The notion that money is speech seems obviously wrong. Money isn’t speech. It’s power. Money is literally a medium of exchange. The transfer of energy to get work done. The more money you have, the more you can do.

In free speech debates, conflating money and speech leads to the rather strange position of defending the speech rights of the powerful. It’s not that the powerful (people with money) should have less speech, necessarily. The real issue is how make sure that the less powerful are able to speak and have their ideas heard. This is one of the beautiful aspects of the internet…it increases access to the means of producing speech.

When we talk about the problem of money in politics, we’re talking about the problem of unelected people with power having influence (power) with elected representatives. So it’s the will of the powerful that gets done, not the will of the people.