Karin Price Mueller’s Disappointingly Biased de-Regulation Report

Karin Price Mueller is an advice reporter for NJ.com. Her specialty is personal money and consumer issues. I have generally found her columns to be interesting, informative, and fair.

 

But some years ago Mueller abandoned her objectivity in her New Jersey Star-Ledger column Five things that have changed for consumers under President Trump. Here is her introductory paragraphs:

Every president brings change. Laws change. Regulations change. The direction of the country changes.

That’s what happens.

But drop your political lens for a moment.

Think consumer protection. What happens if you’ve been wronged by a business? What if laws and regulations don’t protect you and your wallet?

That’s what consumer advocates say is happening under the Trump administration. They’re alarmed by a cavalcade of changes they say leave the little guy behind while Wall Street and big corporations gain advantage.

Apparently, we’re asked to “drop your political lens” so we can view this article through Mueller’s—and the Star-Ledger’s—political lens.

Throughout the entire article not one quote from the people who are instituting these regulatory relaxations. All you get are quotes from a cavalcade of “consumer protection” or “public interest”—that is, biased against business—activist groups. 

I posted these comments (which are no longer published online):

This is political bias through and through. We’re getting an “analysis” of the deregulatory actions strictly from a statist “political lens.” If consumers need “protection” from business, what about protection from our “protectors”--that is, from politicians’ regulatory dictates? Where are the opposing arguments to the “expert” opinions expressed here? Where is the defense of freedom of consumer choice? Catchphrases like “predatory for-profit colleges” are indicative of propagandistic demagoguery, not fair reporting. 

Are there no valid arguments in favor of the deregulatory actions singled out here? I think Mueller has undermined her credibility with this unbalanced column. 

Related Reading:

Finally, Some Positive Recognition for the Statists' Favorite Whipping Boy, Wall Street

The ‘Wild West’ of Government Regulation Caused the 2008 Financial Meltdown

Where Does Valid Law End and Regulation Begin?

The Koch Brothers and the Nature of Government Regulation

"Regulating" Business - the Good and the Bad

Who to Trust More: The GOP Deregulationists or the Statists

Economic Egalitarianism Leads Directly to Racist Policies in NJ

The dangerous myth that wealth inequality, as such, is a injustice is the rationale for proposed racist law in New Jersey. 

In N.J. must ‘repair the harm’ of huge wealth gap between white and Black families, advocates say, Susan K. Livio reports:

The state Assembly Community Development and Affairs Committee met at the Statehouse in Trenton to hear testimony based on the report: “Making the Two New Jerseys One: Closing the $300,000 racial wealth gap in the Garden State.”

The committee focussed on three pieces of legislation:

One bill, A1519, would make it easier for real estate appraisers to lose their license if they caught [sic] scaling down property evaluation based on race, creed or national origin. 

Obviously, discrimination based on race, creed or national origin is evil. But how does one distinguish between appraisals based on legitimate economic criteria and one infused with personal bigotry. In today’s culture, with its extreme intolerance for bigotry, real estate appraisers are highly unlikely to openly admit that they are slanting their appraisals based on race, creed, or national origin. So how do licensing boards go about determining if bigotry is involved?  

This looks like a license to frivolously sue, and coerce higher appraisal values based on fear of lawsuits, enriching existing homeowners/sellers on paper, at the expense of buyers overpaying. How is it good to scale up property evaluation based on race, creed or national origin, for fear of getting accused of scaling down property evaluation based on race, creed or national origin? How is that fair to buyers, who will pay above-market prices for homes? How is that fair to sellers, if they believe their net worth to be higher than actuality?

Another bill, A1579, would allocate $70 million to launch a Baby Bond Account Program, which would invest $2,000 in a state-managed fund for every child born to a family that earns no more than 200% of the poverty level. A family of four earning no more than $27,740 a year would qualify, based on federal poverty rules.

The third bill, A938, sponsored by Sumter, would create a New Jersey Reparations Task Force. The 11-person body would hold hearings and write a report that would “examine the extent to which the State of New Jersey and the federal government prevented, opposed, or restricted efforts of former enslaved persons and their descendants who are considered United States’ citizens to economically thrive upon the ending of slavery.”

After documenting wealth disparities between “races”, the article says:

These inequities stem from slavery and generations-old systemic policies and practices, such as “redlining” or steering Black people away from buying in white communities, and restrictive housing covenants that barred Black people from ownership, she said.

