Forum Post: Individuals' Meaningful Right to Vote vs. Corporations' Free Speech

Eric Blank, a law student at St. John's University School of Law, is working on a scholarly paper dealing with the heart of the issue surrounding the OWS movement.

Essentially, the problem with a representative democracy is collective action. For example, suppose imposing a tax on unhealthy foods would make society better off by $1,000,000. Suppose further that subsidizing sugar farmers by $1,000,000 would make society worse off by $2,000,000. What legislators should do, is to impose taxes on unhealthy foods. Why does this not happen? The cost to the individual citizen of pushing for legislation favorable to them is, for example, $50. The benefit of such legislation, to the individual, is only pennies. Therefore, it rationally makes sense for the individual to do nothing. On the other hand, the cost to sugar farmers of pushing for legislation favorable to them is, for example, $500,000. The benefit of such legislation, to sugar farmers, is $1,000,000. Therefore, it rationally makes sense for sugar farmers to push for this legislation.

The second prong of the problem is the way legislators think when they decide on whether to create or change existing laws. Legislators must be elected into office. In order to be elected, they need more votes than competing legislators. In order to have more votes, they need to run a campaign to get voters to vote for them. In order to run a campaign, they need money. Without votes, they can't be elected into office. However, without money, they can't collect the votes they need to be elected into office. Therefore, to the politician, money is just as - if not more - important as votes.

This creates a conflict that the legislator must struggle with: "do I act in the best interest of my voters, and make them happy, or do I act in the best interest of my campaign contributors, make them happy, and try to frame a story to sell to my voters and justify what I did to enough of them?" Do I pass tax cuts to the wealthy, and effectively funnel wealth from the poor to the wealthy? Do I bail out corporations, but allow them to pay out CEO salaries and bonuses, while millions of Americans lose their jobs? Do I allow for the transfer of vasts amounts of wealth from one generation to the next? Do I allow for some citizens to be able to afford a personal trainer for their gardener, and leave other hardworking citizens unable to pay for their family's rent, food, education, and retirement?

Effectively, law-makers are forced to struggle between their campaign contributors' interests, and their voters' interests. Voters are interested in what they believe is best for society as a whole, while campaign contributors are interested in what is best for them (while the rest of society bears the costs and pays for the bill). In short, contributors are seeking to create or change laws, so that wealth is transferred from the many, to the few self-interested campaign contributors. This cycle will repeat until more and more wealth is transferred from the many to the few. Society loses, a select few who are able to collectively organize their special interests win.

With every election, an individual holds less and less power to influence legislation, while a campaign contributor holds more and more power to influence legislation. Eric Blank argues that when the right of Free Speech is at odds with the right to cast a meaningful vote, the right to vote should prevail, and free speech should be subservient to the right to a meaningful vote. Otherwise, a vote is just an empty and meaningless symbolic gesture, and elections do nothing more than maintain an illusion of a democratic process in government.