This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 21st, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

According to Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case,

the First Amendment is primarily about one thing.

We can't trust government to regulate speech.

And so the Court has issued a broad ruling on just how free speech really is under the First Amendment.

John Samples, author of the book The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform,

offers his thoughts on today's opinion.

This is about an organization who made a movie about Hillary Clinton that they wanted to show and wanted to run ads for.

Now the problem was why this became a political matter and a legal matter is the organization that made the movie was a corporation.

It was engaging in political speech.

However, that involved the outlay of money by the corporation and that turned out to be

illegal under American law and under specifically also under McCain-Feingold.

And the Supreme Court had said about 20 years ago or so that in fact

banning such funding of speech by corporations was okay under the Constitution.

They were trying to set up a distinction between individuals and corporations for the purpose of that

kind of spending, right?

Well, yes and no.

I mean what they said in the case of Austin versus Michigan Chamber of Commerce was that if you let

corporations and labor unions spend money on speech that you would distort the

political process and that would be a kind of corruption.

Really what they were saying was if you let businesses or unions spend money on speech

...