There is no question that past racist government policies were horrible. It may even be plausible that some lingering effects of those policies, which had hindered the economic advancement of blacks, are responsible for part of today’s wealth gap. But those laws, Jim Crow, ended almost 60 years ago. It’s hard to imagine that, after so much time much of the statistical gap stems from generations-old system policies and practices, let alone centuries-old slavery. My wife and I married in 1972. Neither of us got one iota of a financial head start from our parents. We are not wealthy. But we are comfortable in our retirement. We built our wealth through work and thrift. If there is a gap compared to some hypothetical black couple, how is that an inequity stemming from long-ago injustices?

As to the racist-inspired Baby Bond Account Program, how is it equitable to reward or not reward 18 year-olds with a Baby Bond windfall based on what their parents earned in the year they were born? And as to slave reparations, how is it fair to hand a windfall to people who were not victims of past injustices, paid for by people who were not culpable for those long-ago injustices? 

Another bill not directly related to wealth inequality is also on the legislative agenda. In White men dominate most N.J. government boards. This bill aims to change that.by  Susan K. Livio and Kelly Heyboer (NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) report:

State boards and commissions that collectively control billions of dollars and make decisions affecting everyday life in New Jersey must include more women and minorities, under a bill approved by state Senate committee Monday.

Judging people by skin color or gender, rather than merit, experience, and character, is both racist and sexist. How is that just?

All of these bills are not about compensating actual victims of unjust government policies. In fact, not one individual victim, backed by evidence, was even identified. These initiatives are collectivist, racist, in some measure sexist, and motivated by economic egalitarianism—an axis of philosophical evil.

History is settled. What happened, happened. It can’t be changed. The practice of using unchangeable history as a weapon to impose new injustices on innocent people who were not part of that history, through revenge discrimination based on color or sex, to favor non-victims who were not part of that history, is not the sort of actions that civilized societies that supposedly value individual sovereignty and rights and justice for all should tolerate.

These initiatives highlight the danger of elevating a non-issue into a big problem. Apparently, the statists are losing confidence in their “historical injustice” rationalizations for socialist agendas. So they are turning to wealth inequalities. But egalitarianism is the greatest collectivist evil, and is no more a justification for racist policies than history.

Related Reading:

NJ Governor Murphy’s COVID-19 Double Standard Toward the Demonstrators

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: NJ Governor Murphy’s Strange and Discriminatory ‘Baby Bonds’ Scheme

NJ Turns its Back on the 14th Amendment – and History

Beneath the Title IX Controversy

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook

Biden Told of ‘Threat to American Democracy’; No Mention of the Threat to American Republicanism

In Historians privately warn Biden that America’s democracy is teetering, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Tyler Pager reported in early August for The Washington Post:

President Joe Biden paused last week, during one of the busiest stretches of his presidency, for a nearly two-hour private history lesson from a group of academics who raised alarms about the dire condition of democracy at home and abroad.

One person familiar with the exchange said the conversation was mostly a way for Biden to hear and think about the larger context in which his tenure is unfolding. He did not make any major pronouncements or discuss his plans for the future.

“A lot of the conversation was about the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally,” the person said.

Most of the experts in attendance have been outspoken in recent months about the threat they see to the American democratic project, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the continued denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results and the efforts of election deniers to seek state office.

Note, first, that the Jan. 6 attack is packaged in with the “denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results.” 

But do they belong together? No. Outrageous as the continuing 2020 election denial is, the freedom to scrutinize and criticize election processes and results is vital to electoral integrity. If fraud or irregularities are suspected, it is the duty and right of the observer to speak up. Now, the Republicans who still question the 2020 results have been proven wrong time and again, and should be condemned for continuing the charade. But they in and of themselves are not a “threat to democracy.” The continuing “denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results” is not of the same nature as violently storming the Capitol building, as overblown as a threat to the democratic process the storming is portrayed as. Republicans’ continuing denials are a political tactic, just as Democrats’ continuing claim of the election denials as a “threat to democracy” is a political tactic. Our democratic process is not under threat because some Republican still think the 2020 election was “stolen.”

