When protesters disrupted the Supreme Court on the anniversary of the Citizens United opinion last week, they trumpeted a familiar slogan: “money isn’t speech.” In the four years since the ruling, this phrase has been the linchpin of the liberal critique of American campaign-finance jurisprudence, the idiom of the movement to get “money out of politics.”

Yet there are profound limitations to a politics that attempts to distinguish between money and speech. While attempts to curtail corporate expenditures in elections are important, the Citizens United court inadvertently recognized a profound truth about the way wealth structures society. Money is speech, which is precisely why its distribution matters.

The Citizens United case, which struck down prohibitions on corporate (and union) campaign spending, was never so much a change in First Amendment case law as its logical endpoint. American courts have long conceptualized free speech as a wholly negative liberty, their sole concern the degree to which the government can explicitly intervene in the activities of citizens.