Tag: freedom

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

May Trigger Eye Rolling

microaggressions, trigger warning, free speech, First Amendment, freedom,

The fashionable campus notion of “microaggressions” blurs the distinction between peaceful speech (offensive or not) and bashing somebody over the head with a club. 

If courts, police and/or university officials can rationalize regarding the perpetrator of a so-called “microaggression” as initiating force against an offended listener, they can also rationalize using actual physical force in retaliation. Which, to the extent implemented, would mean the end of freedom of speech. 

After all, nobody needs a First Amendment in order to utter banal pronouncements about the weather.

The allied campaign urging or requiring professors to issue “trigger warnings” before discussing anything that might provoke discomfort also dampens discourse. 

Who can object to letting viewers of TV news know that they are about to see a corpse? Or sending little kids out of the room when certain subjects are discussed? But is such common sense the point of “trigger warnings”?

At best, “trigger warnings” are a silly name for referring to what nobody seeks to keep secret. At worst, they help trigger distress themselves — or impede frank discussion of controversial subjects. The latter treats adults as if they were not adults; the former makes adults less adult. 

If and when “trigger warnings” are imposed by force, with penalties for omitting them, they also endanger freedom of speech.

Advocates of open discourse seem to be in an endless war with champions of a repressive political correctitude. The jabberwocky used to justify that repression keep evolving. The response must be constant: intellectual clarity and eternal vigilance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Taking a (Lemonade) Stand

lemonade, freedom, regulation, FDA, free market, law, authoritarian, media

When life hands you lemons. . . .

Once upon a time, putting up a summertime lemonade stand was the American way for kids to learn about hard work, good will, and entrepreneurship. Almost every kid had one, making some spendable profit selling the nectar.*

Some of the youngsters grew up to become Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and, well, lemonade’s one heck of a gateway drink.

But then, along came “progress” — that is, mandates and regulations slapped upon businesses. And the hordes of regulators required to enforce the morass of rules — “swarms of Officers.”

Soon lemonade stands were vanquished from our neighborhoods.

And America was made safe (at long last!) for . . . inane bureaucracy.

“Reports of kids’ lemonade stands being shut down for breaking local health or permitting laws have long left grown-ups feeling sour,” today’s Wall Street Journal informs. But the story also details how “a growing movement of adults is fighting back.”

So, when government policies hand you lemons, what do you do?

Make a map of all the lemonade stand clampdowns.

“I think the Constitution covers [lemonade stands] as written,” Dave Roland told the Journal, explaining the map he and his wife Jenifer have produced. “But if there’s any doubt about that, let’s get it fixed.” The Rolands run the Freedom Center in Missouri, but theirs is a regrettably national map.

Last month, the popular lemonade maker Country Time started “Legal-Ade,”  pledging to come to the defense of any kid “busted” for trafficking in lemonade.

Seriously.

“When life gives you arcane laws,” the company’s video says, “make lemonade.”

Taste the Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The profit was made possible largely by pushing their costs off onto their parents. But isn’t that sorta what parents are for? And good lessons were still learned.

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Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard responsibility

Too Big for Breaches

EU, migrant, crisis, collapse, immigration, refuge, welfare, socialism, borders, freedom

“Any reporter who has covered Europe in the last decade has written a dozen articles or more,” The New York Times informs us, “about how one crisis or another has exposed the fundamental unsustainability of the European Union.”

I hadn’t noticed. Until recently, haven’t reporters and commentators been downplaying Europe’s looming crisis? But they cannot pretend “far right” separatist, decentralist and nationalist movements are marginal any longer, not after strong showings for Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, and the Brexit vote.

Now everybody seems to be panicking.

Even the Times is half-predicting an end to what it calls the “European Experiment.”

The Times identifies the tension as arising from “calls for keeping out secondary migrants and demands to keep internal European borders open. It’s a version of the contradiction within the European Union itself: between an open union and a collection of sovereign states.”

Beneath all the brouhaha about freedom of movement across breached borders lies the real contradiction: between massive welfare states on the one hand and, on the other, freedom of movement, speech and all the rest.*

When governments offer freebies, they entice people into un-productive or at least sub-productive lifestyles. Which is not sustainable, especially when extensive. How many productive people must support how many unproductive people?

