Category Archives: rights

Free Speech for Me; You Shut Up

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University of Chicago pupils (I can’t call them even students in the scale of pupil-student-scholar) are objecting to non-Left speakers being allowed on “their” campus.

The [pupils] objected to the school’s Institute of Politics’ invitation to former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. They claim that allowing him to speak “normalizes bigotry” and provides a platform for fascism.

These precious ones are actively ducking away from a clear opportunity to “denormalize bigotry” by running away from him.

The coalition of students from U of C Resists, Graduate Students United, Students Working Against Prisons, and UChicago Socialists claim that the school’s “commitment to free expression doesn’t require the institution to host him….

Speech should be free only for the Left, they claim.  They are the epitome of the fascism and bigotry these wondrous ones pretend to oppose.

Alternatively, these precious ones are just so terrified of a different view, just so unconfident of their own reasoning faculties, that they’d rather run screaming for the Midway and avoid debate rather than face the alternatives and demonstrate with rational discourse, logic, and fact the suboptimality of their opponents’ viewpoints.  Or they’re aware of the fragility of their own and so of their own inability to mount a coherent, reasoned demonstration of the superiority of their own.

A Hidden Thought from the Republic of China

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Buried at the bottom of a Japan Times piece on the history of the Island of Taiwan that purports to recount the politics since 1947 of the island and then of the nation on the island was this bit:

On May 20, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen, the chair of the Democratic Progressive Party, was inaugurated as president of Taiwan. During her inauguration speech she said that the “goal of transitional justice is to pursue true social reconciliation, so that all Taiwanese can take to heart the mistakes of that era.”

As [postdoctoral research fellow at Academia Sinica, Ian] Rowen argues, Tsai’s call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) “was a sharp contrast with the deafening quiet across the Taiwan Strait, where Chinese government officials and state media marked the 50th anniversary of the violence and depredations of the Cultural Revolution with muted and terse statements.”

According to Rowen, the TRC “signals a departure from Taiwan’s authoritarian past and draws a distinction from China’s authoritarian present, while demonstrating adherence to international norms of human rights, democracy and self-determination.” He adds, “Taiwan’s truth commission will no doubt further highlight these differences between its political culture and that of China. This distinction, which posits Taiwan as a democratic nation capable of admitting the state’s role in past violence, appeals to Taiwanese nationals, realigns Taiwan regionally, and legitimates Taiwan internationally.”

Tsai also is a staunch advocate of the RoC’s independence from the People’s Republic of China.  I have to wonder, then, whether there might be an additional, longer-ranged motive for her insistence on this TRC.  A motive to (finally and thoroughly) unite native Taiwanese and RoC Chinese (and the factions within those Chinese) to strengthen the RoC domestically in preparation for a later more overt push for independence.

A Large Misunderstanding

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A Wall Street Journal article about Breitbart writer and speaker Milo Yiannopoulos and his impact on college campus views of free speech opened with a widespread misunderstanding.

The tour by Milo Yiannopoulos is sparking reaction from more groups than any recent speaker has on college campuses, heightening tensions between free speech and public safety.

There is no tension between free speech and public safety, though: there is no public safety without free speech.  The relationship between free speech and public safety is not only—not even primarily—concerned with people whose feelings get hurt, or people legitimately insulted, and who then act out emotionally and dangerously.  The relationship is centered on Government’s ability to control what will be spoken or done and the threat that those abilities represent to public safety.

It’s only necessary to look at the vociferous protests from the Left and from the Right against what each side saw in its time as Government overreach to see the relationship.

Again: there is no public safety without free speech.  Full stop.

“How Barack Obama rescued the US economy”

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That’s the headline on a recent Financial Times piece (sorry, the FT has a paywall) by Martin Wolf.  It’s a silly headline, for a silly article.

How should we assess the economic success or failure of Barack Obama’s presidency?

This is a difficult question to answer.

No, the question is easy to answer.  Obama’s economic policies have been abject failures.  It’s also straightforward to lay the bulk of responsibility on Obama and his administration.  While it’s true that the Panic of 2008 began in the prior administration, it was Obama’s “stimulus” package that both blew up the nation’s debt and failed in its purpose of stimulating our economy with shovel ready jobs in a massive so-called Keynesian stimulus and its bailout of failing large banks.  It was his Federal Reserve’s policies (yes, yes, the central bank is supposed to be independent, but it was Obama’s Ben Bernanke, extended at Obama’s decision, and his Janet Yellen appointment) that degraded money discipline with their decisions to ease the money supply and hold interest rates artificially low.  It was his excessive—explosively so—regulation that limited business’ ability to function in the market, that limited small business’ ability to get started, that limited job growth and employment recovery.

