Quotulatiousness

February 4, 2018

QotD: Modern feminism

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Feminism now regularly calls for women to be treated as eggshells instead of equals. And through this, it does something pernicious to the women it claims to advocate for: Feminism has become a movement for female disempowerment, or what I call “encouraged helplessness” (from psychologist Martin Seligman’s “learned helplessness”—the feeling that there’s nothing you can do to escape your fate).

In fact, feminism, bizarrely, has morphed into paternalism — instructing women that they are fragile, passive, powerless victims who need authority figures to advocate for them.

That’s a movement I want no part of. Or, as I like to put it — because I’m neither a feminist nor much of a lady: Count me the fuck out.

If you’re a woman, I encourage you to join me — count yourself the fuck out of what feminism has become.

This doesn’t require you to be fearless. You just need to shove your fears aside and do what needs to be done — say, getting up on your hind legs and telling some co-worker, “Stop saying that thing to me” or “…treating me this way.”

Now, if they persist after you’ve told them to stop a few times, that’s harassment and you can seek support to get them to stop. But consider that it’s less likely to get to that point if you simply act like men’s equal—act as if you’re powerful — instead of acting like you’re a feminist.

Amy Alkon, “Are Women Really Victims? Four Women Weigh In”, Quillette, 2017-11-22.

February 3, 2018

QotD: Subsidising the arts

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the Luvvies justify tax subsidy of The Arts by saying, “We can’t call ourselves a civilized country without opera houses, ballet companies, etc., etc.”. Well, perhaps not. But can we call ourselves a civilized country when we have to be forced to pay for these things against our will? Does that not then make us an uncivilized country pretending to be civilized, aping true civilization, a sort of cargo-culture? It’s not our culture at all, spontaneously emerging through voluntary action, it’s someone else’s, laid on the top of our real civilization like fancy icing on (as they might have it) mud. Isn’t that worse?

Sam Duncan, commenting on David Thompson’s “Elsewhere (100)”, davidthompson.com, 2013-10-09.

February 2, 2018

Trump Diminishes the Power of the State in Our Heads: Wired Co-Founder Louis Rossetto

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 1 Feb 2018

Louis Rossetto, co-founder of Wired magazine, on politics, the dot-com bubble, and his new novel, Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet.
—————-
“Trump is a refreshing reminder that the guy that’s in the White House is another human being,” says Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired and author of the new book Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet. “The power of the state is way too exalted [and] bringing that power back to human scale is an important part of what needs to be done to correct the insanity that’s been going on in the post-war era.”

In 2013, Rossetto was the co-recipient of Reason‘s very first Lanny Friedlander Prize, an award named after the magazine’s founder that’s handed out annually to an individual or group who has created a publication, medium, or distribution platform that vastly expands human freedom. Rossetto is also a longtime libertarian who knew Friedlander personally.

While still an undergraduate at Columbia University, Rossetto co-authored a 1971 cover story in the New York Times Magazine titled “The New Right Credo — Libertarianism,” writing that “[l]iberalism, conservatism, and leftist radicalism are all bankrupt philosophies,” and “refugees from the Old Right, the Old Left and the New Left, they are organizing independently under the New Right banner of libertarianism.”

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Rossetto to talk about his new book (the paper version was lavishly designed and crowdfunded on Kickstarter), the 1990s tech boom, and why Trump “diminishes the power of the state” in our heads.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Paul Detrick, Justin Monticello, Zach Weissmueller.
Machinery by Kai Engel is used under a Creative Commons license.
Photo Credits: Chris Kleponis/ZUMA Press/Newscom – Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom – Abaca Press/Douliery Olivier/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom

January 30, 2018

“Libertarian brutalists” … yet another name for the alt-right

Filed under: Liberty, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Catallaxy Files, Jeffrey Tucker identifies two very different kinds of libertarian:

Why should we favor human liberty over a social order ruled by power? In providing the answer, I would suggest that libertarians can generally be divided into two camps: humanitarians and brutalists.

