Free speech isn't free

Notable among other increasing costs is the rising price of free speech. The recent Supreme Court decision which struck down certain restrictions on corporate campaign spending, coupled with a 2006 decision which denied the validity of state campaign finance restrictions, are among the latest pressures contributing to this inflationary trend. In both cases the narrow court majorities proposed a connection between free spending and free speech. Problem is, as the charges for free speech go up, poorer folks are getting priced out of the market.

Try as I might, I can’t think of a good counter-argument, though—keeping the Constitution in mind.

The way I see it, there is very little free speech that isn’t associated with some monetary outlay. From a speaker’s note cards to the cost of a soap box to stand on, from the bottle of water to wet the pipes to the 30-second spot on prime time TV, it all costs money. About the only speech that is truly free is when you stick your head out the window and shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna’ take it anymore!”

Still, I don’t like it. Seems like those with more money get to buy more free speech. Reminds me of Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

So let’s take a look at the source document. “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….” accords the civil rights-packed First Amendment. Hmmmm. I suppose one might argue that the right applies to subject matter rather than to quantity, but probably not.

Well then, what sort of free speech costs are we talking about here? Taller soap boxes? Bigger water bottles? No; for the most part, I reckon we’re talking about transmissions via electromagnetic waves—television and radio, that is.

And guess who owns those waves. We, the people, do.

More on this at a later date.

Don’t get me started: If government were just run like a business.

Enough of the faux academics for now. This is a rant.

One of the most ridiculous things that I seem to hear way too often is, “The government should be run like a business.” Or, “We should let private enterprise take over that government function; they’ll run it like a business.”

And I’m wondering what business it is that they’re talking about. Enron? Lehman Brothers? Frontier Airlines? Circuit City? Countrywide Financial? Bethlehem Steel? Montgomery Ward? Levitz Furniture? Polaroid? Sunbeam? TWA? Arthur Anderson? WorldCom? American Home Mortgage? CompUSA? Wachovia? Mervyn’s? The Sharper Image? Madoff Investment Securities? Peanut Corporation of America? Long-Term Capital Management? Pan Am? Spiegel? Drexel Burnham Lambert? Eastern Airlines? Tower Records? Trump Casinos? Washington Mutual? Ya’ mean like those businesses?

Guess what, folks. Businesses are run by human beings, just like governments. Dumb, smart, greedy, honest, careless, attentive, skilled, pompous, friendly, normal human beings. And governments are run like businesses.

With two major exceptions.

First, governments are not designed to put a profit in anyone’s pocket, so greed is not a built-in factor and costs can be more reflective of actual performance.

Second, my fellow citizens and I get to control all of our governments through periodic elections of their boards of directors and CEOs. And we’re not up against some corporation that holds five hundred thousand voting shares. Everyone’s vote is equal.

But just imagine if your local fire department was expected to earn a profit. Or the Tax Assessor’s office. Or the Road Department. Or the Sheriff. Need I elaborate?

If anything, in today’s culture of righteous avarice, gratuitous megacorp profits, unwarranted executive compensation, imperious exploitattion of labor and arrogant disdain for the consumer, I’d hope governments are run less like business.

Economics 101: Feeling our way

Economics is a social science. That means it’s about people and how people produce, distribute, exchange and consume goods and services.

Even though we often think that economics is about money, or the Dow-Jones Averages, or the price of a bushel of wheat six months from now, or the exchange rate of dollars for euros, or Adam Smith’s theories of capitalism, it’s not. In economics the operative word is social. It’s about human beings and their connections with one another. All of those other things are just symbols or indicators or descriptions of those relationships.

The problem is—and we always need to keep this in mind—human beings aren’t perfect. Nor is their behavior entirely predictable. Generally predictable, often; totally and specifically, never. So while economics might be called a science, it's an inexact one based at best on probabilities.

Why is that? Well, while we so-called intelligent creatures claim to depend on logic, most of the time we are actually reacting to emotions. Emotions are much less calculable than logic might be. So these economic relations are very complex, frequently uncertain, and can easily become volatile.

Which, for instance, is how a stock market crash happens.

Between the day before a crash and the day of a crash very little changes—except how we feel. The intrinsic instrumentality of the vast majority of the companies whose stock prices have fallen has not actually changed. Those businesses still hold the same assets, turn out the same products and cater to the same markets.

Rather, we have changed. We, the people who hold the stock in those companies, have come to feel different. Despite the unaltered nature of those companies, we feel that our shares are less valuable. As a result, we’re willing to sell those shares for lower and lower prices. We react to the fear of others and become fearful ourselves. We crash the market.

It’s even come to the point that we’ve computerized and automated this sell-off reaction, sort of a “sky is falling” program—artificial fear to accompany artificial intelligence.

The same thing has happened to the real estate market. One day we’re willing to pay a certain amount for a house, a month later the same house won’t bring half that price. The house hasn’t changed. The market has. We’re the market.

Economics is about human beings. It’s always about human beings.

Government 102: We put the "us" in USA

In the United States of America, “government” has but one simple yet elegant function: it is how we do things together that we are unable to do by ourselves.

In fact, that is really the only motivating factor in the formation of our country. At the signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock insisted that there must be unanimous support by the colonies’ leadership. It was then that Benjamin Franklin made this famous comment: “Gentlemen, we must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

“Government” is how we all hang together. Government is our best effort to cooperate in seeing to our common good. It is how we build highways from Oregon to Georgia, how we educate and train adults to be able to earn a living and support a family, how we defend our land against those who would conquer it, how we assure safe living and working conditions for ourselves, how we protect the rights of the weak and defenseless and how we meet a thousand other needs and preferences we’ve defined in our laws and Constitution.

In the US, we use governments to light traffic signals and put out house fires. We use them to assure safe food and water and school buses. Through governments we provide humane care for the mentally ill and certify elevators and gasoline pumps. And we make sure our grievances can be heard and our worship is not denied us.

Is government perfect? Of course not. How could it be? Government is staffed by human beings, some of the most mistake-prone people on earth. They are just like the rest of us—who hire the governments’ leaders.

Government is us, imperfect, well-intentioned, diverse but unified, doing things together that we can’t do by ourselves.

Government 101: "They" are screwing with us again

Don't Tread
On Me

I’ve always thought it slightly absurd to see this sign posted on a chain link fence: “Property of the United States Government / No Trespassing.” It prompts this response in me: well, that means it belongs to me, so how could I trespass?

Maybe it was the way I was taught civics in grade school or maybe it’s some sort of hyper-recessive gene, but I’ve always thought of “The Government” as me and the other citizens who have voting rights. It’s a democratic republic, right? We elect the people who govern. They work for us.

Once, when I was on the payroll of a county government, another employee and I were working together on a project. He was senior to me, though from a different department. In passing conversation he happened to make a disparaging remark about the way the county government did things.

I chuckled and said, “Wait a second. Don’t you realize that we’re part of the county government?”

He replied, indignantly, “No, I’m not. I just work here.”

I asked, “Then who’s doing the bad job?”

He sputtered a bit, trying to describe generalized wastefulness and neglect without implicating himself, but all he could finally say was, “Well, I’m not the government.”

But, in fact, he was. And, in fact, we all are.

But lots of folks don’t seem to see it that way. Many people, even members of the voting majority, tend to view “the government” as being an entity apart, often a dark, sinister agency bent on as much mischief as possible. What’s worse, government bureaus are staffed by a unique human species—bureaucrats—different from other human beings, stupid, cruel, rude and vengeful.

Not so. The government is composed of the people the majority of us elects and re-elects; if they do dumb stuff it’s because we let them. Moreover, research has shown that government agencies are staffed by standard-issue human beings—really the only kind available. Some are great, some lousy, most average, and all of them are hired and employed by the men and women we elect.

It was French diplomat Joseph de Maistre who said, “Every country has the government it deserves.” Certainly this is most true of a democratic republic such as our own.

To take liberties with Oliver Hazard Perry as warped by Pogo:

I have met the government, and they is us.