Government speaks to the people all the time: E pluribus unum; No Smoking; Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires. No one has ever seriously suggested that, having posted a sign or sponsored an ad, the government has to also sponsor the opposing view—What the hell? Go Ahead and Smoke Here; or Forest Fires are Fun for the Whole Family.

But that said, there’s something odd about the idea of the government as “speaker” like any other speaker in the marketplace of ideas. Government is Hobbes’s Leviathan with the biggest bullhorn in the world; can it be true that citizens have no more right to intervene in government speech than the government has in theirs?

The idea of government as a speaker with a viewpoint first came into focus in a 1991 case called Rust v. Sullivan. That case concerned a federal program, Title X, which funds family-planning and reproductive health services. Title X clinics have never performed abortions. The authorizing statute, passed in 1970, does not fund programs where “abortion is a method of family planning,” but the original regulations allowed program doctors to tell patients when health conditions made abortion a prudent choice, and to refer them to clinics that offered it.

In 1988, however, the Reagan Administration announced what came to be called the “gag rule.” Under the new rule, Title X-funded providers could not recommend abortion, discuss it as an option, or refer patients to doctors who performed abortions. If a patient inquired, the provider was limited to saying, “this program does not consider abortion a method of family planning”—even if the patient had an underlying health problem that made abortion medically advisable.

The Court, 5-4, brushed aside a free-speech challenge by a group of providers and patients. Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote:

To hold that the Government unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of viewpoint when it chooses to fund a program dedicated to advance certain permissible goals because the program, in advancing those goals, necessarily discourages alternate goals would render numerous government programs constitutionally suspect. When Congress established a National Endowment for Democracy to encourage other countries to adopt democratic principles, it was not constitutionally required to fund a program to encourage competing lines of political philosophy such as Communism and Fascism.

Two days after his inauguration, President Bill Clinton rescinded the Title X “gag rule.” But the idea of government as a player in the marketplace of ideas had begun to take on solid form.

Enter the Beef Board. Some ranchers challenged the check-off as a violation of their First Amendment right not to speak. The Court’s precedents seemed to support them—just four years earlier, it had struck down a similar program to promote mushroom sales. But in 2005, Justice Scalia, supported by five justices, belittled the challengers’ qualms. “Compelled support of government, even those programs of government one does not approve, is of course perfectly constitutional, as every taxpayer must attest,” Scalia wrote. Because the beef program was designed and run by the government, the First Amendment did not even apply. “[C]ompelled funding of government speech does not alone raise First Amendment concerns.”