The humanitarians are drawn to reasons such as the following. Liberty allows peaceful human cooperation. It inspires the creative service of others. It keeps violence at bay. It allows for capital formation and prosperity. It protects human rights of all against invasion. It allows human associations of all sorts to flourish on their own terms. It socializes people with rewards toward getting along rather than tearing each other apart, and leads to a world in which people are valued as ends in themselves rather than fodder in the central plan.

We know all of this from history and experience. These are all great reasons to love liberty.

But they are not the only reasons that people support liberty. There is a segment of the population of self-described libertarians — described here as brutalists — who find all the above rather boring, broad, and excessively humanitarian. To them, what’s impressive about liberty is that it allows people to assert their individual preferences, to form homogeneous tribes, to work out their biases in action, to ostracize people based on “politically incorrect” standards, to hate to their heart’s content so long as no violence is used as a means, to shout down people based on their demographics or political opinions, to be openly racist and sexist, to exclude and isolate and be generally malcontented with modernity, and to reject civil standards of values and etiquette in favor of antisocial norms.

These two impulses are radically different. The first values the social peace that emerges from freedom, while the second values the freedom to reject cooperation in favor of gut-level prejudice. The first wants to reduce the role of power and privilege in the world, while the second wants the freedom to assert power and privilege within the strict confines of private property rights and the freedom to disassociate.

To be sure, liberty does allow both the humanitarian and the brutalist perspective, as implausible as that might seem. Liberty is large and expansive and asserts no particular social end as the one and only way. Within the framework of liberty, there is the freedom to love and to hate. At the same time, they constitute very different ways of looking at the world — one liberal in the classical sense and one illiberal in every sense — and it is good to consider that before you, as a libertarian, find yourself allied with people who are missing the main point of the liberal idea.

In my experience, most of the people who espouse these “brutalist” notions are not people who have ever identified as libertarians.

January 29, 2018

A new collection of H.L. Mencken’s “The Free Lance” columns

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Reason, Bill Kauffman reviews S.T. Joshi’s new selection from H.L. Mencken’s Baltimore Evening Sun essays:

The longtime Baltimore Evening Sun columnist, American Mercury editor, and rumbustiously splenetic critic, who graced this orb from 1880 to 1956, would not be published in any major newspaper today. The reasons he foresaw over a century ago, when he decried the “cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing” whose purpose was the extirpation, the annihilation, of anything resembling a robust exchange of ideas. Two beliefs puffed up the righteous censor, according to Mencken: first, “that any man who dissents from the prevailing platitudes is a hireling of the devil,” and second, “that he should be silenced and destroyed forthwith. Down with free speech; up with the uplift!”

Plus ça change and all that.

S.T. Joshi, who has chosen his primary scholarly interests — Mencken, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ambrose Bierce — with a fine eye for readability over reputation, has assembled a selection of Mencken’s Evening Sun “Free Lance” columns of 1911–1915 into a book called A Saturnalia of Bunk and contributed an informative introduction to it.

Henry Louis Mencken churned out six of these 1,200-word meringues every week, a vertiginous pace that makes Joyce Carol Oates look like Harper Lee.

Logorrheic bloggers aside, does anyone really have that much to say about the controversies of the day? Mencken once nicked Bierce for reprinting his early work, which was “filled with epigrams against frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old and puerile newspaper controversies.” Is A Saturnalia of Bunk similarly irrelevant?

Happily, no. Although Mencken’s fusillades against, say, blue laws have grown fusty, his rousing conclusions — “the militant moralist tries to steal liberty and self-respect, and the man who has lost both is a man who has lost everything that separates a civilized freeman from a convict in a chain-gang” — have lost none of their punch.

These columns, composed while their author was on the shy side of middle age, afford, says Joshi, “a nearly complete view of Mencken’s political, religious, social, and cultural philosophy as it had evolved up to this point” — and this philosophy would largely remain constant for the rest of his rooted life. (Mencken, a dyed-in-the-wool third-generation Baltimorean, a sardonic citizen of his place, made his home in the house in which he grew up.)