What’s genuinely threatening is thart, in the whole article, there is not one mention of “the American Republic.” Yet our free republic certainly is under threat. And it’s coming from the Left in the form of their denial of inalienable individual rights.The Democratic Party is perfectly content with authoritarianism, as long as it’s democratic authoritarianism; i.e., imposed by elected officials and voting majorities.

And then they have the nerve to channel Alexander Hamilton:

[Sean] Wilentz, prizewinning author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln,” has also voiced alarm in recent months about the state of the country. “We’re on the verge of what Hamilton in ‘The Federalist’ called government by brute force,” Wilentz told the Hill last month.

The Founders were well aware of the power of democracy to slip into “government by brute force.” If Wilentz had actually read the Federalist Papers, he would have known that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution were concerned about the potential rise of three forms of tyranny, the one, the few, and the many; in other words, autocracy, aristocracy, and democracy. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

And full-blown, total democracy is fundamental to the Democratic Party. From its founding in 1828, the Democratic Party has reinterpreted the American Founding as a democracy, not a limited republic. Consistent with democracy, the new party supported slavery as long as it is imposed democratically -- i.e., either unilaterally across America by representatives or by a popular referendum at the state level. 

They haven’t changed their stripes. It still holds, as Joe Biden has declared in a Georgia speech, that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” This premise is not a miss-speak. Biden’s Justice Department has sued Georgia based on the same premise. Said Attorney General Merrick Garland, "The right of all eligible citizens to vote is the central pillar of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow." “We are still, at our core, a democracy,” Biden lectured in his MAGA speech, reiterating the his reactionary assertion that “the most fundamental freedom in this country [is] the freedom to vote and have your vote counted”—essentially repudiating the Founder’s Declaration of the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as most fundamental. A society in which all of our rights, including the right not to be held in bondage, are subject to a vote is not a free society. It is a totalitarian state, and 100% contrary to the fundamental American principle of individual rights as inalienable, meaning outside the scope of any electoral power to violate.

I have said that the Democratic Party and the Left generally is the gravest threat to Americanism today, at least in the medium term. The Democratic Party is what its name explicitly declares. It is anti-American Republic. It is a democracy party through and through. It is and has always been the central domestic threat to the American Republic.

RELATED READING:

Joe Biden—the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis

Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right. 

The Dangerous Totalitarian Premise Underpinning the Justice Department’s Suit Against Georgia’s New Election Law

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters

Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’

Rights and Democracy

Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy

Jesse Jackson’s Big Lie: ‘American Democracy is Under Siege’.

Rights are Inalienable, Not an Electoral Privilege

QUORA: ‘Was the Electoral College really intended as a device against tyranny of the majority?’

 QUORA: ‘Was the Electoral College really intended as a device against tyranny of the majority?’

I posted this answer:

Yes; that, among other paths to tyranny.

The Electoral College is part of the checks and balances designed to prevent concentrations of government power. For example, the United States Constitution supersedes the state constitutions, allowing the federal government to act as a check on states’ power. Likewise, since the elected legislatures of the states have the responsibility of choosing the presidential electors "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct," the states as independent governmental entities can, through the Electoral College, act as a check on executive federal power. 

Also, the Electoral College acts as somewhat of a power balance between large and small states as determined by population. 

Likewise, the electoral college acts as a check on populism, which can be quite tyrannical. Instead of one huge national majority acting as a single overbearing power, candidates must win enough smaller majorities in individual states, each of whom may have differing interests, to accumulate the necessary electoral vote majority. Furthermore, by requiring voters to select a group of Electors in each state, who would then join other groups of Electors from other states to choose the president, the chance of an irrational and impassioned majority from directly electing a charismatic tyrant. Placing an intermediary body between the popular vote and the choosing of the president makes the rise of an authoritarian much less likely; or, as Hamilton put it in Federalist 68, “an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements. . .” The point is to check populist power as a means of limiting concentrations of government power.

America was never to be a nation of majority rule—or, for that matter, minority rule. It was to be a country of individual self-rule--that is, of individual rights. Individual rights, not the unrestrained wishes of electoral victors, is what the government is intended to protect. Constitutional scholar Timothy Sandifur on James Madison’s thinking:

In “the extended republic of the United States,” a “great variety of interests, parties and sects” would prevent “a coalition of the majority of the whole society” from coming together in ways that might harm the minority or the individual.

