Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets government transparency national politics & policies

Your Taxes, in Small Type

The business of business is to profit by helping others. The business of government is to make sure that businesses don’t profit by cheating others.

Unfortunately, sometimes it’s the governments that cheat.

Take the airline industry. Though substantially deregulated by the early 1980s, government has not treated it in an exactly laissez faire manner since. First there are the taxes, quite heavy. And recently the Department of Transportation decided that it must regulate the way in which airlines may advertise their prices . . . and the taxes. That is, the DOT insists that the “total price” — by which it means the price-plus-tax — must be shown prominently, with the tax portion “presented in significantly smaller type than the listing of the total price.”

Talk about regulatory micromanagement!

Now, this rule isn’t something Congress cooked up. It’s the result of a bureaucracy gone wild.

And the rule has one obvious effect: It shields government from consumer criticism, showing bureaucrats at their most self-serving. About one fifth of every airline ticket goes to the government, and folks in government don’t want you to know that.

This being the case, you might think — as George Will does — that the First Amendment would apply, especially since the First Amendment is now routinely held as protecting political speech more strictly than commercial speech. But, so far, courts have ruled for the taxing and regulating bureaucrats, not the competitive airlines. Or consumers.

Frequent fliers (I’m one) should hope the Supreme Court justices take up the case, which shows why economic and political freedom go best together.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Earnest Umbrage Goes Indecent

You’ve probably seen Hillary Clinton in a bikini.

She didn’t pose for that famous photo. No paparazzo snapped it. It was constructed in Photoshop, with her head placed on a somewhat more buxom model’s body. It was a joke.

I’m not sure I “get” the joke completely. Sure, take the Pompous Pol and turn her into a pinup. But, still.

Also not very funny was the recent Photoshopping of Georgia State Rep. Earnest Smith’s head onto the body of a porn star. Andre Walker did the work, as he confessed on Monday. “Rep. Earnest Smith Shows His Thin Skin, Says I Have No Right to Make Fun of Him,” Walker amusingly titled his Georgia Politics Unfiltered piece. The picture? Less amusing.

But de gustibus non est disputandum and all that.

It’s not as if the political mockery that the Founding Fathers engaged in was nice, or even decent.

Well, sooner than you can say “Alien and Sedition Act,” Rep. Smith co-sponsored a bill, HB 39, to make Photoshopping politicians onto nude or indecently photographed bodies a misdemeanor, subject to a $1000 fine.

Earnest Smith summed up his case with PC sanctimony:

No one has a right to make fun of anyone. You have a right to speak, but no one has a right to disparage another person. It’s not a First Amendment right.

He couldn’t be more wrong. The Supreme Court has famously come down on the side of making fun of politicians.

Legislators’ biggest problem is that they want to legislate, even where inappropriate. Maybe they should mandate tests in constitutional law before they are allowed to represent us.

Or perhaps “Earnest” should take a lesson in Irony. Or in “lightening up.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

 

 

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First Amendment rights judiciary

Google Vindicated

In 2009, I noted that an Italian court was trying three Google executives for violating Italian privacy laws. The three soon received six-month suspended jail terms for being “too slow” to remove a video from YouTube that depicted the bullying of an autistic child. Google had pulled the video as soon as told about it.

The unjust conviction has now thankfully been reversed.

At the time, Google rep Bill Echikson complained that his colleagues had been convicted although they had neither uploaded the video nor reviewed it before it was posted.

A key word is “review.” Must any Internet host of user-posted content review such content before it is published or else risk incarceration? Of course, “hosted” content covers the gamut of Internet content. Few website publishers provide their own servers.

If a publisher must obtain special approval from Facebook, Google, WordPress or any other platform provider before tossing something onto the web, that’s the death knell for freedom of speech and press on the Internet. At best, the pace of publication would slow to a crawl. At worst, censorship by Web-service providers would become rampant — except when providers suspend their services altogether for fear of non-suspended jail time.

Perhaps if the bad Italian precedent had been allowed to stand, the worst would not have come to pass. Perhaps only rarely would we see a horrific conviction exploiting that precedent, and perhaps only in Italy. But why take even one step down that road?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets too much government

Unfree Financial Speech

Can you get in trouble with the law — or at least a government agency’s unlimited regulatory power — for peacefully telling the truth?

