480
Souter, J., dissenting
complex substance, yielding various insights and interpretations depending upon the identity of the listener or the reader and the context of its transmission. . . . The complex nature of expression is one reason why even so-called commercial speech has become an essential part of the public discourse the First Amendment secures." Florida Bar v. Went For It, Inc., 515 U. S. 618, 636 (1995) (Kennedy, J., dissenting). Since persuasion is an essential ingredient of the competition that our public law promotes with considerable effort, the rhetoric of advertising cannot be written off as devoid of value or beyond protection, any more than can its power to inform. Of course, that value may well be of a distinctly lower order than the importance of providing accurate factual information, and the inextricable linkage between advertising and underlying commercial transaction "may give [the government] a concomitant interest in the expression itself," Edenfield v. Fane, 507 U. S. 761, 767 (1993) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); see also 44 Liquormart, Inc. v. Rhode Island, 517 U. S. 484, 499 (1996) (opinion of Stevens, J.). But these considerations amount to nothing more than the premise justifying a merely moderate level of scrutiny for commercial speech regulations generally: "the 'commonsense' distinction between speech proposing a commercial transaction, which occurs in an area traditionally subject to government regulation, and other varieties of speech." Rubin v. Coors Brewing Co., 514 U. S. 476, 482 (1995) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted).
B
Since commercial speech is not subject to any categorical exclusion from First Amendment protection, and indeed is
more than propose a commercial transaction,' " 425 U. S., at 762 (quoting Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Comm'n on Human Relations, 413 U. S. 376, 385 (1973)), by communicating the idea, " 'I will sell you the X prescription drug at the Y price,' " 425 U. S., at 761.
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