A Thought on Censorship

Stanley Fish, Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law, thinks that when Seton Hall “disinvited” him from speaking there he wasn’t being censored.

Fish’s headline, I Wasn’t Censored When I Was Disinvited, led off his claim. Then he contradicted himself with the opening sentence of his second paragraph:

My ideas were judged unworthy of being heard.

This is precisely what censorship is. Here is a legal definition of censorship:

The suppression or proscription of speech or writing that is deemed obscene, indecent, or unduly controversial.

Here’s a “civilian” definition of censor:

To examine and expurgate.

Near the end of his piece, Fish had this:

I have no right to speak at Seton Hall….

That’s a strawman argument. No one claiming he had a right to speak or that such a right was being blocked.  Moreover, there’s nothing in either of those definitions about blocking a right to speak; censorship in the Seton Hall case was the blocking of speech itself, and the censors were precisely those managers of the school and the school’s pupils.

This is an example of how far left the Left has pushed what is permissible speech and how meekly folks who should know better have acquiesced in that push.

Balanced Journalism

Fox News‘ Howard Kurtz objected to MSNBC‘s use of Mr Kellyanne Conway, George, as a commentator on the President Donald Trump impeachment hearings.  He’s quite right in this but he missed a larger point wit this remark:

Kurtz said it was shocking to him that television networks would cover impeachment hearings only with partisan commentators and political pundits, rather than leaving it chiefly in the hands of bonafide journalists.

Maybe that’s because there aren’t any bonafide journalists; there are only partisan commentators and political…pundits in the journalism guild.

Kurtz and his fellow so-called journalists continue to decline to explain what standard of journalistic integrity he and they use in place of the erstwhile journalism standard of integrity that required two on-record sources to corroborate anonymous sources’ claims.

Financial Transaction Tax

The Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates (with, for now, the lonely exception of Joe Biden) all want one.  Fred Hatfield, once a (Democrat) commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, correctly identified one downside of such a thing.

The tax would be bad for farmers, whose support is critical in the Feb 3 Iowa caucuses.  Farmers manage risk by entering into futures contracts, a type of derivative. Under Mr [Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie (I, VT)] Sanders’s proposal, trades of corn and soybeans futures would be taxed at a rate of 0.5 basis point [0.5%].

Even if farmers could somehow be exempted from a financial transaction tax, their cost of hedging would rise because the general cost of trading—of any sort—in commodities would rise, both from the tax and from the reduced liquidity of the derivatives as other traders eschew those markets. Such a tax could only negatively distort the market—as any tax in any market will do.

Moreover, those distortions would extend to other markets: grocery prices would rise from the increased prices faced by farmers and passed on to farm product buyers, beef and chicken prices would rise from the increased cost of feed, alternative farm produce would rise as other crops would substitute in (with their own increased demand-driven prices), and on and on.

And that’s just in agriculture.  The same cascading consequences would occur in all equity and debt markets, in all other commodity futures and forward markets—like metals: iron, aluminum, copper, in addition to “currency” metals—and on and on.

Investment in general, including for plant improvement and innovation, would be depressed by such a tax.

Sanders’, et al., financial transaction tax would have all the broadly negative impact on our economy as does any other social engineering-motivated tax.

In Which Biden Has the Right of It

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden is taking heat for his position on legalizing marijuana at the Federal level.  No less a light than Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) objects to Biden’s hesitation:

Marijuana should be legalized, and drug consumption should be decriminalized. These are matters of public health.

And Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT):

Too many lives were ruined due to the disastrous criminalization of marijuana[.]

Biden, though, doesn’t see the need for the rush:

I want a lot more [data] before I legalize it nationally. I want to make sure we know a lot more about the science behind it.

On this one, Biden is right, even if his version of the science is centered on whether marijuana is a gateway drug. There’s better science that argues for reluctance to legalize, and if we do so, to legalize only under very narrow circumstances.

There is considerable evidence that THC, the chemical putatively of interest, in uncontrolled use damages brains. There is, also, considerable evidence that various chemicals, including THC, and chemical combinations in marijuana can have beneficial medicinal effect.

Research needs to be done to identify with clarity those chemicals and chemical combinations. If the research bears out, then growing marijuana for the production of medically beneficial chemicals and chemical combinations can be licensed—just as is done with heroin into morphine and related chemicals.

Then, as with morphine, controlled doses of those chemicals/chemical combinations, with their known side effects and trade-offs, can be prescribed pursuant to useful treatment regimes.

The Coming End to the Crisis in Hong Kong

The Wall Street Journal, in its piece on the latest and bloodiest overreaction by the People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jiping to the protests in Hong Kong, asked how “the Hong Kong crisis can be deescalated.”

It will be in the same way that the Tiananmen Square crisis was deescalated; this is made clear by Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Colonel Wu Qian. The WSJ cited him as saying that [emphasis added]

[President Xi Jinping] gave “the highest direction of the central government” to end violence and restore order in Hong Kong. He called it the army’s most pressing task in Hong Kong.

Look for the tanks to roll in the not-to-distant future.