Then throw those domestic programs open to millions of migrants who lack even rudimentary language and First World skills? That’s how states subsidize their societies’ destruction.

Europe’s governments are way too big for their border breaches.

If you want traditional freedoms, you have to pare down government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

*Between social democracy (socialism lite) and the old liberal order.

 

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general freedom U.S. Constitution

Why We Fought

When I was young, we were instructed to revere the men dubbed by President Warren Harding as “the Founding Fathers.” Reverence has since gone out of fashion.

Even today’s freedom-minded often express a general iffiness about America’s separation from England.

Now, I’m so deep-seatedly anti-monarchical, so resolutely anti-royal that I tend to shake my head at this sort of stuff. Yet people I very much admire might be called Revolution Liberty Skeptics.

“Can anyone tell me why American independence was worth fighting for?” asks economist Bryan Caplan. He says “it’s hard to get a decent answer” on specific policies improved by the secession from the Empire, at least liberty-wise.

He speculates, for example, that separation “allowed American slavery to avoid earlier — and peaceful — abolition.”

Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel ably answers him, noting that before “the American Revolution, every New World colony, British or otherwise, legally sanctioned slavery, and nearly every colony counted enslaved people among its population. As late as 1770, nearly twice as many Africans were in bondage throughout the colony of New York as within Georgia, although slaves were a much larger percentage of Georgia’s population.” Vermont, which did not join the union until 1791, abolished slavery in 1777. By 1804, gradual emancipation had begun in all the remaining northern states that had not abolished slavery outright.*

Do we really think all this would’ve happened under British rule?

As Hummel reminds us, “emancipation had to start somewhere.”

It started in the country that put liberty up front.**

Scoffing at the Revolution now won’t put liberty further forward.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* New York’s gradualist plan declared all children of slaves born after July 4, 1799, to be free after ages 25 and 28 years, female and male, respectively.

** Hummel makes good points on other freedoms, too.

 

 

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general freedom meme national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Independence Day

independence, Fourth of July, freedom, Independence Day, 2018

independence:

noun

1. freedom from the influence, control, or determination of another. If a country has independence, it has its own government and is not ruled by any other country.

2. If a country has independence, it has its own government and is not ruled by any other country.

 

Happy Independence Day!

 

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Accountability First Amendment rights folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

Freedom “Weaponized”

free speech, First Amendment, censorship, freedom, liberty, rights, Justice Elena Kagan

Justice Elena Kagan has a way with words. The conservative majority on the court, she said after two recent rulings, is “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

What a phrase! But what does it mean?

“Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals,” explains The New York Times, “have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.”

First: if “liberals” now find themselves not supporting the idea of particular freedoms, or freedom in general, are they really “liberal”?

Second: “borrowing arguments” is what we expect to happen. Logic isn’t partisan.

Third: the point of the Bill of Rights is to “weaponize” the defense of freedom.

Remember, it is freedom of speech; freedom of the press; freedom of association; freedom of exercising one’s religion. The First Amendment weaponizes their defense by disallowing Congress from legislating against them.

Now, it has long been a “problem” that these listed freedoms blend together. They all work together or don’t work at all. And each points to freedom more broadly.

Kagan wants to read freedoms narrowly — though liberals historically have, indeed, read them broadly.

She’s objecting to two recent rulings. The first prohibits states from requiring pregnancy centers to talk up abortion options to their clients. An obvious free speech issue. The second prohibits governments from backing unions in their extraction of “agency fees” from non-members. An incontrovertible issue of freedom of association.

Kagan and The New York Times apparently think that “liberalism” means defending some freedoms in some contexts, but denying freedom in others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

 

Illustration by Newtown grafitti

 

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Grading Democracy on the Curve

public schools, education, democracy,, propaganda, ignorance

Voters, we are told, are amazingly ignorant. So, what to do?

“Ultimately, the ideal democracy is one in which as many citizens as possible vote,” writes Dambisa Moyo at The Guardian, “and the voters are armed with the most objective information. Yet today only a fraction of the electorate are voting, and many are armed with a diet of hyped-up statistics and social media propaganda.” Among her proposals is a voting booth access test: “why not give all voters a test of their knowledge?”

