People who want to take away your freedom will first tell you that the sky is falling. Liberty must be sacrificed to the greater good.

So, naturally, critics of Super PACs have been pounding the table recently with extravagant, often hysterical descriptions of how our politics are being degraded by an unchecked flood of money from wealthy donors and corporations.

Super PACS are “essentially septic tanks” (says The New York Times) that corrupt the airwaves with “tens of millions of dollars of lies” (Dick Polman, Philadelphia Inquirer) and threaten “to obliterate any semblance of a policy debate” (Ben Heineman, Atlantic) with their “noxious round of attack ads, all of which is protected in the name of free speech” (Dahlia Lithwick, Slate).

Don’t you love the derisive reference to “free speech” — by a journalist no less?

Alas, to a depressing number of fulminating journalists, not to mention the campaign finance establishment and its congressional allies, political speech is a conditional right for everyone outside the commercial media — subject to regulation and limitation by government.

The primary examples of a Super PAC’s handiwork that The Times bothered to mention in its “septic tanks” editorial were ads in Iowa by supporters of Mitt Romney “attacking Mr. Gingrich for his government lobbying and ethics violations.” It’s fine, you see, for The Times — a very big corporation indeed — to point out Newt Gingrich’s “government lobbying and ethics violations” during the peak of a campaign, but let a few private individuals pool their money to make the same case in a negative ad and that is an intolerable state of affairs.

And shame on the Supreme Court in its Citizens United ruling two years ago for failing to appreciate the difference between noble free speech as practiced by The Times and the ignoble, ought-to-be-illegal sort practiced by grubby activists.

Super PACs, which in a large majority of cases are voluntary associations of individuals (not corporations) that make independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, weren’t in fact specifically authorized by Citizens United. They are the result of SpeechNow.org vs. FEC, which a federal appeals court decided two months later based upon the high court’s reasoning and which lifted a $5,000 limit on donations to such groups.

Individually, liberals like George Soros and conservatives like Charles Koch could previously spend any amount they liked in support of a candidate. But federal laws forbid them from pooling their money with other individuals for the same purpose — forbid them, in short, from freely exercising their First Amendment rights to persuade voters in the midst of a campaign.

Now, you may not like an endless parade of attack ads — who does? — but when were campaigns ever sweetness and light? The short answer is, never. Super PAC critics refuse to credit voters with a memory of presidential campaigns even in the past decade, which managed to plumb the depths of negativity — remember Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org, to cite two examples? — without the high court ruling.

The critics also want us to believe voters are putty in the hands of spinmeisters, when the reality is more complex. Yes, negative ads often “work” — especially when they reinforce an existing political narrative — but they also backfire if they venture too far over the top.

And, by the way, there has not been an unprecedented number of ads aired in all primaries. According to the Wesleyan Media Project at Wesleyan University, “The overall number of GOP presidential ads on the airwaves this election year [as of Jan. 25] is comparable with 2008, but who is paying for them so far has changed significantly” — with independent groups responsible for a much larger share. So?

Total spending on the 2008 congressional and presidential campaigns topped $5 billion, so it’s a little late to wring our hands about the influence of big bucks.

It’s a big, rich country, and the stakes are huge, and if you can’t stand the jagged edges of free expression, then by all means, do something: Turn off the tube.

E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP.

