31.03.06
Money is Speech
I have been reading Extreme Democracy, a book edited by Jon Lebkowsky and
Mitch Ratcliffe. It is a collection of papers on the subject of how the usage of Information Technology have and will influence the way the world is governed. Very recommended reading, and I will probably have more than one comment on this 371 page work.
One of the papers included in the book is “6.4 Billion Points of Light Lighting the Tapers of Democracy“, by Roger Wood. The points Roger makes are very clear and I concur with most of them. However, there is one point regarding the equivalence of money and speech where I disagree strongly with his arguments. Roger writes (emphasis added):
Buckley v. Valeo (1976) gives us the theory that money is equivalent to speech. The issue is ripe for debate, if for no other reason than money is not equally available to all citizens in society, while we are all equally endowed with one mind. [...]
Money is not speech, it merely creates (or pays for) a platform for an individual to speak.
Living in a developing country, I can see a clear relation among money and speech. Not the way Roger means it, but rather that people lacking resources generally do not have the skills, means or opportunities to even develop their speech. So the problem is not only to make the (presumably existing) speech available for others to see, but to enable poor people to reflect upon their situation, have access to information, being able to process it and finally to create their own speech.
Consider a child that is born in a low-income group in Chile. The child generally does not get much stimulation at home, since both parents probably have to work in order to feed the family, covering only the basic needs (which already is an improvement relative to other families). When the child goes to school, it is necessary to choose a private (high quality) or state (low quality) school. When the money is scarce, the child will drop out of school and work to support the family.
In this circumstances, having money guarantees access to cover basic needs (food, housing, health, living in a stimulating or depressing environment) that are taken for granted in many countries. A person that has not covered its basic needs will have no opportunity for reflection on their situation, hence no possibility of arguing or making a point. The day to day survival is all that matters in their case, which is not helpful either to avoid the same situation for their own children. When the title is citing 6.4 Billion people (the whole earth population), we should consider that not all have access to the same basic services, so an argument that makes sense in an industrialized country cannot be blindly applied to the whole world. Zuckerman makes that point in his article “Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower“, also included in the book Extreme Democracy.
