I find it hard to get worked up about a lot of things. Privacy for instance. No matter how much data the government collects on you, surely for it to be a threat to liberty a few things have to happen. They have to process it - a task which is increasingly challenging as they collect more esoteric data. Then, your joke about bombing a public space has to be considered so serious that it is actionable - in other words, more serious than the millions of other bomb jokes which they are diligently recording. All this has to happen becfore the cardinal sin occurs - the government gets in the way of my life.

I in this way I oppose anti-privacy measures like the national ID card on non-standard grounds - as expensive, useless, largely symbolic, unnecessary burdens.

And so Google sets up a website in China that says that Tianamen Square is most famous for its happy snaps and tourists. The internet goes crazy - a fair enough reaction, once Google set themselves up as the opposite of evil, it doesn’t take much creativity to flip the tables.

I’m pro-freedom, so obviously censorship is unwelcome.

But to argue that Google did the wrong thing is misguided, and ignorant of the nature of political information. Merely making it tough to do a Google search for “why the chinese government sux” does not a closed society make. Similarly, just because your MSN home page can’t be titled Freedom in China; or Why the Falun Gong is Awesome, doesn’t mean your ideas can’t be delivered in a more subtle fashion.

Information is not that simple. We don’t read books called Freedom!, we read books called Two Treatises of Government, Atlas Shrugged, or, more accurately, Cryptonomicon.

On the internet, when a teenager is forming his political beliefs, he does not do it systemically by reading up on every issue from a dedicated website which lays down the points in a logical and coherant manner. Instead, he goes to The Onion, or SomethingAwful, or CollegeHumor.com. Political beliefs are ingested, not calculated.

When the media first realised that millions of Chinese getting blogs, they waffled about how political communication was the natural result - how blogs would free the Chinese from the shackles of their one party state. Until one day a chinese-reading reporter realised that the vast majority of them weren’t writing about Tianamen Square, but instead about going out, relationships, school and uni. A collective disappointment was discernable - the Chinese were squandering the internet on petty matters, instead of starting up moveon.org

No matter, its better this way. Political freedom isn’t taught by debate, it’s learnt by experience. By using Google to go to apparently non-political websites, Chinese citizens become more and more attached to the marketplace of ideas. The advantages of pro-market economics will become clearer as they dig through the unregulated world of eBay. And not for nothing do popular histories attribute part of the pro-freedom movement in the Soviet Union to non-political communication like Dallas.

Mind you, I find it hard to believe that the average Chinese citizen will be unaware of the evils of events like the cultural revolution, merely because they can’t download directly images of it happening. The value of a book smuggled is greater than the value of a book brought freely. And informal networks are more powerful than books or websites. Oral histories, while they are inaccurate, are more compelling.

Hopefully Google recognise this. Political awareness and freedom seep through a collective mindset, they are not instantly acquired. This is why some freedom in communication is better than no freedom of communication. As the famous saying goes ‘do not let the best be the enemy of the good’. Would Google’s critics prefer it not be available in China at all?*

*yes, I know it was available in China somewhat through the international sites, but it was unreliable and rarely accessible.

A Club for Growth chart on laws passed in the US per year (which clearly illustrates a spike in election years) has reminded me of these Australian statistics, on the average length of Commonwealth legislation over the past century:

and the comparison between the Commonwealth and the states:

The original graphs are found in Reducing Red Tape in Australia. (PDF)

This is jaw-dropping (PDF). John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the United Nations has taken his whiteout and changed virtually every point on the draft UN summit agreement - or at least every point and phrase which clearly originated from a transnational progressivist mindset. (The Guardian is naturally quite upset)

He covers, obviously, the big topics - Kyoto, Millenium Development Goals, urges for greater corporate social responsibility - but what is most interesting is the small changes. For instance the goal of

Promoting equal participation and representation of men and women in government decision making bodies

becomes, after Bolton’s edits,

Promoting equal opportunity for men and women to participate in government decision making bodies

The emphasis is now on equality of opportunity, rather than equality of outcomes. Read it - it clocks in at 40 pages, but it’s worth the effort.

Two new books arrived in the mail today (or yesterday, I don’t know)

You Can’t Say That! : The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws by David E. Bernstein and

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner.

