Tag Archives: free speech

American Oligarchs

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According to the Progressives in America:

  • the Koch brothers—billionaire oil men and entrepreneurs, who also support Conservative political causes

Those they’ve…missed:

  • George Soros—billionaire hedge-fund manager who supports Progressive political causes
  • Tom Steyer—multihundred millionaire (via capital markets) who supports anti-fossil fuel development
  • Al Gore—multihundred millionaire (via “green” energy firm investments) and supporter of al Jazeera
  • Elon Musk—multimillionaire (via “green” energy subsidies, electric-car tax credits, and solar-energy mandates) who supports more “green” freebies

Hmm….

 

h/t The Wall Street Journal

A Judge to be Impeached

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US District Court Judge Jesse Furman said the censorship itself was protected free speech.

This is a man who has violated his oath of office and so is unfit to continue in office.

Baidu, the People’s Republic of China’s Google wannabe, has a free speech right, according to this “judge,” to block searches for things related to the PRC citizenry’s pro-democracy movement.  After all,

The First Amendment protects Baidu’s right to advocate for systems of government other than democracy (in China or elsewhere) just as surely as it protects plaintiffs’ rights to advocate for democracy.

Advocating for one’s own position by actively preventing those with differing opinions from speaking their differing opinions, or from seeking out differing opinions, is “free speech.”  Because suppressing the free speech of dissenters, suppressing dissenters’ access to others’ free speech, or to anything related to the subject(s) of their own interests, is just “editorial judgment.”  Because isolating dissenters each into a separate, individual island, and preventing contact with any other island is entirely legitimate free speech.

In fact, in dismissing a free speech suit against Baidu, this judge ruled in part

…to allow Plaintiffs’ suit to proceed, let alone to hold Baidu liable for its editorial judgments, would contravene the principle upon which “[o]ur political system and cultural life rest”: “that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.”

And therein lies a fatal contradiction of this judge’s pseudo-logic.  Each person cannot decide ideas and beliefs for himself if he’s actively denied access to those ideas and beliefs.  If each person is allowed only to decide from among a carefully limited set of ideas and beliefs which others permit him to view, he has no decision to make.

The failure of the judge’s logic goes further.  The only liability to which a publisher is subject in the editorial judgments it makes is from its decision to suppress speech, not its decision to present it.

And further, and far more fundamentally: each person’s right to decide for himself “the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence” extends to presentation and consideration to him alone; it does not include any right to prevent presentation to or consideration by others.  Each person’s right to decide questions of adherence extends to himself alone; there is right to prevent such consideration by others.

What this judge appears to have (carefully?) ignored is that there is nothing at all in a right to free speech that requires any person to listen to another, nor is there any right to determine for another person what that person will be permitted to listen to.

Furman’s opinion can be read here.

Random Pseudo-Thoughts on Free Speech

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Erin Ching ’16, of Swarthmore College, without a trace of irony:

What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.  I don’t think we should be tolerating [Christian thinker Robert George’s] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society.

Sandra Korn, ’14, of Harvard:

[T]the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me.  After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication.  Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities.

And

…why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

This is what we’re teaching at our colleges and universities?  Maybe there’s too much “academic” freedom for the students, and not enough teaching of rigorous thinking.  Which flows from too much “academic” freedom of a different sort for the professors and their failure to teach the techniques of rigorous thinking.

h/t Robby Soave of The Daily Caller

A Progressive Government’s Free Speech

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Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Brian Schatz (D, HI) are gathering colleagues’ signatures on a letter to the networks asserting that they’re ignoring global warming.

It is beyond my comprehension that you have ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, that their Sunday shows have discussed climate change in 2012, collectively, for all of eight minutes….

And

Sunday news shows are obviously important because they talk to millions of people, but they go beyond that by helping to define what the establishment considers to be important and what is often discussed during the rest of the week.

What [the networks] are saying is, climate change is a non-important issue, it is an irrelevant issue, and yet the scientific community tells us that it is the greatest crisis facing this planet….

By God, you’ll talk about what Big Government wants you to talk about, and you’ll talk about it when we want you to.  Or you’ll rue the day….

Freedom of Speech

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The House Ways and Means Committee voted—on party lines—to move to the full House for debate (and passage) a bill that would delay Treasury’s proposed regulations that would “limit the political activities of so-called social welfare groups.”  These regulations are targeted at 501(c)(4) groups and written in a way that will affect conservative groups more than liberal groups.

That’s not what interests me, though.  What does interest me is a Democratic Party Congressman’s remark decrying the bill.  Congressman Bill Pascrell Jr (D, NJ), who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, said,

It is about disclosure.  Nowhere in the Bill of Rights does it say you have the right to say anything you want—and also not pay any taxes.

There are a couple of things wrong in this short statement….

Actually, there is such a right, and it’s not just in the Bill of Rights, but in the Constitution as a whole.  Our Constitution is a document that explicitly limits the Federal government to a short list of permitted activities and powers with which to carry out those activities: the 18 clauses of Article I, Section 8, and the powers enumerated in Articles II and III are the sum total of what the Federal government can do.  Nowhere in there is there any tying of political speech to the payment of taxes.  An American citizen has no obligation whatsoever to pay a tax to the Federal government in order to receive permission to speak publicly.

Moreover, what rights American citizens do have under this Constitution, especially in relation to the powers of the Federal government, were clearly laid out in The Federalist [emphasis added]

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined.  Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.  The former will be exercised principally on external objects…with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.  The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people….

and in the 9th and 10th articles of the Bill of Rights which Pascrell seems not to have read:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

and in the 1st article of the apparently unread Bill of Rights, which says this, in part:

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….

Notice that: nowhere in there is speech tied to the payment of a tax.  Quite the opposite.  Speech cannot be abridged in any way, and taxes exist primarily to fund the government’s ability to engage in its outward looking authorizations.  In particular, taxes cannot be used to regulate—to abridge—speech.

To say to an organization, “If you want excusal from paying taxes, you must engage primarily in these kinds of activities” is entirely legitimate.  To say to that same organization, however, “If you want excusal from paying taxes, you may not speak of these things which we will identify for you,” is exactly that abridgment.  This is, nakedly, a tax on speech.

Then there’s this: “It is about disclosure.”  No, Congressman, it isn’t.  The Federal government has no legitimate interest in who says what in the political arena.  The articles in The Federalist were, every one, written by Publius, even though the authors in fact were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.  Anonymity is, in fact, a major protection for a speaker against a government that might presume to object to that speech and seek to act against the speaker—by, for instance, demanding a tax payment as a condition of being allowed to speak.

A propos this whole free speech limitation that the Democrats want to impose on us is this statement with which “Publius” opened The Federalist:

It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.

This is a typical Democrat’s lack of understanding of our Constitution.