Five years ago this month, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law prohibiting corporations and unions from spending money to urge citizens to vote for their preferred candidates on the grounds that it violated those organizations’ First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

The case, Citizens United v. FEC, soon became a lightning rod for controversy over the funding of modern political campaigns. Half a decade later, however, it’s clear that many common beliefs about the case are wrong.

Citizens United did not rule that “money equals speech” or that “corporations are people,” contrary to the claims of its fiercest opponents. In fact, the phrase “corporate personhood” never appears in the decision. Those who believe Citizens United established this principle evidently slept through the last few centuries, throughout which corporations have been considered “persons” for legal purposes.

Importantly, legal persons are not the same thing as human beings, and the court has made it explicitly clear in other cases that the rights of corporations are not equivalent to the rights of human beings. The rights of corporations exist to protect the people that comprise those corporations, and Citizens United is just one in a long line of cases recognizing those rights.

After all, what gives corporations such as The New York Times Company the right to report on or endorse political candidates? What gives Simon and Schuster the right to publish books that criticize or praise candidates? What gives Saturday Night Live the right to satirize public officials?

The answer, of course, is the First Amendment. It does not matter that the speaker is organized as a corporation or union.

As for money and speech, the relationship between the two is not hard to see.

Money is a key ingredient in all First Amendment freedoms, especially in modern political campaigns. Just as no one would react to a law limiting how much can be spent building churches or publishing newspapers by saying, “money isn’t religion” or “money isn’t press,” no one should dismiss the free speech implications of regulating campaign finance.

The need for campaign finance laws such as the one struck down in Citizens United is overstated because elections cannot be bought. Wealthy self-funding candidates have a history of losing; think of Mark Jacobs, Meg Whitman, or Linda McMahon. In fact, USA Today reported that just 14 of 69 candidates who spent at least $1 million on their own campaigns were victorious in 2010 and 2012.

Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor learned the hard way that money alone is not enough to win. He was dispatched in the 2014 primaries by a candidate he outspent 26:1.

Unusual? Not as much as you might think. In a 2013 review of the scholarly research on effects of campaign spending, University of Missouri Professor Jeff Milyo found that outspending your opponent has “negligible effects” on competitive House races.

The doom-and-gloom predictions that the decision would usher in an unprecedented era of money in politics now seem laughable. The most expensive election in American history was not 2010, 2012, or 2014.

As a percentage of GDP, it was 1896 – by a country mile.

Unfortunately, because reporting on money in politics rarely takes into account the effects of inflation or the size of the economy, every election is reported as history’s most expensive.

In fact, campaign finance remains much more heavily regulated today than throughout most of American history. Prior to the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act in the 1970s, every presidential campaign in American history occurred under a system with virtually no regulation of campaign finance. Does anyone think that today’s heavily regulated modern politics is “cleaner” than the system that elected FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower?

One of the most important First Amendment cases of the last decade is also one of the most misunderstood.

When the government argues it can prevent the publication of books or movies containing political advocacy, supporters of free speech can only be on one side. That side won in 2010, and we should remain thankful for that five years later.

Bradley A. Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, is chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics in Alexandria, Va.