The hands of a man who has never worked a day in his life with the fingernails of Karl Marx.

Fake communists like Streetlight would melt if they lived under communist rule.

No. One is not at liberty to interfere with another’s liberty.

I don’t want to abolish democracy, nor do I want to completely abolish the government. I just don’t think the task of government is to meddle in our livelihoods.

The abolition of slavery was fantasy. Perhaps given enough time, the abolition of state control over economic activity would come to fruition.

In my mind the proper role for government is to defend liberty, or to go extinct. The moral and just way to fund any institution is voluntarily, whether through subscription, donation, etc.

Simply that the state ought to mind it’s own business, stop regulating the economy, and let people earn their livelihoods as they see fit.

For every man who would exploit his neighbor is another who would not. This is why I have faith in the absence of state fetters. What prohibits a man from exploiting his neighbor is not the state, but a conscience and a reasonable set of moral principles.

Would you seek to dominate others should there be no state?

Humans are far too embedded in their social institutions for even the most ardent individualist (@NOS4A2? @Harry Hindu?) to opt out.

It has become increasingly more difficult.

I don’t think such a regime has existed.

My own view is that the state is formed through conquest and confiscation. I don’t believe in any social contract theory. As such, suffrage is merely a concession to state power, all of it premised on the off-chance that each of us might benefit from the spoils should we get to vote for the exploiters.

StreetlightX is right. The failure of laissez-faire doctrine is that it was never laissez-faire. In practice, the only difference between its proponents and it’s opponents is the incidence of those interventions shifted from one class of beneficiaries to another. The merchants never followed a policy of laissez-faire, and never wished the state to “let it do”, but sought to wield that power for its own benefit.

At any rate, a state that engages in intervention is engaging in exploitation, and does so with the monopoly on violence, whether influenced by “the people”, special interests, or a tinpot dictator.

I’ll try to clarify. If there are no positions of power for the plutocrats to occupy, it doesn’t follow that the absence of these positions of power leads to plutocracy. We can point to existing state structures and say “that is plutocracy” until the cows come home, but we are no less pointing to the state. Plutocrats can achieve control through democratic means.

What you haven’t done is shown how laissez-faire leads to plutocracy, is all I’m saying.

I look around and see competing interests competing for state power. All of them intervene in the economy through the very means you defend, yet we’re supposed to act aghast when they seize and use them. But it doesn’t follow that the absence of those means leads to them seizing them.

How does separating the state and economy lead to a plutocracy?

But the state is a monopoly of the kind you describe, destroying the playing field for everyone else, and willing to maintain it with compulsion and violence, with free reign to wage war, dominate each other, and ensure no one has any way of beating them again. Unfettered statism seems to me the greater threat than some entity from a game.

Fair enough. I’m not sure the far right would employ multiculturalism or socialism as state doctrine, for example.

We’re all over the place here. I thought we were talking about the left today, and not the right yesterday. Both are statist, both are authoritarian, both like identity politics, both are collectivist, yes. I appreciate the examples but I just don’t know what purpose they serve.

It’s true. The left used to be about freedom and individualism. Now it’s statist, reactionary, and collectivist. That’s why the old divisions hardly work anymore.

I’m not sure that’s true. To identify the left wing all you have to do is ask them.

This thread is about the left wing, though.

Whatever it is, it always reads to me as big government, nanny-statism with an emphasis on identity politics, activism, and anti-capitalism. It’s no so much extreme as it is routine. It’s fashionable.

I was just talking about Math.

Math wasn’t racist until people such as the Ethnic Studies Math teacher entered the scene. They are creating systemic racism.

Biden’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” commissar.

I mostly agree with your definitions. I would add, though, that an agnostic believes in the possibility that a god exists. The possibility of god is an equally untenable belief, in my mind.

I’m aware of Mill’s ideas. I don’t think the harm principle should apply to speech.

However you don't have the inalienable right to use Twitter or be employed by me, therefore it isn't wrong for me to fire you or for Twitter to suspend your account for expressing your opinion.

It’s true. Your business is yours and no one has a right to be employed by you, and you have every right to fire anyone. But the fact of having the right to fire someone for their opinions doesn’t mean that it is right to fire someone for their opinions. Though it’s up to you and no one else how you should operate your business, you should not fire someone because you don’t like his opinions.



It’s not a gift or a bargain or a contract. I was merely using the idiom “uphold my end of the bargain” to say that I will fulfill my obligation. Perhaps that idiom is too American. My apologies.

I will not seek sanction or punishment for your speech. I will also defend you from those who would seek your sanction or punishment. No casuistry will convince me to do otherwise.

