Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen was interviewed by Bret Weinstein. Like libertarians generally, she was fixated on maximizing individual freedom without acknowledging any relevance of our nature as a social species. Libertarians are incensed by government restrictions on personal choice, but they seem to have no problem with corporations depriving people of choices or opportunities.
Weinstein has often noted that the founders could not have foreseen the advances of technology or their political consequences. They understood that free speech was necessary for securing the blessings of liberty, but they saw little threat to liberty except in a too-powerful government. Capitalism was still a new thing, and there was a notion of property rights with a powerful intuitive appeal. Owning something just means being able to do with it whatever one wishes, except using it to hurt other people. And even hurting might be more a case for civil litigation than legislative action. If your use of your property harmed me, I can sue for compensation, but only if the harm actually occurred.
In due course it became apparent that the state should be empowered to foresee harm and prevent it, and so we got things such as health and safety regulations. This new power was often abused, but objections are dismissed as badly motivated. There are always power issues. Regulators need information, but the information sources are biased. Good intentions cannot guarantee good regulations. What is bad for GM is not necessarily good for America.
So we have competing factions wanting to maximize their power. In a democracy, the voters are supposed to decide who wins that competition, but uninformed decisions are often bad decisions. And if the outcome of a decision is contrary to the intentions of the decider, it's a bad decision.
The promotion and facilitation of reasoned debate is a utilitarian reason for allowing press freedom: Just let everyone who has something to say, say it. Do not empower the government to decide what the voters need to know. But what if the press itself is controlled or dominated by one faction? Our founders were very concerned about preventing any faction from achieving permanent control of our government.
Partisan control of the press did not seem to be a realistic threat in the late 18th century, or at least not such a threat as to make government control not seem a much greater threat. But publishing technology has evolved, and so has our economic system. It has become possible for some businesses to exercise a degree of power that kings would have envied.
The idea that free-market forces would prevent any sustained abuse of such power now seems indefensible. Conservatives who will not confront this fact will earn the reputation for heartlessness they have so long had to endure. But conservatives are not obliged to think that the best corrective to excessive corporate power is greater government power. Granted that I don't like it when the government tells me what I may or may not eat, I don't like it any better when Burger King or Taco Bell tells me that, either.
As Weinstein says, what we really need is to adjust our incentive structure. We should find ways to make the costs of misusing our resources fall on the misusers rather than everyone else. There was no free-market incentive against environmental pollution as long as polluters didn't have to pay for cleaning up whatever messes they created. Any manufacturer could argue, "It's my land and my equipment. I can do whatever I want with my land, and I can keep anybody off it whom I don't want on it, especially including government agents." But I have heard of no conservative principle according to which any entrepreneur is more justified than the government in threatening anyone else's life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
If a free market is supposed to prevent abuse of economic power, then we'd better make sure the market is really free.
Dogmatism is not conservatisim. Conservatives are attracted to it, yes, but so is everyone else. Liberals are just attracted to different dogmas, as are libertarians of both right and left.
The Internet is a public resource. Nobody is supposed to own it or to use it as if it were their private property. But we have to be very careful. If Facebook won't let me express certain opinions on Facebook, I can still set up my own website and express them there. My right to press freedom is not an entitlement to Facebook's readership.
Almost nobody reads my website because the few who do read it aren't encouraging anyone else to do so. And that is on me. My writing does not have the mass appeal I wish it had, and nobody—in the government or anywhere else—is obliged to do anything about that. Rights do not entail entitlements.
Life is not fair, and we cannot eliminate its unfairness. What we can do is randomize the unfairness by equalizing opportunity as much as possible. We must ensure that no one is denied opportunity just because their demographic characteristics such as gender or ethnicity. But we must not assume that we can infer unequal opportunity by observing unequal outcomes. No matter how level the playing field, there will be winners and losers. A sufficiently prosperous society can and must ensure that the penalty for losing is not deprivation of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, but it need not guarantee the achievement of happiness.
We do not have to earn our inalienable rights. They are called inalienable for a reason. We are born with them. We are told that they come with responsibilities, and so they do, but our having them is not contingent on our properly exercising those responsibilities. If it were, they would not be inalienable. We do apparently revoke some people's rights when they use them to deprive others of their rights, but those who unilaterally deprive others of their rights are in effect forfeiting their own.
If this begins to seem like semantic gamesmanship, so be it. It is a game we have to play. The very notion of rights becomes irrelevant if a few people, by exercising their rights, can deprive all others of theirs. Thus are the rights of all secured and their responsible exercise enforced.
Access to the Internet is like access to "the airwaves," which were regulated because broadcast frequencies had to be allocated. Bandwidth was a limited resource. But once allocated, why regulate further? Because, given multiple requests for access, criteria had to be applied. The regulators settled on the crition of "public interest." This sounded good and noble, but the government was defining the public interest. Not surprisingly, it turned out that what was in the public interest also happened to be in the government's interest.
Newspapers were controled by the interests of their owners, and the owners' interests were dominated by advertising revenues. Thus advertiser preferences could affect editorial choices. Ideally, editorial policy was "Just print what the public needs to know, without regard to anybody's feelings." But where did editors find the answer to the question, "Does the public need to know this?" It was a judgment that somebody had to make, and nobody's judgment could be unaffected by their own feelings.
For a time, large cities had several competing newspapers. By the late 20th century this was no longer true except in the very largest cities, and even there, competition was much diminished.
From the 50s on, most people got their national news from television. Even if the news first appeared in print, most didn't know about it until the evening anchorman said, "Today the New York Times reported that . . . ." And the networks had to be as concerned about their economic security as any newspaper.
The press has never been free from control by economic elites. But there was still competition, and for even the most morally compromised corporate executive, credibility was indispensable. It was bad for business if one of your competitors caught you in an outright lie, because a lie that nobody believed was useless. I'm not talking about sloppy journalism. I'm talking about journalists just making stuff up, telling falsehoods that they know to be false. This was normally career suicide if it was found out, and there was always someone highly motivated to find it out when it happened. When a journalist was caught lying, then whoever hired them would be held accountable by whoever was paying the bills.
It was not that a lie could never be good for business, but that it couldn't do any good unless it was believed. Any news organization therefore had to be credible to be profitable, and the best way to maintain credibility is to actually be credible, which means establishing a reputation for making a consistent good-faith effort to get the facts right.
I'm not claiming that mistakes were rare or that there was no bias, but that there was an economic incentive for the mainstream press to make some obvious effort to be accurate. They didn't have to be infallible to be credible.
But now it seems most people aren't getting their news from the mainstream press, at least not directly. They're getting it from social media, and the people running social media are not even trying to do journalism. They get their revenue by providing other services. Those services still have something to do with information, but the credibility of the information has gotten disconnected from any good reasons for believing it. In a sense, credibility has become irrelevant.
And this is not good for our democracy. The consent of the governed is no protection against tyranny if it is not a properly informed consent.
Next: Nothing has changed
(This page last updated on February 22, 2021.)