Letting the Market Control Hate Speech
Occasionally I like to comment on our First Amendment right to free speech and how the marketplace of ideas tends to police itself very well. This is quite clearly the case with most issues in our society. While the U.S. Supreme Court has drawn a number of lines concerning the types of speech that are not protected (those that pose a threat to human health and safety), most bad ideas simply disappear on their own.
For example, one is free to express the idea that the god Apollo and his chariot are responsible for the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, but one does so at the peril of losing credibility in a world that used reason and science to figure all this out 400 years ago.
Here’s a real-world example of how all this happens, explained in Time Magazine’s recent article on the downfall of Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh didn’t lose his audience because he was censored, but rather because so many people disapproved of what he was saying, and some of them organized boycotts against the sponsors of his hate speech. Bingo.
If you want to tell me that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that Neil Armstrong didn’t walk on the moon, or that you’ve invented a machine that spits out “free energy,” go for it. I’m not offended in the least. On the other hand, don’t expect me to take you too seriously.
Hey Craig,
I’m joining the ranks of bloggers.
I’ve actually wanted to have my own blog for about 20 years now. I’ve had an obsessive interest in public policy since I was in my early teens, and at this point I’ve devoted literally tens of thousands of hours to researching and studying public policy and, social issues, and macro and micro causality of those issues… and I’m finally overcoming my reticence and jumping in.
The goal is to have a place for an elevated discussion of public policy where informed and intelligent people from the left and the right (note, I do not suspect intelligent and informed people on the right would be members of the republicans after the Tea Party took over the GOP) can discuss the issues of the day without venom.
I hope that it will be an informative and productive meeting of minds between the nation’s wonks. The problem is that wonks comprise a very small portion of the population, so in order for this to succeed I’m going to need those who are interested to aggressively share the site with anyone they think might be interested.
🙂
I was hoping you might give me a shout-out to your reader’s list. My first post is all economics, but my next post that I’m working on is about the new record low arctic max… and that would certainly be of interest to those here…
Anyway, here’s our (my wife is learning the coding and doing the blocking for me, while I hammer out content) new blog: the Centerhold (somehow the text box which had “The Second Coming” by Yeats disappeared from the mission statement, but I imagine you understand where we’re going here) – and my first post: “Quit Calling for the Fed to Raise Rates!”.
http://thecenterhold.com/quit-calling-for-the-fed-to-lower-interest-rates/