This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 29th, 2013.

I'm Kayla Brown.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is being asked to get into the business of compelling companies

to tell shareholders how engaged they are in political speech.

Alan Dickerson, legal director at the Center for Competitive Politics, argues it's a solution in search of a problem.

So the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates publicly traded companies, has

been asked by a group of academic law professors to start a rulemaking process

which would eventually lead to regulation, which would require those companies to disclose political contributions beyond what they already need to disclose.

Companies have dealt with these kinds of issues internally for a long time, haven't they?

Well, both internally and externally. It's important to remember

that there is a contribution disclosure regime that already exists and there's

no there's no separate set of rules for corporations.

If corporations cannot legally contribute to candidates, but if corporations were to earmark

their funds for issue speech or contribute to political committees, that's already disclosed under existing law.

It is true that internally corporations have had to make decisions on how they report these things

to shareholders.

What is it that these professors want, in your view?

It's tough to know.

What they say they want is access to what they see is a particularly dangerous type of corporate spending.

Now they're not talking about contributions to candidates, they're talking about spending on public

discourse essentially. Well yes and no, I mean certainly no in the sense that it

is illegal to contribute to candidates as a corporation and that has not changed. Yes in the

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