I have bestowed it; I’ve conferred it; I’ve granted it; and I bestow it on everyone. I give you the right to be a fraud, a bigot, a liar. Reject it all you wish, but I will uphold my end of the bargain nonetheless.

Mill’s arguments for free speech are far better than his arguments for voting and other statist schemes—a Benthamite through and through. We are talking about one and not the other, after all.

JS Mill, John Milton, Meiklejohn, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Voltaire, Emma Goldman, Orwell, Huxley, Karl Jaspers, Arendt, Paine, Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Chomsky…there are plenty of arguments for free speech from a vast array of important thinkers. One ought to at least consider them, place them next to the opposition, and see which prevails.

Of course there are limits on speech. If there wasn’t there wouldn’t be censorship, and therefor no need to argue in favor of free speech. But I’m making prescriptive statements, not descriptive ones. The fact of slavery, for instance, is no argument against its abolition, just as the fact of limits on speech is no argument against the absence of such limits. So I repudiate the article and Fish’s book.

And so true is this fact that it is illegal to say otherwise.

France has laws making it illegal to lie about the Armenian Genocide happening.. This is because Turkey spreads lies and propaganda and denies they committed genocide.

Nothing could go wrong when the State has the right to determine historical truth and to punish dissent from it.

The moral and practical basis for free speech is well-established, well-argued, even ancient, especially where the legal basis has yet to catch up. The moral and practical basis for censorship, on the other hand, is utterly threadbare.

You do have the right because I and others bestow you that right. This right has little currency in a censorial and querulous culture, no doubt, and it’s not backed by any vested interest like a state or corporation, but it exists.

Similarly, there is no right to censor such views, nor any obligation to consent to censorship. This is why it is so odd to see so many try to undermine the principle of free speech but say nothing of censorship, premised as it is on its own kind of bigotry, hatred, and immorality.

State censorship, mob censorship, church censorship—a distinction without a difference. We should be concerned about their censorship and for the same reasons. One act of censorship is a thousand-fold more destructive than any sentence ever uttered.

Many despots have suppressed views they don’t like, and no flaunting of power and priggery warrants its defense.

Trump using violence is hardly a trivial matter. His speech incites the violence and it is deliberate. By the way, new here. Are most people in England?

The “incitement” doctrine is an exercise in magical thinking, in my mind. If one can incite violence, one should be able to incite me to accept a contrary view, or perform any other activity for that matter. Can someone’s words make you commit violence?

The website is in English, is all I know.

“Imagine”…this is all the censor can do, imagine a future in which speech inflicts harm, corrupts the youth, but in all likelihood merely conflicts with his own views.

There’s plenty of reasons why Socrates ought not have been censored, and his views tolerated.

Not only is it wrong to censor a man, kill him, for specious fears that he might corrupt the youth, but it is wrong to deny others the opportunity to hear him, the choice of which is no business of the censor’s.

Such actions also deny history and posterity the same opportunity—we will never know what other wisdom he might have shared if his views were tolerated. It is, as Mill said, to rob humanity.

Censorship weakens truth, as Milton said, by prohibiting and licensing her strength.

So it may be legal to engage in censorship, but there is plenty of reasons to tolerate views, at least more so than reasons to censor them, which is invariably premised on personal fears and other subjective feelings.

Another question? Is this an interview?

I agree with all of this.

You either believe in freedom of speech or you don’t. Censors should crawl out from under the rocks and be proud of who they are.

It’s an utterly useless and contradictory phrase, not so different than “freedom of speech but not freedom from censorship”. Maybe come up with something better.

The actual consequence of speech are physical in nature: the expelling of breath, the subtle vibration of the air, the marking of pencil on a paper, and so on. All benign stuff and not worthy of suppression.

Any and all reactions to those benign activities are born in those that react to them, and thus a consequence of themselves.

Considering this, the phrase “freedom of speech but not freedom from consequences” is a goofy one at best, but a justification for censorship at worse. The idea that the world and posterity might lose a great work of literature because someone cannot control their rage is a tragedy.

I approach it from two prongs. The language around “laws of nature” imply a kind of governance, leading to the assumption that something else controls or forces our actions. I would refute that language because the “something else” cannot be found, and further that it cannot be shown to control or force our actions.

Second, simple observation and experience shows me that wherever an action begins in an organism, it is thus willed by that organism. It couldn’t be otherwise.

I said speech is free from consequences. The consequence of that sentence, apparently, was for you to quote it out of context, to which you responded with a flurry of questions and an assertion of the opposite. My speech then caused you to resort to sarcasm.