You can, despite the protections articulated in the First Amendment and the greater respect sometimes accorded to freedom of speech than to other constitutionally protected rights.

It is possible because when they assault speech, government officials claim to be opposed not to the right to speak freely but to something else. They say they’re combating lung cancer, the influence of money on politics, or the unequal distribution of information to investors.

This summer, Reed Hastings of Netflix committed the sin of boasting on Facebook that monthly viewing of Nexvids “exceeded one billion hours for the first time ever in June.” Sounds innocent enough.

Come December, though, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has threatened to bring civil charges against Netflix for allegedly violating “public disclosure rules.” SEC Regulation FD requires public companies to make “full and fair disclosure” of “material” information that is not already public.

The SEC still thinks that 244,000 Facebook subscribers don’t fully and fairly constitute the public, but the communication cannot by any reasonable, modern construal be a case of offering “insider information.” How much more “outside” from the back rooms of a corporation can you get than Facebook?

The absurdity, here, lies in the SEC’s rules and its interpretations of those rules — and in the blind, confused, bankrupt way bureaucracies, which don’t go bust as the companies they oversee can, enforce their rules.

That is why Bernie Madoff slipped through the SEC’s fingers for years, while Netflix finds itself in hot water for a Facebook posting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies political challengers

Silence, Please?

At this time in an election year, condemnations of “negative” political ads crescendo to fortissimo. But hey: Are folks really so attached to watching the standard menu of TV advertisements for GEICO, Viagra, and Chia Pets?

I doubt it. I think they worry about what such nasty attacks say about our political process. Granted, many 30-second political spots stretch the truth like a pretzel, though not any more than the candidates regularly do in person.

Still, political debate today is no nastier than it was when Washington and Adams and Jefferson roamed the earth.

And TV wasn’t even very big back then.

“An onslaught of negative political advertisements in congressional races,” the New York Times relates, “has left many incumbents, including some Republicans long opposed to restrictions on campaign spending, concluding that legislative measures may be in order to curtail the power of the outside groups behind most of the attacks.”

Incumbents are smart . . . and informed about campaigns. I’ll bet they know that in the 54 races lost by incumbents in 2010, Super PACs spent on average over $900,000. In races incumbents won, about $75,000.

“Incumbents have a lot more money than challengers do,” Professor Bradley Smith, former Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, points out, “and Super PACs help to level that playing field and make challengers competitive.”

Incumbents think that elections are a time for them to speak. It’s all about them. Plus, no one — great, lousy or mediocre — likes to be attacked.

But elections in a free society are a time for everyone to speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access First Amendment rights general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

Concerned and Confused

Why call it “political correctness,” when it’s simply “political” and so terribly incorrect?

Whatever we call it — “a totalitarian impulse” comes to my mind — placing Angela McCaskill on administrative leave from her job at Gallaudet University is just flat-out wrong.

“It recently came to my attention that Dr. McCaskill has participated in a legislative initiative that some feel is inappropriate for an individual serving as Chief Diversity Officer,” Gallaudet President T. Alan Hurwitz wrote, last week, on the University’s Facebook page. McCaskill’s alleged transgression was to sign a petition to refer the Legislature’s same-sex marriage law to the ballot for Maryland voters to decide, and potentially overturn.

Hurwitz didn’t mention any specific policy violated by McCaskill. Worse, while acknowledging her “right to sign a petition,” Hurwitz added, as if in clarification, that “many individuals at our university were understandably concerned and confused by her action.”

There appears to be much confusion at Gallaudet . . . about the meaning of freedom.

President Hurwitz, who faces criticism from both proponents and opponents of the same-sex marriage referendum that started this fracas, claimed to be confident that a “resolution of this matter can be reached,” hazarding that it “will require that she and the university community work together to respond to the concerns that have been raised.”

A “resolution”? McCaskill has an attorney, and the greater likelihood is a large lump sum settlement for violating her civil rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights free trade & free markets

Demanding Demands

Logic and evidence? Or bullying and intimidation?

A member of a local Pennsylvania teachers union has demanded the resignation of the vice president of the West Chester Area School Board, Heidi Adsett, for suggesting in a letter to the editor that, instead of threatening to strike, teachers unsatisfied with hefty compensation packages try their luck elsewhere.Free Speech Zone

Adsett had also said that Pennsylvania should ban teacher strikes.