It was the Obama administration’s Dodd-Frank, with its too big to fail policy that distorted those big business’ risk-taking decisions, decisions that used to be made in a free market but that under Dodd-Frank are made with the perception—courtesy of that “stimulus” bailout—that if the business messed up, Government would bail them out.

[S]hockingly, most congressional Republicans opposed all significant monetary, financial and fiscal actions taken to deal with the crisis.

This isn’t shocking at all; what’s shocking is the blind, knee-jerk rejection of free market principles by a Democratic Party (soon to become a Progressive-Democratic Party) suddenly in complete control of our government and cut loose from any restrictions on their power.  Absent the “stimulus,” the Panic might have been steeper, but it also would have been much shorter.  One only has to compare the Depression of 1920-21 with the Great Depression to see the efficacy of government non-response compared with Government intervention, and the Panic of 1907 with both to see another example of the efficacy of private response compared with Government intervention.  Of course, the Democrats knew—and know—this history, yet they acted as they did, anyway.

He tried to move the US closer to the universal health insurance taken for granted in other high-income countries. The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) has added an estimated 20m adults and 3m children to the insurance rolls.

He didn’t try, he did it by Party fiat and then by Executive diktats—lots and lots of diktats.  Further, while Obamacare has provided health welfare to those adults and children, it also has thrown millions more out of their health insurance plans and denied them access to their doctors in direct—and knowing—contravention of Obama’s explicit promises that these denials would not happen.  The claim of cost growth reduction is a cynical one, also, being limited as it is to the cost of selected groups of Americans.  In fact, the cost has exploded, with premiums rising in double-digit per centages, deductibles going to 10s of thousands of dollars—an annual expense—the departure of heretofore health insurance companies from the health welfare plan “market,” and the cost to taxpayers similarly growing rapidly to pay for the subsidies of those given essentially free access to this health welfare.

Wolf’s discussion of our “jobs” recovery is misleading, also. Labor force participation rate is at historic lows, held back by those policies’ suppression of job creation.  Even the male labor force participation rate, which has been in a declining trend since its early ’50s peak, is farther below that long-term trend than it ever has been in that time frame.

Finally, this graph summarizes the efficacy of the Obama administration “recovery” as compared to post-WWII economic dislocation recoveries.

Even at the end of 2016 rate of 4.7% unemployment of 4.7%, the Obama administration’s economic policies have held back the recovery by years.

Failure of Hate Laws

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The failure stems from an inability to define hate, but mostly it fails from the irrelevance of hate as anything other than a motivator for committing a crime.  Motive, though, belongs solely in the jury box during the punishment phase given a conviction of a crime; it should not be foreordained by a Government’s attempt to define the hate or by Government’s more evident attempts to discriminate among groups of Americans and single some out for favorable treatment at the expense of other groups of Americans.

That’s demonstrated by Illinois and Ohio law, which comes up from case of the four blacks who attacked a white disabled man and live streamed it on Facebook, as discussed by Eugene Volokh in his Washington Post article.  For instance,

The focus, then, isn’t on “hate.” For instance, if a thief selects a physically disabled victim simply because he thinks it’s less likely that the victim will fight back, that too is covered as a hate crime under Illinois law.

And

Similarly, the Amish beard-cutting case was prosecuted as a hate crime on the theory that the targets were chosen by fellow Amish perpetrators because of the targets’ dissenting religious beliefs within the Amish community.  …  Choosing someone for attack based on his religion would be a hate crime whether the motivation is hatred, theological disagreement, or whatever else.

You see the irrelevance of hate in such crimes, yet Government, in these instances Illinois’ and Ohio’s, arbitrarily tacks it on, just because.

As Volokh put it,

But the Illinois statute and the federal statute [another of his example laws], like most other hate-crime statutes that I’ve seen, focus on discriminatory selection, not the underlying emotion behind the selection.

Indeed.  I pick you for my crime victim because I think I’m more likely to get away with it than if I’d selected someone else or because I’ve decided (legitimately or not) that you’d done me wrong, and I was determined to get you back, and I do the crime.  But if you happen to belong to a government-favored group of Americans, my crime—completely unchanged in its nature or motivation—becomes much more serious solely because of Government’s own discrimination: it has chosen to favor your group over other American groups and so to discriminate against those other American groups.

Which also is an argument for doing away with Governments favoring, for any purpose, this or that group of Americans over other groups of Americans, which Government has decided should be disadvantaged by that favoring.  That’s hate crime by Government.