“… those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike [Jordan Peterson] more than the honest progressives I know”

Zachary Slayback tries to discover why so many intellectuals dislike Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson:

I’ve spent the last few years thinking about how to upend higher education and have worked with some leading entrepreneurs and thinkers in this space. Continually, we come back to the question of liberal arts education and its value (remember, I studied philosophy!). Some people are too quick to dismiss liberal arts education as useless and not worth the time. Instead, they insist on purely vocational education. Yet many of the most successful and happiest individuals I know are widely read (rarely because of their college courses), can discuss ideas from Aristotle to Jung to Jacobs with you, and love the idea of entertaining big ideas.

I visited Peterson’s lectures and found them to be nuanced, intricate, and to jump well between clinical experience, psychological research (most of which was well-validated, hard to do in psychology), and Jungian myth interpretation. When he released his Bible lecture series, I found myself, for the first time since I was a child, intimately listening about the ideas that go into religion and how these ideas surface elsewhere in the culture. More than a decade of skepticism towards religious texts due to their shallow readings and uses for the Joel Osteens of the world melted away.

His lectures rarely touch on politics in any capacity. When it gets brought up, he’s quick to note that he does not oppose calling trans individuals by their pronouns but that he opposes having his language dictated by a central political committee. This seems commonsensical to me. Part of what made the American and Canadian traditions so egalitarian is their rejection of forced speech and titles.

And for those who listen to Peterson, he bridges any kind of ideological gap (in fact, those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike him more than the honest progressives I know). Peterson’s worldview is a classical liberal rejection of collectivism (an ideology that killed more than 50 million people in the 20th century alone) while simultaneously not falling into an atomized view of the individual relative to his culture.

Just last week, I met with an acquaintance in San Francisco, the Mecca of American political correctness, who described herself as a “liberal democrat type,” who had listened to and met Peterson at a company event. She admitted that she couldn’t read into his politics and found his talk compelling about the nature of the world, men in it today, and why people like Peterson must appeal to so many people outside the San Francisco and Washington DC bubbles. She was explicit in saying that she was neither a libertarian nor a conservative and still Peterson motivated her to introspect, read into Jungian archetypes, and better understand the culture that shapes the world.

She’s not alone. I regularly speak to friends and acquaintances from across the political spectrum who find value in Peterson’s talks. These are people years out of college (or who never went) who now pick up classics like Dostoyevsky, Jung, Neumann, and even the Bible with a critical intellectual lens. Peterson regularly talks about and shares letters from fans who admit that his moralistic talks inspired them to pull themselves together and “sort themselves out” by figuring out what they want from life and pursuing that. r/JordanPeterson (yes, he has his own subreddit) is filled to the brim with stories of people saying how Peterson helped them get control of their lives and navigate the world.

I’ve bought but not yet read Peterson’s recent book, 12 Rules for Life. It’s not the sort of thing I usually read, so I’m not quite sure what to expect (Indigo says it’ll be delivered tomorrow).

January 28, 2018

Sexual Enlightenment – Defining what is Normal l HISTORY OF SEX

Filed under: Europe, History, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

IT’S HISTORY
Published on 28 Sep 2015

With Sexual Enlightenment came radical changes to the perception of sex in society. This episode on sex in modernity covers discussions held in salon culture, debating and defining ideas of what sexual liberty meant. Public figures like Anne Lister openly addressed homosexual relations and the first sex researchers took up on the topic.

January 27, 2018

The difference between being “pro-free market” and “pro-business”

Filed under: Business, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s a distinction that really does make a difference, argues Jonah Goldberg:

One of the most difficult distinctions for people in general and politicians in particular to grasp is the difference between being pro-free market and pro-business.

There are many reasons for this confusion. For politicians, the key reason is that businesspeople are constituents and donors, while the free market is an abstraction. Also, because capitalists tend to lionize successful people, we assume they share our philosophical commitments. But it is a rare corporate titan who favors a free market if doing so is bad for his or her bottom line.

Adam Smith recognized this in his canonical 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion,” he wrote, without the conversation ending “in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

This doesn’t mean that capitalists are evil; it means they’re human beings. Virtually every profession you can think of has a tendency to dig a moat around itself to protect its interests and defend against competition. A few years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out against affordable health care for children. Retail chains like Walmart and CVS started opening in-store clinics to provide affordable basic health care like vaccinations. The pediatricians rightly saw this as a threat to their monopoly over kids’ medical care. Obviously, the pediatricians didn’t think they were villains; they simply found rationalizations for why everyone should keep paying them top dollar for stuff that could be done more cheaply.

Similarly, most teachers like kids, but that doesn’t stop teachers unions from doing everything they can to protect themselves from competition or accountability. Indeed, unions, by design, are conspiracies against the public to defend the wages and perks of their members. NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard) is another manifestation of this phenomenon.

[…]

Smith understood this too. After noting how people of the same trade conspire to raise prices, he added: “It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.”

What both Smith and the founders understood is that such conspiracies can only last with the help of government. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter argued, in a system of free competition, monopolies cannot long endure without government protection.

January 19, 2018

Playboy sues Boing Boing for … linking?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I thought this sort of legal stupidity went out with the 90s …

A few weeks ago we were shocked to learn that Playboy had, without notifying us, sued us over this post (we learned about it when a journalist DM’ed us on Twitter to ask about it). Today, we filed a motion to dismiss, asking the judge to throw out this baseless, bizarre case. We really hope the courts see it our way, for all our sakes.

Playboy’s lawsuit is based on an imaginary (and dangerous) version of US copyright law that bears no connection to any US statute or precedent. Playboy — once legendary champions for the First Amendment — now advances a fringe copyright theory: that it is illegal to link to things other people have posted on the web, on pain of millions in damages — the kinds of sums that would put us (and every other small publisher in America) out of business.

Rather than pursuing the individual who created the allegedly infringing archive, Playboy is pursuing a news site for pointing out the archive’s value as a historical document. In so doing, Playboy is seeking to change the legal system so that deep-pocketed opponents of journalism can shut down media organizations that displease them. It’s a law that they could never get from Congress, but which they hope the courts will conjure into existence by wiping us off the net.

It’s not just independent publishers who rely on the current state of copyright law, either. Major media outlets (like Playboy!) routinely link and embed media, without having to pay a lawyer to research the copyright status of something someone else posted, before discussing, explaining or criticizing it.

The world can’t afford a judgment against us in this case — it would end the web as we know it, threatening everyone who publishes online, from us five weirdos in our basements to multimillion-dollar, globe-spanning publishing empires like Playboy.

As a group of people who have had long associations with Playboy, reading the articles (really!) and sometimes writing them, we hope the judge sees it our way — for our sakes… and for Playboy‘s.

The ineffectiveness of the NFL kneeling protests

Filed under: Football, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Wall Street Journal, Shelby Steele explained (among other things) why the NFL protests went nowhere and seemed to have so little positive effect … unfortunately, that essay is behind a paywall, so Rod Dreher has pulled out some key excerpts:

… Steele reflects that black protest has lost its power to change minds in our culture. Steele says the self-defeating nature of the NFL kneeling protests — they have not only failed to change minds, but have ended up hurting the league. He says that unlike Martin Luther King and the civil rights protesters, these wealthy players took no serious risks. Nevertheless, because black protest has in the recent past been so incredibly effective, it makes sense that they would follow this model:

    It is not surprising, then, that these black football players would don the mantle of protest. The surprise was that it didn’t work. They had misread the historical moment. They were not speaking truth to power. Rather, they were figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course.

    What they missed is a simple truth that is both obvious and unutterable: The oppression of black people is over with. This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless. We blacks are, today, a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by surprise.

