Daily Archives: 1 September 2016

Free Speech and Disruptions

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Do high school football fans have a constitutional right to display the American flag at games?

That question headlined Jacob Gershman’s piece in a recent Wall Street Journal law blog.  A North Carolina high school principal, Travelers Rest High School’s Lou Lavely, answered that question in the negative, justifying his ban of the American flag from the school’s home football games with the excuse that students had

used the US flag, in conjunction with verbal taunts, to target Hispanic members of the Berea community in a manner that was both unsportsmanlike and also a misuse of our flag[.]

Lavely’s move also was consistent with an earlier 9th Circuit ruling on the other side of the country that

a California high school didn’t infringe on the constitutional rights of white students who were told they couldn’t wear shirts displaying the American flag in an effort, the school said, to defuse a potential fight with Mexican students

a ruling that the Supreme Court then declined to review.

In the face of public outrage over the flag ban, Lavely reversed his position and “allowed” our flag to be displayed after all.  However, that doesn’t cure the misunderstanding, both by Lavely and our courts, underlying such bans of our flag or of shirts with our flag imprinted on them or of any other such display.

The misunderstanding is in the cause of disruptions and how to deal with those disruptions.

Banning the American flag because its display might cause disruption is wrong-headed.  The American flag, or displaying our flag—free speech generally—doesn’t cause disruptions.  The disrupters cause disruptions, and they’re the ones who need to be dealt with.

Full stop.

Update: Clarified a sentence to say what I actually meant rather than the opposite.  Also clarified a later paragraph.

The EU and Tax Invasion

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Notice that: invasion.

EU antitrust regulators ordered Apple on Tuesday to pay up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in taxes plus interest to the Irish government after ruling that a special scheme to route profits through Ireland was illegal state aid.

The problem, in the EU’s eyes, is that Apple headquartered its European operations in Ireland, which has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the EU (and which EU Know Betters keep hammering on the Irish to “correct” because its tax rates are, somehow, unfairly low), and then Apple funneled most of its European revenue through that Irish branch so as to pay—legally in their and Irish eyes—low taxes.

“Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years,” said Competition Commission Margrethe Vestager….

Ireland agrees with Apple and will appeal the EU’s demand.  As Finance Minister Michael Noonan said,

This is necessary to defend the integrity of our tax system; to provide tax certainty to business; and to challenge the encroachment of EU state aid rules into the sovereign member state competence of taxation.

Ireland is quite clear on the invasion matter.

The EU may well be on the right side of its law, but it’s on the wrong side of morality and the wrong side of economic principle.  It’s not the EU’s money.  It’s not even Ireland’s government’s money.  It’s Apple’s money, and it’s the money of the 6,000, or so, Apple employees in Ireland, which they allocate to the Irish government (not the EU governance) as taxes.  If Ireland is charging Apple a lower tax rate than continental members of the EU, the latter should compete, not run from competition by presuming to dictate to a fellow member what that member must do.

It’s also the case that the lower tax rate leaves more money in the hands of those who earned it—those Irish employees and the Apple corporation—which means those employees have more money with which to take care of their families and to spend generally and Apple has more money with which to hire employees and to engage in product development—all of which are good for the Irish economy.

How Ireland takes care of its domestic economy is of no legitimate concern to the rest of the EU, and that Apple paid all the taxes required by Ireland is just a bit of too bad for the EU Know Betters.