaw in Citizens United is that it failed to recognize that spending huge amounts of money on political ads is speech, but it's also conduct. It's like protesting the Vietnam War by burning your draft card -- the Supreme Court held that such conduct was not protected by the First Amendment. That was the correct decision. The same logic should have been applied to the spending at issue in Citizens United.

As for the overall state of political dialog, I don't think other countries are better off because of hate-speech laws. I think they're better off because their political dialog is less subject to domination by big-money interests.

There's also a different issue raised by your reference to the public airwaves. There's no practical limit to the number of different newspapers and magazines that can be published, but scarcity of spectrum space means that not all points of view can have all the broadcast air time they want. Therefore, under the First Amendment as interpreted by U.S. courts, the government has greater power to regulate broadcast media than print media. Fortunately, the advent of cable makes this distinction less important.