The First Amendment Is Hereby Repealed

September 23, 2009

Pravda

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Items in the news this week:

1) The president signals he’s open to a government takeover of the newspaper industry. No word on whether government-supported papers will be required to change their names to PRAVDA.

If you’ve been told that the bill in question doesn’t set up direct government funding for newspapers, you’ve been misled. It doesn’t set up federal funding for newspapers, but it does everything possible to grease the skids for state and local government funding – and who’s prepared to bet that won’t happen once the opportunity is available?

As I wrote back in April:

Since the law already allows nonprofits to publish and distribute their own newspapers if they want to, the only possible rationale for Sen. Cardin’s proposal is that it allows newspapers to continue charging money to cover their costs while also recieving tax-free subsidies. And who would be doing the subsidizing? Even if government (at the state and local level) doesn’t do it directly, it’ll do it indirectly. Politicians have lots of wealthy friends who would love to have their own pet newspapers.

In fact, Cardin’s proposal is actually worse than a direct government subsidy. At least a direct subsidy would be on the books and subject to disclosure, oversight, and some level of accountability.

Cardin invokes the old Jeffersonian saw that it would be better to have newspapers without government rather than government without newspapers. Yes – but either of those would be better than having government newspapers.

I also wrote that “the proposal is obviously going to go nowhere because it fails the laugh test.” But the laugh test is one exam that’s been pretty radically dumbed down over the past six months; these days anyone can pass it.

2) Meanwhile, the latest development in the health care debate: The U.S. government is now openly using the criminal law to censor core political speech solely because the speech in question advocates a position the government opposes.

When I say “censor” I don’t mean they’re regulating donations and spending levels or imposing restrictions on the when, where and how. I mean they’re threatening to impose criminal sanctions for having said a certain thing, simply because it’s something they don’t want said.

And, of course, once the threat is made there’s no real need to prosecute. The threat itself is sufficient to censor all future speech on the subject.

I’ve written before that health care reform is a knife at the throat of our freedom. I had no idea the enslavement process would move so quickly. Care to place bets on which clause of the Bill of Rights will be the next to go?

UPDATE: Yet another health-care-destroys-free-speech story.

5 Comments | economics, politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The ALA Double-Standard?

August 11, 2008

Last week I had a post observing that high school reading lists were much less likely to contain feminist critiques if those critiques were of non-Western societies, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel. 

Later last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Random House had cancelled the imminent publication of a book that it had under contract that was a fictionalized history of one of Mohammed’s wives.  Random House engaged in this self-censorship out of “fear of a possible terrorist threat from extremist Muslims.”

Once again we see a double standard in the treatment of non-Western subjects.  Where is the American Library Association (ALA) to denounce this self-censorship?  The ALA rightly advocates against efforts to restrict the kinds of books that are available and maintains a list of the most frequently “challenged” books.  They preface that list with a quotation from Judy Blume: “[I]t’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”

The ALA saw the need to issue a statement to denounce censorship in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.  When will they release a statement denouncing Random House’s decision not to publish a book that they had deemed worthy of a $100,000 contract because they were bullied by threats of violence?

2 Comments | civic values | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene