Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

James Heckman, a Nobel Lauereate whose reputation in the mainstream economics community is impeccable:

         I do not think it’s class warfare [Obama's economic policies], I think it’s empirical economics. The real issue is the empirical content of the supply side economics dogma. It’s pretty threadbare. The “real business cycle” theory is simply inconsistent with empirical evidence. That does not prevent it from being taught as gospel to students (it’s really gospel not empirical evidence). I would first and foremost talk to Ray Fair (Yale) and Mark Watson (Princeton) about the evidence for the supply side model. What is ironic is that those who preach supply side practice a crude version of Keynesian economics that ignores all of those incentive effects claimed to be so important by the supply side theorists. The real question apart from the current turmoil is the longer run. Denying the value of investment in knowledge;in infrastructure;in basic science and education at all levels has been and will continue to be harmful to our long run health. In my mind Obama’s eyes are fixed more on things that will improve the US economy in the next century. The basic data on the current crisis is still being revealed, but it’s clear that the absence of serious regulatory oversight contributed mightily to the current problems. It’s not class warfare; its about a future-oriented society.

Both Ned and Jamelle have posted their electoral college maps, and Jamelle memed me, so here it is:

HHere’s my thinking in having Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina swing red. I don’t have confidence in the Democrats’ ability to get turnout in red states (except those that are going through a rapid and large scale demographic-political change like Virginia). Until proven otherwise, the GOP is really good at getting people in red states to vote for them. I think Missouri could easily go Obama’s way, but I think it’s more likely that McCain wins by a real squeaker, like thousands if not hundreds of votes*. I also think Florida could tighten up and be really close, and I was even tempted to predict McCain victory there as well. And as far as Montana and North Dakota go, if you look at 538, McCain has fairly solid leads in both of them, but five points in Montana or North Dakota are a whole lot different than five points in Ohio or Missouri, so Obama could surprise me. 

*Also, if I put Missouri down for Obama, then Jamelle and I would have the exact same map, and that wouldn’t be much fun

The financial crisis doesn’t have a defining quote, like ‘Yeah, grandma Millie, man’…’Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.’ But I think we may have found it:

Official #1: Btw (by the way) that deal is ridiculous.

Official #2: I know right…model def (definitely) does not capture half the risk.

Official #1: We should not be rating it.

Official #2: We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.

I’ve written about this before, so maybe I’m missing something, but I’m always a little confused when people point to the 3/5s compromise as the best evidence that the constitution was racist/did nothing about slavery/denied black people citizenship. For example, in making an otherwise unobjectionable point that the Constitution, as ratified, did not ensure the liberties and rights for African Americas, Adam Serwer says “The Constitution’s acceptance of slavery, and its valuation of slaves as “three-fifths” of a person, was a fundamental flaw that contradicted the very principles outlined in the Constitution” 

Sure, the valuation of slaves as 3/5s of a person for the purpose of apportioning seats in the House is a good symbol for what was going on, but in reality, it doesn’t mean much.

That’s because it was the Southern slaveholders who wanted slaves to count as a whole person so they could get more seats in the House and maintain national legislative support for slavery. The Northerners, though hardly angels on the slavery front, wanted them to count as zero to get more political power for themselves. If we were to imagine a world in which the South got what it wanted – individual slaves counting as one – we would lose a powerful anecdote for the legalized erasure of blacks in pre Civil War America, but it wouldn’t have actually improved the legal status for antebellum African Americans. (even if they counted as one, they wouldn’t have been able to vote). If anything, antebellum America would have been a much better place had slaves counted for zero. From Wikipedia:

For example, in 1793 slave states would have been apportioned 33 seats in the House of Representatives had the seats been assigned based on the free population; instead they were apportioned 47. In 1812, slaveholding states had 76 instead of the 59 they would have had; in 1833, 98 instead of 73. As a result, southerners dominated the Presidency, the Speakership of the House, and the Supreme Court in the period prior to the Civil War.^[5]

Historian Garry Wills has postulated that without the additional “slave” votes, Jefferson would have lost the presidential election of 1800. Also, “…slavery would have been excluded fromMissouri…Jackson’s Indian removal policy would have failed…the Wilmot Proviso would have banned slavery in territories won from Mexico….the Kansas-Nebraska bill would have failed….”^[5] However, other historians have criticized Wills’s analysis as simplistic.^[6] For example, while the three-fifths compromise could be seen to favor Southern states (which generally had larger slave populations), the Connecticut compromise tended to favor the Northern states (which were generally smaller). Support for the new Constitution rested on the balance of these sectional interests.^[7]

Of course, there are limits to what this type of counterfactual can explain or illuminate, but it shows that the 3/5s compromise was hardly the be-all end-all of antebellum legal racism.

What’s weird is that I’m sure Adam Serwer knows all the history behind the 3/5s compromise, but uses it as an example anyway.

Robert Samuelson has yet another mind bogglingly inane column. He first does his ritual criticism of “conventional wisdom,” declaring that stimulus in the form of direct government outlays to shore up consumer spending and/or employment (checks, jobs programs, public works, tax credits etc) is totally off the table. His reasoning is pretty weak. He notes that the first 152 billion dollar stimulus was mostly saved and that public works programs take a long time to get started. Well, his first point is fair, but it seems like a bigger stimulus could still lead to more consumer spending. And as far as public works goes, there are lots of projects that are ready to go except for a lack of funding. Also, most economists think we’re going to be slumping for quite some time, so the regular concerns about public works funding leading to these works being spent during a boom don’t seem to apply. Samuelson just ignores other ideas for more direct supply side stimulus like expanding unemployment benefits or increasing outlays for food stamps. These are much more directly tied to consumer spending, not to mention that they help out people who are directly suffering as a result of the downturn.

But let’s get to his three fashionably impolitic ideas. His first is actually decent – “Raise fuel taxes the equivalent of one cent a gallon per month for four years.” The arguments for it are the same as any argument for a carbon tax, and it makes no real sense as a stimulus measure to get us out of a slump

This second one is truly daft: “increase the earliest age that workers can qualify for Social Security from 62 to 64.” This measure wouldn’t function as a stimulus, wouldn’t save the government money (he even says that the checks retirees get later would be bigger). At best, it would encourage people to work longer, but compared to more direct forms of stimulus, it’s pretty weak tea.

His last suggestion is the only one that makes some sort of sense, even on its own terms: allow for offshore oil drilling. But his own reasoning is still quite lame “America’s huge foreign oil bill weakens our economy but also destabilizes the world economy. Oil producers don’t spend all they earn, dampening worldwide demand.” OK yeah, but offshore drilling won’t meaningfully affect the price of oil, especially since its crashed recently, for decades. Once again, as a stimulus measure, it makes no sense. The only good reason for offshore drilling I’ve heard articulated is that it would directly bit into our current account deficit, bu Samuelson doesn’t even mention that.

So, here we have a columnist for America’s preeminent newspaper for reporting and analyzing politics. He has the reputation of being highly numerate and for proving insight about economic policy. And he uses his position as a columnist to peddle three ideas that no economist would support as a stimulus measure in a slumping economy. He wraps his ideas up in the vestments of “controversy” and the fact that the president elect isn’t likely to implement any of them. In Samuelson’s world, the fact that an idea is politically unpopular and unlikely to be implemented is a sign of its strength. But, in the case of stimulus, the opposite is clearly true. We have a consensus from Ben Bernanke to Larry Summers to Jamie Galbraith that some sort of direct, classic stimulus is needed. What Samuelson is doing is trotting out his favorite ideas and saying that now is the best for them to be enacted. This type of column writing isn’t only misleading and pointless, it’s also quite unoriginal. 

I don’t want to say that Bill Simmons comparison of the revived (in his mind) NBA to Joan Halloway isn’t a decent one, and I also don’t want to say that people who’ve gone through what Joan did can’t be as awesome as the NBA is, but this is just poor timing. Because when one mentions Joan, they aren’t really thinking “curvy” and “sexy”

There probably isn’t a better way to capture the hearts of the liberal blogosphere than declaring a love for graphic novels (just look at Yglesias’ Rachel Maddow swoon). But a mere declration of love isn’t the optimal way to induce blog-o-swooing. The best way to write posts entitled “Doctor Manhattan’s Rate of Pure Time Preference is Zero.” Awesome! (fairly large spoilers, however)

For a similar, though less visually interesting argument, check out Tyler Cowen and Derek Parfit’s “Against the Social Discount Rate.” 

I think if one put Doctor Manhattan and Derek Parfit in a room together, they would have a pretty interesting conversation.

Mike Meginnis finds the logical endpoint of McCain’s absurd “Name + the + Occupation” strategy.

Interestingly enough, Bartelby has a rich history of endorsing political projects. Except they tend to be on the radical leftist side of things. In fact, he’s something of a postmodern leftist radical who palls around with terrorists.

No, no, no, I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about the author of High Variance, who, by the symmetric property (I think, my formal/mathematical logic skills are rather lacking), is the girl version of Matt Rognlie (except she goes to Princeton).  And her blog is a must-read. Check it out.

A term-paper writer for hire explains his craft.

So, let’s say you’re a political philosopher who wants to crticize the “neo-Kantian” idealistic theorizing of renonwned figures like John Rawls and Robert Nozick. One complaint you get is that you don’t have a model for other types of theorizing that aren’t “idealistic” and do a better job at taking into account the nature of power and of the real existing society that philosophers are in. After all, isn’t the job of a political philosopher to figure out what is just/virtuous/provides the most freedom et and then to hold that image up to a current society so as to better diagnose its ills? Or to provide a guideline or framework for citizens and policymakers in making their own polity more just? Well, those were two good points, but there are some political philosophers who take into account power and the real conditions of their society, and unlike those Harvard eggheads, they effected real change in their societies. OK, who is this great thinker? Lenin!

An oversimplification, obviously,  but it goes to show why having a solid conception of justice is probably a good idea before you dive into improving your society. Just sayin’

Check out the rest of Adam Kirsch’s review of Raymond Geuss’s Philosophy and Real Politics. For more Geuss check out this discussion on Leiter Reports, and here’s the intro to his book.

Fuck

Only an Obama victory combined with a total thrashing of Minnesota next week will make me feel better.

Oh, and by the way, I’m actually pretty that Charles Fried endorsed Obama. Sure, he’sstill quite the conservative and was the Solicitor General for Reagan, but as evidenced by his bloggingheads appearence with Joshua Cohen and hi high reputation in the academic community, the man is a serious scholar and intellectual before being a political hack. It certainly means something that he’s coming out for Obama. I would like to think that the “flight to quality” of ones side inteligentsia would mean something to a movement, but with Sarah Palin “going rogue” and laying the groundwork for a 2012 run, I think we can be sure that the conservative movement’s divisive populism, fear of policy subtance, and total nihilism when it comes to governance will continue. And although I think it’s a strategy that will lead to them losing more in the short term, it’s hardly good for American politics to have one side whose base and party leadership just doesn’t care about quality or governing ability. Politics are cyclical, and the Palinauts will have some sort of power soon, and it won’t be pretty. 

Also, when will we see the mainstream media pointing to the defections from McCain by moderate Republicans as a sign of the party’s fading relevance and hijacking by radicals. This, of course, is the popular narrative for explaining the Democratic decline from the early 70s through the 80s. Because the Democrats were too socially liberal and hated our veterans (or something like that), all these white union workers abandoned the party that they had always been tied to. So, shouldn’t we be hearing about white collar workers whose capital gains taxes are going to shoot up and support free trade not voting GOP (and the flight of the moderate leadership) as a sign that the GOP has been taken over by socially conservative, fiscally insolvent, hawkish radicals? I know that this a common refrain of, say, Andrew Sullivan, but when will it congeal to the standard narrative? I feel like the Bush administration’s obvious incompetence is the culprit. For the past eight years, it was too easy to just say “oh, well, Bush is an idiot, so no wonder the GOP is so screwed up.” But when they realize that non-idiots (Steve Schmidt, Bill Kristol) are behind a systemic degradation of the party, hopefully the narrative will change accordingly.

Another note on conservative intellectuals endorsing Obama. In a perfect world, Gary Becker would be next, but he seems to be pretty far in the tank.

Alex Massie has a good post trying to find a political analogy in tomorrow’s Penn State-Ohio State game. Not surprisingly, he finds that there isn’t really any neat, cute correspondence. But that’s OK! Because the game is really important for the BCS rankings, and even more important for the Northwestern Wildcats.

The Cats have a ridiculously soft schedule this year. We’re not playing Penn State, and the other traditional Big Ten powers we are facing (Ohio State, Michigan, Illinois) are both having below-expectations seasons. So, if we want to make the Ohio State-NU game at Ryan Field, November 8, the biggest game of that week, then we need to see Ohio State impressively beat Penn State and find their way back into the Top 5. If the Wildcats can meet their rather low expectations and beat sorry Indiana and not look ahead to Ohio State and beat the surprisingly-good Minnesota Gophers, then the OSU game will be the biggest sporting event at Northwestern in years. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but this is looking to be quite an exciting year. 

PS – Alex wanted me to dream of Roses, but after me and a bunch of guys painted “WILDCATS ROSEBOWL” on our chests for the horriffic Michigan State game, I’ve learned to be a bit a bet less audacious in my hope.

PPS – Jon Chait, Wolvernine alumnus, is just being silly

I think, unsurprisingly, that Obama is the parallel of Rich Rodriguez. Brilliant, innovative figure, hated for his rapid rise and willingness to discard old allies on his way up. Michigan right now is the Obama campaign circa last fall, or this last summer — fans are panicked, fearing they’re trying to change too much too fast, imploring the coach/candidate to revert to more conventional tactics, but the coach/candidate is confident the new course will succeed in the end with some patience.

WIll Wilkinson has a thoughtful post about Rawls and equal opportunity that I’ll write a more about after I take a nap and read some chapters of the The Republic. Towards the end of it, he puts forward a bunch of egalitarian ideas which I don’t think he endorses, but still seem commendable:

Maybe this is how you approach it, and I do wonder why we don’t see more proposals like the following from those egalitarians who do tend to see the desirable positions as more or less fixed… How about a quota system for firms that limits hiring from high-status schools and mandates a certain number from low-status schools, so that it’s better to be the best kid from the University of North Dakota than the median kid at Princeton? Radical high school-quality affirmative action quotas for college admissions. No Supreme Court justice can have more than one clerk from a top-ten law school. It is illegal ever to hire someone who is a relative, or a friend, or a friend of a friend. Randomized assignments to a vast network of national boarding schools. Combat self-reinforcing prestige by picking an athletic conference at random and then mandating that all Federal Reserve governors for the next ten years be professors at schools from that conference. (So Harvard and MIT econ depopulates as everyone rushes to Creighton and Indiana State. Etc.) Examples of this sort can be multiplied. So would these strategies be “consistent with maintaining equal basic liberties”? Are they necessary for maintaining equal basic liberties, but egalitarians are simply missing the real issue by going on and on about income redistribution?

One reason why liberals may not approach egalitarianism this way is because many egalitarian liberals who even think about these issues are in a position where they would personally lose out if we promoted this type of radical institutional egalitarianism. I, for one, would like to see my kids have a better chance to get in at Northwestern, because I think that it would be good for them. Should I think this way? Probably not. But then again, if you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?

 But getting past the psychological barriers, I think proposals like those outlined by Will are good ones. Let’s take ivy league schools, for instance. I remember going to an info session at Yale and hearing that they could admit three different classes of qualified applicants with no overlap between them. At Harvard, the admissions officer said that 85% of the applicants could easily go there and do the work. In light of all that, wouldn’t some level of randomization seem like a good idea? Sure, you could impose quotas and guidelines to maintain some sort of social, ethnic or class balance. But considering the social and economic premium associated with going to a top flight school, I feel like it would be a basic requirement of justice to make them as accessible as possible. And not just by making them free for low and middle income students, but also by making the applicant pool as wide as possible by getting rid of ways to minutely distinguish between virtually identical applicants. I also think that there would be social benefits to making kids realize the luck involved in going to a top-flight school.

Another interesting thing to note about Will’s post is what a good case it makes for fairly confiscatory income redistribution so as to expand opportunity and the well-being of the poor. He makes a pretty good case that great success in life is contingent on factors that can hardly be attributed to the actions of individuals, which would lead people like me to think that high incomes are not really “deserved” and so society should not feel that bad about redistributing them. Of course, all the old Nozickian arguments against income distribution still apply to even those cases where some contingency is involved in amassing great wealth and power. But in light of that contingency, Nozick’s arguments become less convincing, and Rawlsian claims about luck become more so.*

*Of course, there are efficiency arguments against high levels of redistribution. And these are arguments I tend to agree with. But we have to clear the moral brush before we can start talking about specific polices.

Sam Jaffe has an article for Jewcy on Marx, “our biggest shonde,” and how he wasn’t really Jewish. For one, his father converted to christianity, and Marx himself railed against all religion, and had some special venom for Judaism. We can conceede to Jaffe that Marx “borrowed nothing from the Jewish tradition to formulate his ideals,” but it would be pretty daft to ignore the fact that a disproportionate number of Jews have been socialists, communists, marxists or anarchists. For some reason, Marx’s ideas, or some version of them, have always been attractive to Jews. I don’t know exactly why, although I suspect the cosmopolitanism of the Marxist vision has something to do with it, but there is certainly something there.

You can’t exactly ignore Leon Trotstky, Rose Luxemberg, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alexander Berkman, Mark Rudd, Emma Goldman, Gabor Petor, Eric Hobsbawm, Murray Bookchin, Max Shachtman, Gyorgy Lukács, Albert Einstein and nearly the entire Frankfurt School (not to mention countless less famous names), can you?

I imagine that many liberals, tired of the stupid Edwards haircut story and of personal stories in general, will try to argue that Palin’s mindblowing expenditure on clothing and accessories (some $150,000), all paid for by the RNC, don’t really matter. People, and politicians, should be able to look as nice as they want and this distracts us from the real issues. There are, however, two points that suggest this story is, in some way, important.

1. The press is obligated to blow up over this. The Politico and other news organizations crafted an entire narrative out of John Edwards’ $400 haircut. This campaign expense, which amounted to 2.7 percent of that for the Palins, was used to push a line on Edwards that he was vain and hypocritical. So I expect the same news organizations to constantly imply that Palin is 375 times more vain than Edwards, and 375 times more hypocritical for presenting herself as an avatar of middle America , while allowing the RNC to spend more than three times the median income of an average American to present herself on TV and in public appearences. 

2. This looks like corruption to me. Or at least sleaziness. If a rich conservative donor were to directly purchase, say, $75,062.63 worth of stuff from Neiman Marcus and $49,425.74 from Saks and give it Palin, it would be clearly illegal. Instead, we have a collection of rich donors giving money to the RNC and the RNC buying all this stuff for Palin. Now, all of these expenses have been reported and they can’t be traced back to any individual, so it’s not like there’s a possibility of Palin distributing favors to particular clothing-benefactors. What bothers me is that we have a Vice Presidential candidate spending fucking insane amounts of money on personal fineries for her and her entire family with political contributions!

I shouldn’t have to explain why this is wrong, she and the RNC should have to explain why it’s OK. Surely, she had clothes in Alaska? She made public appearences there, I imagine. Unless, of course, the people of Alaska don’t deserve to see her at her best. But I doubt she’ll want to say that.

Sure, women need to do more to look publicly presentable in public than men. So I understand if a female candidate gets her hair done everyday and spend more money on clothes. These expenses can even come from the campaign. But is anyone going to seriously argue that there isn’t the least bit of impropriety in spending at least $4,902.45 for Todd Palin’s clothing? The number is simply too high to be reasonable or justifiable. Did Hillary Clinton ever expense this much to her campaign. Well, she didn’t have to, because of her considerable personal wealth, but I think we can all agree that there’s a reasonable amount of money that could be spent on Palin’s appearence, and that $150,00 isn’t it.

3. It will be fun seeing conservatives trying to justify these expenditures. One can make a consistent argument that $400 on a haircut is trivial, but $150,000 is not. One, however, can’t make the argument that the former matters while the latter is just the liberal press trying to smear a small-town American for trying to impress the coastal elite.  

I should add that, obviously, there are much, much better reasons to vote against McCain-Palin than how much campaign money is spent on her clothes. But we deal with the media-driven narratives and priorities we have, not those we wish we had.

Derek Parfit is an amazingly smart person. He’s almost like a modern day Socrates. He seems to spend most of his time doing taxonomy on commonly held beliefs and common arguments, and then rigorously pointing out the flaws in them by using logical reasoning and thought experiments. He doesn’t spend so much time making his own claims as he does showing why all the other claims to be faulty. This is what Socrates did (or, at least, early dialogues Socrates, not “Socrates” of the middle and late dialogues) and it’s still, after 2400 years, an impressive thing to witness. He also, incidentally, looks like a total gangster.

I should note that I’ve only barely dipped my toes into the free spech literature, and so if my points have been made before by someone else, or have been conclusively answered and rebutted by another, I’m not referencing them because I’m ignorant, not because I’m trying to do some intellectal claim jumping. 

There’s an idea that seems innocuous, but I find rather silly. Namely, that freedom of speech is some sort of natural right that all persons have by virtue of being persons. Because we are autonomous and free human beings with the ability to express ourselves and communicate, it follows that we should have the maximum feasible range of free speech rights. Stephen Hayman, whose book “Free Speech and Human Dignity” I found through a google search of “free speech as a natural right” expresses this rather succintly:

According to this view, freedom of speech is founded on respect for the autonomy and dignity of human beings. But these values also support other fundamental rights, ranging from personal security and privacy to citizenship and equality. Speech that invades these rights is subject to regulation through narrowly drawn laws, except in cases where the value of the speech is sufficient to justify the injuries it causes

The obvious question to ask proponents of this view (from Locke on down) is “what is a natural right?” and “why is free speech one of them?” Heyman says that his theory of rights “is based on the idea of mutual recognition and respect: rights instantiate the respect that individuals owe one another as human beings and citizens.” and that “those rights are founded on respect for the intrinsic worth of human beings and are meant to enable them to develop their nature to the fullest extent.”

The tricky parts are that I don’t suspect that Heyman has a great answer to “what is respect” or “why do we owe eachother respect as human beings” and “what is the intrinsic worth of human beings, why do we have intrinsic worth?” and so on and so forth (Let me note, it’s very possible that Heyman actually answers these questions in the same way I do, I haven’t read his book. But I think we probably disagree because he uses concepts like ‘dignity’ and ‘intrinsic worth’ which generally signal a fundamental difference with my approach to these issues).

I think one can develop a comprehensive system of rights, including those of free speech, that will balance competing values and insure protection against tyranny without reference to any natural rights tradition or notions of intrinsic values or dignity. Here’s the quick and dirty of it.

People form governments, write laws, make constitutions and such for the purpose of ensuring voluntary cooperation that advances everyone’s interests in a non-zero sum way. There are plenty of accounts of how this happens (or should I say, how it should happen or how a hypothetical way of this happening explains a theorists’ preferred mode of government), but from Hobbes through Rawls, there’s a basic agreement of how this stuff basically works. The difference in my mind are between those like Robert Nozick(and Locke and Hobbes and most social contract theorists) who just propose as an axiom that people have individual natural rights that should be protected, and those like Rawls who actually explain why we have these rights or why we would want them. And this is where the knotty question of free speech comes in.

For the natural rights types, we have free speech and every curtailment of free speech needs to be justified by showing some sort of concrete harm to someone else – i.e. shouting fire in a crowded theater. But this standard is by no means universally applied. For example, starting since Bethel v Fraser,  there has been been a steady curtailment of student free speech rights, with a lone exception – political speech.

We generally recognize that political speech has a place above other forms of speech and that any restrictions on it should face a higher level of scrutiny than restrictions on other forms of speech. This view would imply that freedom of speech is about something else than human dignity or intrinsic worth or any natural-rights based claim. Instead, what we all actually seem to agree on is that freedom of speech is a concept whose utility is in allowing free deliberation among parties and thus further encouraging mutual cooperation.

So, I think that we should be able to curtail this type of speech:

 

Photographer Joe Eddins and I headed over to the closest one and found a steady line of voters hoping to cast ballots early. Most seemed to be Obama supporters and several had come from the rally. Nearly all the voters were black.

 Also at the polling site was a group of loud and angry protesters who shouted and mocked the voters as they walked in. Nearly all were white.

 

 As you can see from these videos, no one held anything back. People were shouting about Obama’s acknowledged cocaine use as a young man, abortion and one man used the word “terrorist.” They also were complaining that Sundays are for church, not voting.

 

 

This is speech whose sole intent is to imitate people from participating in the democratic process. It’s speech with the sole end goal of inhibiting the ability of free people to collobaratively make decisions. It, to me, seems worse than most “hate” speech, incitement or any other category of speech most find objectionable. Now, the problem comes with how to regulate this type of speech. Although I’m very skeptical of slippery slope arguments people make about the sanctity of free speech (Europe has much more restrictive speech laws than the US, but I don’t think anyone would argue that we’re much freer), I still think we should be careful about any speech restrictions. It’s very hard to predict what the long-term effect of offensive of inflamatory speech will be, and content-based restrictions are certainly open to abuse and malenforcment. I guess what I’m really saying is that there should at least be a recognition by people that free speech is not always good and that we shouldn’t simply resort to platitudes about the only cure for bad speech being more speech and poorly thought-out slippery slope arguments when we’re talking about free speech.

PS

What I just wrote is pretty hard to reconcile with what I wrote back in June

But I don’t think one needs to make the slippery slope argument to generally defined “tyranny” to defend a broad proection for free speech, but instead one needs to make a slippery slope argument about restrictions on speech becoming too broad. As Jesse Singal argues, once you enshrine certain vague categories of speech that can be restricted – “offensive” speech, speech that offends dignity etc, inevitably these restrictions will be read incredibly broadly and freedom of speech will be tampered down. So, in Canada for example, they are not on the slippery slope to tyranny, but is a world where Mark Steyn is (rightfully, I may add) a martyr for free expression a good one?

Free speech is one of those values that anyone who claims to care about liberalism must hold incredibly dearly. Liberal theorists from Mill to Rawls have put freedom of expression at the top of their list for protected and guaranteed rights because it’s a key component to two key liberal values – autonomy and open discussion. The autonomy argument is obvious, restricting freedom of speech (especially when there’s no “real” or demonstrable harm) is pretty damn close to thought control. As for the value of a multitude of opinions,  Mill argued that only a totally free speech environment could eventually figure out “truth” or good arguments. In short, we need a market place of ideas. And anyone who has any respect for the Enlightenment can tell why this argument is A. true and B. self evident.

Freedom of speech is one of those issues that goes to the very heart of what it means to be a liberal. A liberal who doesn’t support expansive protections for speech, especially offensive speech, can hardly call themselves a liberal. Free speech is a value in its own right, and it’s one that goes to the very heart of what it means to live in a liberal democratic society.

I don’t know if I’m really being inconsistent. I still think that an open public sphere and a proliferation of viewpoints and opinions is incredibly important. I think we should be suspicious of anyone who wants to restrict speech and should be even more suspicious of legal restrictions on speech. But I also think that we should be able to talk about free speech without using poorly thought-out claims about human dignity and autonomy.

I’ve seen plenty of my facebook friends change their statuses into pithy messages in opposition to California’s proposition 8. Even though there are stil two more weeks until the vote, I think I can declare the “best political status” contest over. From a friend of mine:

even my dad is voting no on prop 8. don’t be a conservative ass – please vote no

This is actually a serious argument. Voting yes on proposition 8 would lead to revoking the legal, valid and recognized marriages of at least 11,000 people. It is, fundamentally, a really dick thing to do. Vote no on 8.