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What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation?

by on August 11, 2009 · 23 comments

What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? [pdf]

by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka The Progress & Freedom Foundation, Progress on Point No. 16.19

Anyone who has spent time following debates about speech and privacy regulation comes to recognize the striking parallels between these two policy arenas. In this paper we will highlight the common rhetoric, proposals, and tactics that unite these regulatory movements. Moreover, we will argue that, at root, what often animates calls for regulation of both speech and privacy are two remarkably elitist beliefs:

  1. People are too ignorant (or simply too busy) to be trusted to make wise decisions for themselves (or their children); and/or,
  2. All or most people share essentially the same values or concerns and, therefore, “community standards” should trump household (or individual) standards.

While our use of the term “elitism” may unduly offend some understandably sensitive to populist demagoguery, our aim here is not to launch a broadside against elitism as Time magazine culture critic William H. Henry once defined it: “The willingness to assert unyieldingly that one idea, contribution or attainment is better than another.”[1] Rather, our aim here is to critique that elitism which rises to the level of political condescension and legal sanction. We attack not so much the beliefs of some leaders, activists, or intellectuals that they have a better idea of what it in the public’s best interest than the public itself does, but rather the imposition of those beliefs through coercive, top-down mandates.

That sort of elitism—elitism enforced by law—is often the objective of speech and privacy regulatory advocates. Our goal is to identify the common themes that unite these regulatory movements, explain why such political elitism is unwarranted, and make it clear how it threatens individual liberty as well as the future of free and open Internet. As an alternative to this elitist vision, we advocate an empowerment agenda: fostering an environment in which users have the tools and information they need to make decisions for themselves and their families. Continue reading →

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Thomas Sowell on the Model that Drives Elitist Ideological Crusades

by on June 1, 2009 · 23 comments

Vision of the Anointed book coverBerin recently encouraged me to re-read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, which I hadn’t looked at since I first read it back in 1995 or 96.   I’m glad I did since Sowell’s work has always been profoundly influential on my thinking (especially his masterpiece, A Conflict of Visions) and I had forgotten how useful The Vision of the Anointed was in helping me understand the reoccurring model that drives ideological crusades to expand government power over our lives and economy.

“The great ideological crusades of the twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields,” Sowell noted in the book.  But what they all had in common, he argued, was “their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government.” (p. 5)  These elitist, government-expanding crusades shared several key elements, which Sowell identified as follows:

  1. Assertion of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
  2. An urgent need for government action to avert impending catastrophe.
  3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
  4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

You can see this model at work on a daily basis today with our government’s various efforts to reshape our economy, but I think this model is equally applicable to debates over social policy and speech control.  In particular, the various “technopanics” I have been writing about recently fit this model. (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  For example, consider how this plays out in the debate over online social networking:

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