The member of the West Chester Education Association spoke up at the school board meeting after the letter had been published, objecting to Adsett’s statement on the grounds that it expressed “publicly venomous animosity [against] our teachers,” and clashed with support for public education. Other union members applauded. Others professed confusion about whether Adsett was speaking officially for the whole board.

In his report on the fracas, Ben Velderman quotes the president of Stop Teacher Strikes, Simon Campbell, who observes that congressmen “are interviewed all the time. None of them say, ‘Well, I want to make it clear that I’m not representing the whole of Congress.’”

Union defenders “can’t argue the facts,” says Adsett, “so they have to try and argue by bullying and intimidation.”

Whether public employees should be permitted to strike is debatable. Were education privately run and unions not free to bully persons crossing picket lines, then parents, taxpayers and schools wouldn’t have to worry about being pushed into paying teachers far above market rates. But that’s not the current situation. We have public schools, and our democratically elected school board members should be just as free to speak — to debate — as voters are.

Democracy, after all, requires free speech. And public education, for all its problems, surely doesn’t require democracy’s suppression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture video

Video: A “Free Speech Wall” Falls

If you agree to a “free speech wall,” you can’t complain about the speech that offends you, can you? Well, if you run a college, I guess you can:

Note that it wasn’t the use of the vulgar “f-bomb” that upset the professors. It was the use of one against the current U.S. president.

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ballot access First Amendment rights political challengers

“Top Two” Goes South

Washington State has a long history of popular antagonism to political parties. For years, the state enforced an open primary, which meant that Republicans could vote in Democratic primaries and Democrats in Republican primaries. This was very popular, because it led to widespread strategic voting.

Well, that’s a euphemism. In open primaries, what you get is not mere strategic voting so much as sabotage. I have heard of Democrats and others boasting of voting in Republican primaries, for example, supporting Pat Robertson. Why? They believed Robertson to be unelectable, and hoped putting Robertson ahead would undercut the GOP in independent voters’ eyes, and make running against the party easier in the general election.Shooting numbered ducks.

Well, a few years ago that system was thrown out as unconstitutional, as an abridgment of free association rights.

But instead of allowing party members to select candidates, Washington State movers and shakers cooked up something else altogether. They set up a system wherein anyone could use a party’s label — even if that party’s members don’t know said candidate or despise him. Robbing parties of any control over candidates offered in their name is far worse on the very constitutional issue that nullified Washington’s traditional open primaries. Though Top Two has been legally challenged, the U.S. Supreme Court just this week refused to hear arguments.

The name “Top Two” comes from the fact that only the top two vote-getters in this super-open primary are on the general election ballot. The new system has completely removed minor party candidates from the general election ballot, when most folks vote.

Top Two has had the same impact in California. Arizona voters will decide the issue this November, on their ballot as Prop 121.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture

Half Clocked

Outside the U.N. General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was asked if Salmon Rushdie remained under a death sentence. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwā for the author’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1989. Though that specific death sentence was rescinded a decade later, others have renewed the call for Mr. Rushdie to be killed.

Ahmadinejad responded jokingly, “Is he here in the United States? . . . If he is . . . you shouldn’t broadcast it for his own safety.”

Clearly, Mahmoud never completed a Dale Carnegie course.

On the bright side, nothing so clearly articulates the superiority of our system of government over Iran’s as does our embrace of free speech and their rejection of it.

Tragically, political leaders in the West often fail to stand up for this freedom. The Iranian leader cited a German law to claim the West has a double standard. He argued that Germany’s prohibition on publicly denying that the Nazi Holocaust ever happened makes it a criminal offense to “embark on historical research.”

Now, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier, his point about historical research is moronic, and the tyrannical government he figure-heads would really, really like nuclear weapons, making him extremely dangerous, to boot. But, more tragically, he has a point here.

He’s half as good as a stopped clock.

Germany’s abridgment of freedom in this instance doesn’t help battle Nazism, much less Islamofascism; it hurts by undercutting a key value. We have nothing to fear from free speech. Indeed, it’s important to hear fully what both our friends and our enemies are thinking.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.