I don’t really have anything to say about them yet, but they look very good.

I love free speech. And not just because I blaspheme* a lot, either. I think it is a fascinating topic. Why would you want to restrict speech? There are various reasons why it is done, but all come down to a concept of ‘harm’.

Perhaps it is offensive and would psychologically damage certain members of the community - for instance hate speech. Defamation action protects reputational harm. Perhaps it could lead people to do harm to themselves - I’ll quickly quote Abraham Lincoln here:

Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?

There are a few other stranger ones. Campaign finance laws (which I have published an response to, in the Australian context, here). Copyright (remember this?)

I don’t buy the ‘meme’ argument for regulating speech, which says that by verbalising hate speech, you propagate it to those who would not normally hold those opinions. There are many ways of expressing a dislike for someone - merely stopping people from verbalising hatred would not stop people from doing the hating itself. The attempt to do so is merely validating Orwell’s notion of crimethink.

Instead, anybody who has faith in the market should have faith in a Mill-style marketplace of ideas. There is no better method of challenging falsehoods than by transparently presenting them - therefore subjecting them to sustained, hopefully logical, criticism.

Following this line of thought, the movement towards political correctness has damaged the very thing it was intended to promote - tolerance. By relegating hatred to unspoken status, it has not been able to be subject to the very criticism which would destroy it.

As this post has gone on long enough, I’ll tackle (read ‘criticise’) the harm principle some other time. Rest assured, I have more to say on this topic.

*nice word, ‘blaspheme‘.

As Nick Gillespie says , this idea is wonderful, rather than scary:

The proposal, spelled out in three short sentences, would give the president the power to appoint an eight-member panel called the “Sunset Commission,” which would systematically review federal programs every ten years and decide whether they should be eliminated. Any programs that are not “producing results,” in the eyes of the commission, would “automatically terminate unless the Congress took action to continue them.”

Sort of like an ass kicking Productivity Commission

I’m not a supporter of VSU, on what I consider broadly liberal grounds (government should not be mandating the unbundling of university services), but this attack on VSU by National Senator-elect Barnaby Jones is just daft:

Sporting fields, netball courts, and hockey courts and the rugby grounds and the gym, they’re things that are generally available for everybody to use, if they’re not actually playing on them, they’re walking across them. It’s part of the whole atmosphere of what is a university.

Oh, come on. $400 a year to have some oval shaped grass to walk across?

Not really knowing anything about Australian defamation / libel law that I mentioned I was going to try to learn about in the post below, I am struck by an introduction to this article (PDF):

Sydney has been proclaimed ‘Defamation Capital of the World’. While London offers serious competition for the title, the UK produces fewer writs per head of population. Far more striking is the awning gap between Australia and the United States. On a rough estimate, Australians start 35% more defamation actions than do the entire American population. Put differently, on average an Australian is 20 times more likely to sue than an American. Sydney alone sees a level of defamation litigation equivalent to 60% of that in the US.

And I thought Americans were supposed to be the litigious ones? The article goes on to blame the lack of First Amendment protection to Australian speech, as opposed to our common law, ad hoc, under-the-radar approach.

I have more to say on the matter of “inalienable rights” - I’m currently reading Greg Craven’s Conversations with the Constitution, and it is very clarifying, even if I don’t totally agree with it - but I have to move on to other things.

I just finished Make No Law : The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment, a stunningly well researched and written overview of First Amendment protection / not protection of libel. While the emphasis is on New York Times Co. vs Sullivan, the book is really a grand history of free political speech, from the Sedition Act to the late 1980s, including a nice little section on the post WW1 Supreme Court decisions. Definitely worth reading - it provides, at the end, a good explanation of the standards for libel and the differences between public and private figures are decidec by various post-Sullivan decisions.

Now to track down one for Australia, you know, where I live.

Here’s an article about postal censorship. “Postal Censorship in England, 1635-1844“. (PDF)

I’ve also learnt how to get review copies of books - an amazing feat for someone like me, who is so used to actually purchasing books. Three came today.

The World’s Banker: How Australian expatriate James Wolfensohn changed the World Bank.

Greg Craven’s Conversations with the Constitution.

The Ideas Book.

Because, I’m desperate for books to read, y’know.