Freespace

Playing the Rights Game

The new issue of Reason Papers features a symposium on Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen's recent book The Realist Turn, in which I participated. My contribution, "Playing the Rights Game" pushes back against Den Uyl & Rasmussen's argument that individual rights exist only in a situation in which people seek to pursue moral excellence together, by saying that this smuggles in a sort of social compact idea, even though they are trying to avoid such a notion. Their response is here.

Privacy and free speech

In the new issue of Regulation magazine, I take a look at "donor disclosure" requirements--including two now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and the euphemistically titled "For the People Act" (HR 1) now pending in Congress. Excerpt:

Little wonder that a 2020 Cato Institute study found that 62% of Americans are afraid to express their political views publicly. A third of those surveyed believed that revealing their opinions would harm their employment prospects. In fact, that chilling effect is precisely what motivates some of those demanding “transparency.” When challenged in 2012 about the fact that some people would hesitate to express their opinions if forced to reveal personal information, Sen. Chuck Schumer(D–NY)replied that he was not bothered by this. It was “good,” he said, “to have a deterrent effect.”

That is obviously the opposite of what the First Amendment contemplates. It exists to protect free speech—including the right to contribute money to groups that advocate for positions one believes in, free from government interference or reprisals. In 1995, the Supreme Court recognized that speaking out while retaining one’s privacy “is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice” but an “honorable tradition” that protects the free exchange of ideas and respects the importance of dissent. “Anonymity,” said the Court, “is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.”

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My review of Akhil Amar's The Words that Made Us

...is now available at The Objective Standard. I didn't like it much:

Amar’s refusal to fairly address opposing arguments deprives his book of objectivity and crosses the line into partisanship and historical caricature. That, combined with clumsy writing and repetitiveness (do we really need a list of twenty rhetorical questions to prove that Jefferson’s idea of rewriting the Constitution every generation was impractical?) make The Words That Made Us simply a bore—as does its off-putting pomposity. “The biggest news,” Amar writes, “is that a book such as this now exists.” Is that so?

...This is all extremely disappointing, given that the country really could use a book of the kind this purports to be. Amar explains that he wrote it after observing the uninformed, hotheaded nature of recent arguments over the nation’s founding, especially after the “1619 Project” was unveiled. After watching “radical-chic intellectuals” proclaim “that Americans revolted in 1776 mainly to protect slavery”—a view he rightly calls “ridiculous”—he decided it was important to “bring together between a single set of covers the main constitutional episodes of the fateful era in which America became America.” Amar would seem peculiarly well-suited for that job, given that his past writings on these subjects have been insightful and sometimes brilliant. No scholar, for instance, has more persuasively debunked the fallacies behind the nullification and secession theories that sparked the Civil War. Yet beginning with America’s Constitution (in which he himself called the Constitution “pro-slavery”), his work has become increasingly undisciplined, one-sided, politically motivated, and downright misleading.

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