I can think of a whole bunch of reasons, as can Ilya Somin, over at Volokh Conspiracy, who considers just a few. One of the more interesting is this: whereas Moyo has no wish to shove poor people out of the voting booth, and so envisions public schools to teach to the test — “the knowledge needed should be part of the core curriculum” — Somin quotes John Stuart Mill about the very political dangers of the very idea of public schooling: “A general State education,” wrote Mill in On Liberty, would inevitably be devised to please and serve “the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation” and must constitute “a despotism over the mind.”

Though Moyo does observe incumbency and political careerism as big problems, she is innocent of the more fundamental issues.

Indeed, she does not consider the obvious: today’s voter ignorance of politics and government is in no small part the result of government schools.

For politicians, general ignorance is not a bug, it’s a feature.

Let’s look for solutions to political problems that do not give politicians more power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

The Cuban Slavery-and-Freedom Sandwich

Cuba, New York Times, communism, socialism, freedom, slavery

How easy is it to mix freedom with just the right amount of slavery?

New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed regards the attempt to mingle political opposites as noble or at least understandable. He doesn’t call Cuban Communism and its destructive effects “bad” — it’s a “unique tapestry.”

He wonders, instead, to what extent the Cuban government can fine-tune the contradiction.

According to the article, Cuba’s newest Dear Leader “will have to foster the growing private sector . . . while guarding against the income inequality it often brings. . . . Move too slowly and it risks economic collapse and widespread discontent. . . . Move too fast, and it risks unstitching the unique tapestry of Cuba’s social project.”

“Unique”? With or without cigars and salsa, the “social project” of repressing a hapless populace is as old as civilization. And as a “tapestry,” we’ve seen this warp and weft before.

Under freedom, inequalities are unavoidable.* On the other hand, nothing is wrong with inequality per se. Nature, human beings and economic outcomes are inherently unequal. Equality arrives only with the grave.

A government working to phase out slavery and phase in freedom may have legitimate problems in transition. But it is wrongheaded to seek just the right “balance” of both. How can any degree of freedom and markets fail to threaten a revolution, the purpose of which is a thoroughgoing assault on freedom and markets?

My advice to Cuban social engineers? Abandon Communism altogether and embrace prosperity and freedom instead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Speaking of inequality, Cuba’s head commies certainly have not lived like the masses they’ve kept down.

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crime and punishment education and schooling folly general freedom moral hazard privacy responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Ecstatic with Independence

free range, freedom, Utah, children, walk, outside, law, hysteria

Utah’s legislature unanimously passed it; the governor signed it — the nation’s first measure protecting what’s become known as “free-range parenting.”

It was once known simply as “parenting.”

Certain activities are now exempt from a state law criminalizing child neglect. Children may legally “walk, run or bike to and from school, travel to commercial or recreational facilities, play outside and remain at home unattended” — thereby allowing “a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities . . .”

Back in the day, we apparently played outside in a sort of statutory limbo.

Do we really need a law saying kids can walk on a public street?

Sadly, yes: government agencies across the country are grossly violating the most basic rights of parents to rear independent children.

Regular readers may recall my 2015 defenses* of the Meitiv parents against the absurd charge of “unsubstantiated neglect” leveled against them by Montgomery County (Maryland) Child Protective Services. Ultimately, Maryland authorities acknowledged that permitting one’s kids (in the Meitivs’ case, a 10- and a 6-year-old) to walk on a public sidewalk (from a local park) wasn’t prima facie evidence of a crime. 

The current free-range parenting movement was launched in 2008 when Lenore Skenazy publicly admitted — to mass shock and condemnation — to allowing her 9-year-old son to take a trip alone on New York City’s subway.

“My son got home,” she wrote in the New York Sun, “ecstatic with independence.”

Notice how rare it is to find anyone ecstatic with dependence.

Lesson? An old one: Happiness must be pursued with freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* My writings on the Meitivs’ battle to keep their kids:

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general freedom meme

Equality vs. Freedom

equality, freedom, Milton Friedman

“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”

—Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, p. 148.