Our Freedom of Expression Is Killing Us

[JDPriestly]

230. Jessy169, who among us should decide whose speech, what speech incites to riot?

You see. Banning speech, burning books, requires the speech-banner or the book-burner to make a value judgment. The minute a person is given the authority to make that kind of value judgment about ideas, speech, books, news, etc., that person, the censor, has a degree of control that transforms the society into a dictatorship under the censor.

Censorship is dictatorship. The two are one and the same (although dictators don't necessarily always censor in the way you are suggesting). You can censor very specific kinds of information like child porn. Information that can be narrowly defined. The censorship is limited and not based on a subjective decision about the information being banned.

But you cannot have objective censorship of political or religious speech. It is nearly impossible to establish clearly defined criteria for what is or is not acceptable, what will or will not incite to riot.

Do you think that advocating against the military draft should be barred?

Do you think that publishing a book written by Karl Marx should be illegal?

How about a book that suggest that sexual repression or frustration causes people to become violent? (May sound silly today, but it has been banned.)

How about banning all foreign news media? (The dictatorship in Greece tried this in the early 1970s.)

These are just a few examples of the kinds of things that people have wanted to censor in the past.

Sorry, free speech is here to stay. We don't want information czars who tell us what we can and cannot read, hear, say or write. We have tried that, and it did not end well.