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John Samples joins us on the show for a discussion on the relationship between money and political speech.
John Samples joins Aaron and Trevor in looking at the relationship between money and political speech. Campaign finance is a perennial issue, but much of the argument about it rests on often unexamined assumptions. Is money speech? If it is, can we still restrict its role in politics? If it isn’t, what’s its relation to political speech? What does it mean to say elections can be corrupted by too much speech?
Samples is director of Cato’s Center for Representative Government, and author of “The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform.”
John Samples directs Cato’s Center for Representative Government, which studies campaign finance regulation, delegation of legislative authority, term limits, and the political culture of limited government and the civic virtues necessary for liberty. He is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. Samples is the author of The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History and The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform. Prior to joining Cato, Samples served eight years as director of Georgetown University Press, and before that, as vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund. He has published scholarly articles in Society, History of Political Thought, and Telos. Samples has also been featured in mainstream publications like USA Today, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on NPR, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. Samples received his Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.