This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 19, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Does the First Amendment in Shrine Your Right to Speak anonymously?

Are the touted chilling effects of disclosure laws real.

John Samples is the director of the Cato Institute Center for

Representative Government.

He argues that speaking out about politics shouldn't automatically mean everyone else gets to know who you are.

There is a, the thing that I've been noticing in the past as we get closer to election days,

the, uh, there is a sort of a rule that rhetoric will

become more irrational the thing I've been noticing is that there's been a lot of

writing about tickly campaign finance.

It's really, there's cliches have become much more pronounced,

it seems to me, now than in the past and part of it is about untrammeled or secret

secrecy being getting a heavy emphasis these things are all themes that have been talked about from at least

the 1970s in this area, but it seems to me that it's a little more hackneyed than it has been in the past, particularly the aqua

metaphors, the metaphors of water and floodgates and flood of new money and all of this and you know the truth is this is a yet another one of

these that we've had now the third in a row of an election that's again the

aqua metaphor a wave election big things are happening

the country a lot of people voters in the country are moving back and forth

between parties and that's generating a lot of money that people are giving to

candidates to groups to to make this possible because people are upset and engaged as they were in 2006 and 2008.

And that's what really is happening. There's nothing untoward here.

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