This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 13th, 2011.

I'm Keila Brown.

Disclosing political activity is one of those issues that about everyone agrees on but mandatory

disclosure of political contributions isn't all benefits and no costs.

So says John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government.

In the Citizens United decision, one of the things that four of the five justices in the

majority said was basically disclosure is the thing

we'll put up with in order to have you know truly free elections otherwise in terms of people who get to speak and

about about that seems like disclosure was just sort of a backstop for

otherwise relatively unregulated speech.

Yeah, I thought the disclosure part of Citizens United was very political in the sense that you got the idea from it that the justice were saying we're

making this significant decision that may you know cause political controversy and in the middle of it we're going to say but you

know you can have disclosure the people who are against this decision there'll be

there'll be disclosure and it can be broad and so on.

For me, the part of the decision,

touching on disclosure, was not good at all

in the sense that it wasn't well reasoned it wasn't conceptually

coherent and I don't think the majority or maybe very few of the Supreme Court

justices have thought very much about disclosure and the

new world they created with citizens united and they need to do that because actually things have changed a great deal.

The speech that was freed up in Citizens United, it's not subject to the same kind of disclosure for the same reasons.

What new evidence do we have regarding this sort of new world that Citizens United created?

...