There was always a risk of oppression in any form of government, of course, because factions would seek to benefit themselves at the expense of their rivals. . . The . . . solution was a constitution of limited powers, with a system of checks and balances by which “the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.”

Madison consistently recognized that the essential goal of the Constitution was not to expand democratic authority or give voice to the “will of the people”—an idea he regarded skeptically—but to establish a political system that would enable the majority to accomplish its legitimate goals while protecting minorities against oppression. [from The Genius of James Madison by Timothy Sandefur for The Objective Standard]

This does not mean that populism doesn’t have its place: It gets its expression, for example, in the powerful U.S. House of Representatives, where members face election every two years by direct popular vote, bypassing the state legislatures; where each state’s representation is proportional to population, which in turn counterbalances the senate, where each state has equal representation regardless of population. 

The intricate structure of checks and balances embedded in our constitution checks, but does not negate, populism just as it checks, but does not negate, state power, presidential power, court power, and legislative power. The purpose of this structure is to protect the primacy of individual liberty. The Electoral College is a part of that structure. That’s why the Electoral College of the United States of America exists. 

Related Reading:

QUORA: ‘Where do you stand on the question of deleting the electoral college as it can and has clearly obviated the vote of the majority twice in recent history?’

Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right

Avoid ‘Majority Rule’—Keep the Electoral College in Fact and in Spirit

The Conscience of the Constitution—Timothy Sandefur

QUORA: What's to stop a state . . . from making a law that just says their parties electors are chosen by default?'

Does the Electoral College Allow 'a Minority of Americans to Control Us All?'

Wouldn't going by Popular Vote be an even worse system than the Electoral College?

QUORA: Can't We Make the Electoral College More Democratic?

N.J. Governor Phil Murphy’s Hypocrisy on Saudi Arabia

Brent Johnson’s recent report, Saudi Arabia move to cut oil supply ‘a war on N.J. working families,’ Murphy says, is very instructive.

Gov. Phil Murphy’s “clean energy” agenda includes “weaning the state off its century-old addiction to fossil fuels.”

But if fossil fuels are as bad for N.J. residents as Murphy keeps saying, he should be cheering the Saudi cutbacks. Why doesn’t he? By criticizing them instead, Murphy is tacitly admitting that the Dem’s war on fossil fuels is destructive to the well-being of ordinary people. So if the Saudi cutback is analogous to “a war on N.J. working families,” then his agenda is analogous to “a nuclear holocaust” for N.J. As the worldwide energy crisis unfolds, the utopian anti-fossil fuel “clean energy” agenda is increasingly exposed by its own champions’ hypocrisy as a dangerous fraud. 

Related Reading:

When Climate Dogmatism Meets Energy Reality

The ‘Jihad on Pipelines,’ New Jersey Front

The False Promise of ‘Clean Solar Powered Utility Scale Energy’

My Letter Rebutting Sierra Club Opposition to N.J. PennEast Gas Pipeline

Human Energy Needs vs. 'Mother Earth'

Environmentalists Seeking to Deprive NJ Residents of Reliable Energy

Ecomodernism Is the Solution to Man-Made Climate Change—Ronald Bailey

This is Rich—a ‘Diversity’ Exec Crying ‘Racism.’

Racism pervades this N.J. hospital, former exec says. She was forced out because of it, she claims. This article by Elizabeth Llorente for NJ Advance Media for NJ.com recently appeared on the front page of the New Jersey Star-Ledger. What attracted my immediate attention was not the headline, which is getting routine, but the first paragraph:

University Hospital’s former diversity and inclusion officer says her efforts to eliminate bias were demeaned and she was pushed out of her position due to racism, which pervades New Jersey’s only public acute-care facility.

Dr. Chris Pernell’s Sept. 2 departure — which the hospital announced in a statement as a resignation “to pursue new opportunities” — came as a shock to many observers who viewed the Ivy League-educated administrator as a strong chief executive candidate. Her exit came just months after more than 100 leaders from across the state signed an open letter to Gov. Phil Murphy and the Newark hospital’s board of directors calling for Pernell, 46, to replace Dr. Shereef Elnahal, who stepped down in March to become under secretary for health at the Veterans Health Administration.

[My emphasis]

How any black woman can advance to the stage of  “strong chief executive candidate” with strong support from “100 leaders from across the state” in an institution pervaded by racism is beyond me. 

