[EL] Abrams & Blackman are Right...

[Benjamin Barr]

You're quite on to something here, Steve, that many of us have been hinting
at in past years.

But let's take a moment to celebrate Justice Breyer writing more and
sharing more of how he exactly views the First Amendment and his
dispensation of free speech rights to the little people.  Whenever Breyer
takes to dissent or concur I'm especially happy because it further
illustrates just how foreign and antithetical his thinking is to the
maintenance of a free civil society.  Ever the more so here.

Think about his dissent in *U.S. v. United Foods*, one of my all time
favorites, which involved forcing mushroom producers to support speech
celebrating Americans eating mushrooms.  For Breyer, the only means for
Americans to be properly educated about their diet and just how amazing
mushrooms are is through the use of collective force.  However else would
average Americans know to eat mushrooms?  These are the broader "values" of
Benjamin Constant, the masquerade of the collective, that Breyer and others
invoke.  It's simply a never-ending game of constitutional three card
monte.  Show the audience how much you appreciate individualist oriented
rights (go on and speak Ms. McIntyre, we will let you!) but keep hiding
that card in the stack while the murky values of the collective
(manipulated and designated by political elites and lobbying forces) keep
overriding the original protection of the First Amendment.  Fortunately,
this is all unraveling with due speed.

I'm quite content the framers already balanced these interests and decided
in favor of individual liberty and not in favor of a Breyer Patch of
ghastly collective interests.  I can handle deciding whether to eat
mushrooms or not on my own (personally, I abstain).  I can handle reviewing
the conflicting merits of global warming arguments, whether I want to use a
Firefox Mozilla browser, whether I trust anonymous speakers, and so on.  As
a nation, I should hope we can handle these basic acts of self-governance
or we're rather doomed, collectively, that is.

Forward,

Benjamin Barr
Counsel to Project Veritas, the Wyoming Liberty Group, and free thinkers
nationwide






On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 12:39 PM, Steve Hoersting <hoersting at gmail.com>wrote:

> ... Breyer's invocation of the collective is the most disturbing part.
>
>
> http://joshblackman.com/blog/2014/04/06/floyd-abrams-on-the-disturbing-recurring-reality-of-collective-liberty/
>
> "Egalitarian" justifications for speech restrictions -- a la Rick, a la
> Owen Fiss -- masquerade with a patina of hyper-individualism: Every
> individual deserves an equal, egalitarian, quanta of influence upon the
> political process.
>
> But the wholly egalitarian is the wholly undifferentiated. The wholly
> undifferentiated is the collective -- not a representative aggregation of
> competing voices in a representative Republic; not an aggregation of the
> voices of many individuals exercising individual rights.
>
> Egalitarianism tends toward collectivism.
>
> The distinction is not word salad; it is everything. "Collective speech"
> is always managed (by the bureaucracy). Managed speech is always collective.
>
> We should be grateful to J. Breyer for naming the elephant in the room and
> saving us a lot of trouble: Individualism and Collectivism remain the
> argumentative poles of the campaign finance debate. (Breyer may well have
> saved Lessig and Teachout the unnecessary effort of future verbal
> contortions; of dressing their policy prescriptions in the Aristotelian
> individualism of the Founders).
>
> There are fundamental points on which the leaders of the campaign-finance
> camps agree upon (forthcoming protestations to the contrary,
> notwithstanding). They are these: There are only individuals. And
> self-government *requires* free speech.
>
> If I could impart anything to Rick Hasen, to Cass Sunstein, indeed, to
> David Brooks on these points, it would be this -- and I mean it sincerely:
>
> Forget Kant and all his followers on matters of epistemology. The five
> senses are valid. The individual mind works: There is no harm in voters
> voting with "too much" information. You have nothing to fear from
> businessmen who don't operate by force. You have nothing to fear from a
> so-called hayseed in the "hinterlands" running his own life.
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> Stephen M. Hoersting
>
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