Quote of the Day
The best portion of a good man's life is
the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
William Wordsworth
The Greatest Threat to Free Speech?
Kudos to Reason.com for posing an interesting question and the responses. My own answer is more general: I worry about the ability of the judicial system to cope in a proactive manner with rapid technological challenges to unalienable individual rights. These go beyond free speech, of course; for example, there are privacy concerns (say, health, adoption records, and privileged communications) and the protection of financial assets.
Of course, any special-interest group can intimidate freedom of speech through, for example, legal intimidation. One example was a lawsuit filed by Latino employees against a community college where a college math professor had posted critical comments about the nature and extent of Hispanic immigration to the area. (The college disassociated itself from the professor's opinion but declined to take any disciplinary action against the professor's politically incorrect behavior. Why? It's probably the consideration of academic freedom: "the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment". Speaking as someone whose own academic freedom was violated (not for expressing political opinions), I think the college math teacher was stretching things (like Ward Churchill did), since immigration policy has little to do with his teaching mathematics.)
But, of course, the government is the biggest threat, and we must be wary of any government attempts to establish or build on regulations, particularly on the Internet, telecommunications, or other high technology (including, but not restricted to, net neutrality, intellectual property, national security, etc.), which can be used as a sham pretext for the repression of free speech (including whistleblowers). (We have already seen this done in more explicit ways, e.g., in China and Iran.) I have a nuanced view on WikiLeaks, but it is instructive to consider the tactics governments used in going after Julian Assange, and there is little doubt what message they were sending. Some of the same tactics are being considered in currently stalled pro-Big Entertainment SOPA/PIPA bills in Congress. This brings up a related challenge that often works in conjunction with the government: Big Business to raise the barrier to market entry.
Reinstate the Military Draft? Not Again
I haven't really addressed this issue in the blog; reinstatement of the draft hasn't been seriously considered since the days of the Vietnam War (I wasn't old enough to worry about the lottery, but my dorm resident assistant had lost one of his legs in the war). But the idea of a draft continues to pop up, both on the left and the right (for example, in this discussion raising potential issues in staffing our current responsibilities in Afghanistan).
I've made it clear that I want to see us scale back our foreign entanglements; we have a quarter of the world's GDP but spend over 40% of global military budgets. Over the entire budget, we're borrowing about 40 cents on the spending dollar. We cannot afford to intervene in every global hotspot. We have to learn to choose our battles, and not waste American blood and treasure, engaging in morally hazardous missions like propping up an unpopular, corrupt regime in Afghanistan.
The draft is an enabling tool for dubious foreign missions; it lowers the cost of manning an unpopular mission, versus, say, an intrinsically worthy mission of defending US territorial integrity. We understand Madison and Jefferson's reluctance of a standing army: in essence, giving a defense department a guaranteed supply of conscripts is like giving a federal agency head a larger than expected sum of money: somehow you just know every cent that agency head is given will be spent. Perhaps if the President is required to recruit American soldiers on the merits of specific and direct American interests in military operations, he or she would decide more prudently.
More on Obama's Birth Control "Compromise"
I've already made clear that I think birth control is an ordinary expense and should not be funded in an insurance context. As a Catholic, I haven't discussed many of the related issues from the bishops' perspective as to why they rejected the compromise. There are a number of reasons, but let me briefly summarize: they believe the one-sided "compromise" (a real compromise would involve Republicans/conservatives, not the resolution of a kerfuffle between members of Obama's own administration) still doesn't deal with the conscientious objector issues, the compromise has yet to be fully fleshed out and parts may be deferred past this fall's election, and they realize that Obama's rhetoric of "no cost" coverage is little than an accounting gimmick (the insurance companies will simply pass along the costs in a more hidden fashion--back to the church).
I will also point out another point I raised in posts back in the spring of 2010 when ObamaCare passed: the question of self-insured employers. Not all health insurance comes out of an external entity; sometimes an organization will pay expenses as they incur, in essence simply reinsuring against unexpectedly high aggregate expenses, like a high-deductible policy. In essence, the business is the insurer. So one of the things the Church has been discussing is the fact they self-insure in a number of contexts, but Obama's rules don't exempt insurers themselves. So the Church still ends up paying for procedures against its own moral teachings, a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Perhaps just as outrageous was the fact that the US Army initially forbade Catholic chaplains from reading a pastoral letter critical of the birth control ObamaCare rule, which the progressives considered essentially insubordinate to the Commander-in-Chief. That was a clear, incontrovertible violation of the First Amendment. The Army Secretary John McHugh (remember the NY-23 race where Congressman McHugh surrendered a seat that had been held by the GOP for over a century?) initially allowed them to distribute copies of the pastoral letter after Mass, so long as they didn't read it from the pulpit. (Could you imagine Martin Luther King being told he could deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech--but only in written form after the event?)
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Paul McCartney & Wings, "Hi, Hi, Hi"