My first impression was that I didn’t Believe her. But I read further, seeking some kind of evidence for her charges of racism. I found none. Instead, Llorente reports on these complaints, none of which are race based:

Pernell, who is Black, told NJ Advance Media that University Hospital officials hampered diversity efforts, scrutinized her more than other administrators and retaliated against her for expressing interest in the open CEO position. She said her decisions — including employee hiring — were constantly questioned, she was accused by a male executive of lying about her COVID-19 community vaccination efforts and the hospital launched two “baseless” noncompliance investigations into her conduct in two years.

At the heart of the investigations was the insinuation, “How dare you, as a Black woman, aspire to that [CEO] role? How dare you get out of place?” she told NJ Advance Media in her first public comments since her departure.

But an “insinuation” is not evidence. So what might explain her charge? Note her executive position was that of the “former diversity and inclusion officer”—i.e; She is a trained racist. Her job is to judge people on skin color in order to achieve some sort of proportional racial balance. 

In other words, her job was to find racism in statistics. Could it be that the real grievance against her is that she thinks she deserves the CEO spot based partly on the color of her skin, for diversity purposes? Is this what she interprets as racist? If so, she is, in fact, the racist. After all, her job involved judging potential employees on skin color. That’s the kind of mindset that anyone filling the position of diversity and inclusion officer must, by definition, have. Why wouldn’t that mindset carry over into her quest for the CEO job, which her colleagues might justly see as unfair and which she interprets as the insinuation that “How dare you, as a Black woman, aspire to that [CEO] role?”

But a differing view might be something like, “How dare you aspire to that [CEO] role based on the fact that you are a black woman?” If she claims race and gender as qualifications for CEO, based on diversity considerations, one can understand why fair-minded competing candidates would object. One can understand why “University Hospital officials hampered diversity efforts” if she placed skin color as a primary “qualification” for employee hiring or her “aggressive” efforts to “address health care inequities.” After all, racism is inherent in the modern version of “diversity.”

These are legitimate areas for scrutiny and criticism, especially given her apparent agenda:

“I was going to be aggressive,” said Pernell, a graduate of Princeton University, Duke University School of Medicine and Columbia University’s public health graduate program. “I was very clear about it. I always say I’m a system breaker. It’s my goal to bend, break and redesign systems … We were going to talk about white supremacy.”

One can understand why “some hospital officials resented her work — and the way she approached it,” as she put it. She appears to me more a Woke activist than someone genuinely trying to “improve patient experience,” as she put it. No one relishes unjustly being lumped in with “white supremacy,” which Wokism sees everywhere. Wokism “sees” racism everywhere in the same religious way that climate activists “see” climate change everywhere and traditional religionists “see” God everywhere. Anyone can “see” anything in anything if they want to: The human capacity for self-delusion is endless. If Pernell’s goal is to storm in and break “the system” and redesign it according to Woke racist ideology, can anyone be blamed for pushing back? Is that pushback against her “diversity efforts” unreasonable? I think not, especially when Pernell is throwing around unfounded accusations of white supremacy.

If you think I’m being unfair, consider this: What would you expect in the era of race-based “diversity?” The re-mainstreaming of racism by the Woke Left has cast a cloud over legitimate claims of racism. That’s what the diversity craze has wrought. If racism is holding her back, where is the evidence? Until I see any, I don’t believe her.

Related Reading;

SEC’s Boardroom ‘Diversity’ Rule Is Racist, Unnatural, and Politically Motivated

DelBarton Student’s 'Diversity' Initiative, Though Well-Meaning, is Based on Counter-Productive Premises

The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’

From 'Diversity Maps' to Forced Integration: Obama's Racist Housing Policy Masks the Real Problem—Lack of Free Markets

Don’t Allow the Left to Own ‘Diversity’

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

‘Ordinary citizen’ With ‘little chance of influencing elected officials’ Reaches 114,000 Readers

This letter appeared in the New Jersey Star-Ledger on 5/18/19 under the heading Murphy wrong to veto dark-money bill (no longer available online):

Once again we see politicians preventing the disclosure of the sources of campaign contributions (“No light to shine on hidden donors,” May 14). How could Gov. Phil Murphy veto a bill designed to increase transparency that passed both houses of the Legislature with only two dissenting votes?

