Politics & Power Quote by Jef I. Richards

A paper towel can’t promise it will “restore the soul of the nation,” but it can get sued for implying it’s more absorbent than it is. Richards’ jab lands because it weaponizes that mismatch: we regulate the low-stakes, measurable stuff with near-religious rigor and treat the high-stakes, democracy-shaping stuff as an honor system. The punchline isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s a sideways indictment of what the U.S. has decided is worth policing.

The line works by yoking together two kinds of persuasion that live in different legal universes. Advertising law (FTC standards, substantiation requirements) assumes consumers deserve protection from deceptive claims about products that can be tested. Political speech, protected by the First Amendment and insulated by courts wary of “truth tribunals,” is treated as too dangerous to regulate, even when the falsehoods are obvious and the harms diffuse. Richards frames that legal distinction as absurd not because he doesn’t understand it, but because he wants you to feel its moral perversity.

The subtext is aimed at the civic bargain we’ve quietly accepted: we’ll tolerate lying in campaigns because the alternative looks like censorship, and we’ll outsource correction to journalists and voters who are structurally outgunned by money, repetition, and motivated reasoning. Coming from a professor, it reads less like a quip than a provocation to rethink policy assumptions: if consumer protection is justified by asymmetry of power and information, politics is the most asymmetrical market of all. The “picture” is wrong because the consequences are backward.