    Of course this doe not mean there is no racism left in American life. Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.

    Protest always tries to make a point. But what happens when that point has already been made — when, in this case, racism has become anathema and freedom has expanded?

Steele goes on to say that black Americans, victims of four centuries of grinding oppression, weren’t ready for freedom.

    [F]reedom put blacks at the risk of being judged inferior, the very libel that had always been used against us.

    To hear, for example, that more than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2016 embarrasses us because this level of largely black-on-black crime cannot be blamed simply on white racism.

Steele makes the interesting and important point that freedom “is a condition, not an agent of change.” It doesn’t mean things get better for you automatically. It only means that one has the liberty to change one’s life. And with freedom comes responsibility.

QotD: Political correctness

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It”, FrontPage Magazine, 2005-08-31.

January 13, 2018

Everyone You Love Did Drugs

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 12 Jan 2018

It turns out that a lot of accomplished, well-respected historical figures did drugs. From Winston Churchill taking amphetamines to Thomas Edison lacing his wine with cocaine, not everyone who uses narcotics is a hopeless basket case living in a dumpster. While some drug users spiral into addiction and crime, others go on to become president. It’s time to debunk the age old stereotypes of the back alley dangerous dealer or the lazy stoner when, according to the National Survey on Drug Use, roughly half of all Americans have tried an illegal drug.

In the latest “Mostly Weekly” host Andrew Heaton breaks down the cartoonish Drug Warrior portrayal of drugs by showing some of the beloved historical figures who used them.

January 7, 2018

QotD: The Whiskey Rebellion

Filed under: History, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ninescore and fifteen years ago, with the ink only just sanded on the United States Constitution, President George Washington and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton decided it was time to try out their shiny brand-new powers of taxation.

Their first victims would be certain western Pennsylvania agricultural types long accustomed to converting their crops into a less perishable, more profitable high-octane liquid form. Unfortunately for the President and the Secretary, many of these rustics, especially near the frontier municipality of Pittsburgh, placed a slightly different emphasis than high school teachers do today on the Revolutionary slogan regarding “taxation without representation”. In their view, they’d fought the British in 1776 to abolish taxes and they weren’t interested in having representation imposed on them by that gaggle of fops in Philadelphia, the nation’s capital. They made this manifestly clear by tarring-and-feathering tax collectors, burning their homes to the ground, and filling the stills of those who willingly paid the hated tribute with large-caliber bullet holes.

Feeling their authority challenged, George and Alex dispatched westward a body of armed conscripts equal to half the population of America’s largest city (Philadelphia once again, later famous for air-dropping explosives on miscreants charged with disturbing the peace). Four hundred whiskey rebels, duly impressed by this army of fifteen thousand, subsided. The miraculous process by which the private act of thievery is transubstantiated into public virtue was firmly established in history. The results — chronic poverty and unemployment, endless foreign wars, and reruns on television — are with us even today.

L. Neil Smith, “Introduction: A Brief History of the North American Confederacy”, The Spirit of Exmas Sideways: a “novelito” by L. Neil Smith.

December 28, 2017

QotD: The 1960s cultural revolution

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The entire political and cultural trajectory of the decades following World War II in the U.S. was a movement away from the repressions of the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union, when the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives searched for signs of Communist subversion in every area of American life. A conspicuous target was the Hollywood film industry, where many liberals had indeed been drawn to the Communist Party in the 1930s, before the atrocities of the Stalinist regime were known. To fend off further federal investigation, the major studios blacklisted many actors, screenwriters, and directors, some of whom, like a favorite director of mine, Joseph Losey, fled the country to find work in Europe. Pete Seeger, the leader of the politicized folk music movement whose roots were in the social activism of Appalachian coal-miners in the 1930s, was banned from performing on network TV in the U.S. in the 1950s and ‘60s.