Unfortunately, dark money and the corporate support unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has corrupted the political process. In doing so, ordinary citizens have little chance of influencing our elected officials.

As Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Let’s let the sunshine in and identify those making large political donations.

Jerry Jeglinski Woodbridge

“Dark money” is the buzzword that refers to anonymous donations to political advocacy groups like political action committees (PACs). It is meant to conjure up images of something sinister. 

But ‘dark money” is nothing more than private citizens exercising their rights to free speech in private. 

Keep in mind that the bill that Murphy vetoed does not apply to direct contributions to politicians. It applies to political donations for purposes of independent political advocacy. As of now, PACs have not been legally required to publish or reveal to the state or to the public lists of their donors, and have not done so voluntarily. To protect their donors’ privacy, they keep their donors private.

Jeglinski’s ridiculous charge that such donations “has corrupted the political process” amounts to the charge that running political ads for the purpose of persuasion is somehow corrupt. Consider what Jeglinski is saying: that people participating in election discourse in association with others through private donations should be illegal; that who said, not what is said, is primary; that the intellectual substance is irrelevant to the chance of influencing our elected officials; that privacy is corrupting to the political process!

Well, what exactly is the political process if not a battle of persuasion and debate over ideas? 

Political advocacy groups’ right to keep their donors private has long been backed by the courts. As SCOTUS ruled in 1958 in NAACP vs. Alabama, “compelled disclosure . . .  is likely to affect adversely the ability of . . . members to pursue their collective effort to foster beliefs” by exposing them to “economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility,” violating fundamental rights to freedom of association, privacy, free speech, and due process. The court held that “compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy” is of the same nature as "A requirement that adherents of particular religious faiths or political parties wear identifying arm-bands,” a favored practice of dictatorships.

NJ’s forced disclosure law is opposed across the political spectrum. Opposition comes from the Institute for Free Speech, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, and Americans for Prosperity. It is even opposed by New Direction New Jersey, a PAC that backs Gov. Phil Murphy, a “dark money” ban supporter whose veto of the bill is over technical, not fundamental, reasons.  New Direction New Jersey has adamantly refused to expose their donors to government officials or the public.

Political free speech is a crucial tool of private citizens to participate in the political process and to keep their political leaders accountable. Politicians have always hated accountability, and the attempt to ban private, anonymous political spending is one way for the political class to weaken citizen accountability. Note that NJ’s attempt to legally force the disclosure of the sources of campaign contributions had broad bipartisan legislative support. 

Political spending is integral to freedom of speech, which in turn is a vital ingredient of the political process and of the maintenance of a free society more generally. We must defeat any attempt to restrict freedom of speech, under whatever guise and however it is framed. Speech is much more important than the vote. 

Contrary to Jeglinski, the ‘Ordinary citizen’ has much less chance of influencing elected officials through his lone vote than through his speech. A single vote out of millions, while symbolically important, doesn’t extend beyond the single voter. But a letter to the editor of the New Jersey Star-Ledger, if printed, can potentially reach 114,000 readers--and that’s only the print circulation, which doesn’t include digital-only subscribers. Then there is blogging, social media like QUORA, and speaking as a group through donations that fund public political messaging. Engaging directly in or indirectly through associations is the far more effective way for ordinary citizens to influence elected officials than standing alone in a voting booth (which, by the way, is anonymous). 

That’s why politicians love “the right to vote” and hate “dark money”—by restricting free speech, they better control election discourse and thus maintain greater influence over voters. 

Don’t succumb to the fear tactics of the anti-free speech crowd. Reject all calls to ban “dark money.” Contra Jerry Jeglinski and his ilk, our ability to influence elected officials depends on it. 

Related Reading:

Murphy’s Veto of NJ’s ‘Dark Money’ Ban Should Be Unconditional

Kill New Jersey’s ‘Dark Money’ Ban

NJ’s ‘Dark Money’ Bill an Attack on Intellectual Freedom

NJ’s ‘Dark Money’ Bill is an Assault on Free Speech

The Anti-Free Speech Fallacy of ‘Dark Money’

‘Dark Money’ is Free Speech. Protect It

The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech--by Kimberley Strassel, especially Chapter 2, “Publius & Co.”

Campaign Finance: Free Speech, Not Disclosure, is the Main Issue

Making Private Donations Anonymously is a Right