There were sporadic landmark victories for free speech in the literary realm. In 1957, local police raided the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco and arrested the manager and owner, Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for selling an obscene book, Allen Ginsberg’s epic protest poem, Howl. After a long, highly publicized trial, Howl was declared not obscene, and the charges were dropped. The Grove Press publishing house, owned by Barney Rosset, played a heroic role in the battle against censorship in the U.S. In 1953, Grove Press began publishing affordable, accessible paperbacks of the voluminous banned works of the Marquis de Sade, a major thinker about sex and society at the close of the Enlightenment. In 1959, the Grove Press edition of D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, then banned in the U.S., was confiscated as obscene by the U.S. Postal Service. Rosset sued and won the case on federal appeal. In 1961, the publication by Grove Press of another banned book, Henry Miller’s 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, led to 60 obscenity trials in the U.S. until in 1964 it was declared not obscene and its publication permitted.

One of the supreme symbols of newly militant free speech was Lenny Bruce, who with Mort Sahl transformed stand-up comedy from its innocuous vaudevillian roots into a medium of biting social and political commentary. Bruce’s flaunting of profanity and scatology in his improvisational onstage act led to his arrest for obscenity in San Francisco in 1961, in Chicago in 1962, and in New York in 1964, where he and Howard Solomon, owner of the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, were found guilty of obscenity and sentenced to jail. Two years later, while his conviction was still under appeal, Bruce died of a drug overdose at age 40.

This steady liberalizing trend was given huge impetus by the sexual revolution, which was launched in 1959 by the marketing of the first birth control pill. In Hollywood, the puritanical studio production code, which had been adopted in the early 1930s under pressure from conservative groups like the Legion of Decency and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was gradually breaking down and was finally abandoned by the late 1960s. The new standard of sexual expression was defined by European art films, with their sophisticated scripts and frank nudity. Pop music pushed against community norms: in 1956, Elvis Presley’s hip-swiveling gyrations were cut off by the TV camera as too sexual for the Ed Sullivan Show, which was then a national institution. As late as 1967, the Ed Sullivan Show was trying to censor the song lyrics of major bands like the Doors and the Rolling Stones, who were imitating the sexual explicitness of rural and urban African-American blues. (The Stones capitulated to Sullivan, but the Doors fought back — and were never invited on his show again.) Middle-class college students in the 1960s, including women, began freely using four-letter words that had rarely been heard in polite company, except briefly during the flapper fad of the 1920s. In the early 1970s, women for the first time boldly entered theaters showing pornography and helped make huge hits out of X-rated films like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones.

In short, free speech and free expression, no matter how offensive or shocking, were at the heart of the 1960s cultural revolution. Free speech was a primary weapon of the Left against the moralism and conformism of the Right.

Camille Paglia, “The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech”, Heat Street, 2016-05-09.

December 11, 2017

QotD: Occupational licensing

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… occupational licensing laws and Competitor’s Veto laws exclude would-be entrepreneurs from the marketplace — with disproportionately negative consequences for members of minority groups — […] Congress could act today to protect the fundamental human right of economic liberty against unjust state interference.

Licensing laws tend to have particularly harsh consequences on members of minority groups for a couple reasons. First, if a law requires a person to have, say, a college degree to practice the trade of interior design (which is the law in Florida), people who have less money and time to spend in college will find that avenue of opportunity closed to them. Since black and Hispanic Floridians are about 30 percent less likely to have a college degree, they will suffer more from this absurd licensing requirement than others will. Competitor’s Veto laws that forbid a person from practicing a trade unless they get permission from the businesses already operating in that industry are also very likely to create a sort of Old Boys Network, and to exclude entrepreneurs who lack political connections. Second, in a more general sense, any law that restricts economic opportunity for some to benefit others — as licensing laws tend to do — are likely to benefit those who have more political influence and can therefore get the government to regulate in ways favorable to them. Since members of minority groups have less political influence, they tend to be the ones excluded.

Timothy Sandefur, “Testifying to the U.S. Senate Oversight Subcommittee Tuesday about economic liberty and minorities”, Freespace, 2015-09-30.

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