Rulers and Censorship

rulers always think they know best

Dear old John Kerry is worried. He’s worried about the difficulty in western democracies of “building consensus around any issue”.

our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

Bill Gates too.

We should have free speech, but if you're inciting violence, if you're causing people not to take vaccines, you know, where are those boundaries, that even the US, ahh, should have rules…

What is amusing to me is that these chaps don’t get it. Earth to to educated nobles. The whole point of the First Amendment is that, dollars to donuts, when the ruling class is pushing some idea, whether it’s “planning,” or “climate change” or “vaccines” or the odd world war, it is lying through its teeth.

When rulers decide that government needs to do something — with our money and/or our young men — they don’t care about the truth or the science or justice or good and evil. They just decide to do it, anyone that disagrees is a traitor or an enemy of democracy or a dupe of Russia, Russia, Russia.

We saw that in spades in the late COVID unpleasantness. The government decided that we needed lockdowns, and closing of non-essential businesses, and vaccines. And anyone that disagreed got censored. Nothing to do with the truth, nothing to do with the science, nothing to do with health. Just this one thing. The government decided upon lockdowns and business closures and vaccines, because, and you were not allowed to disagree. That’s how wars work. The sovereign lord commands the troops into battle and they all follow orders.

It is natural and instinctive for rulers and government officials to follow this model in all their activities. Going to war is what governments do.

But with just about everything else in life, the going-to-war model doesn’t work. That’s because in almost everything, from growing food to designing smartphones, we can’t know beforehand what is going to work. People have different ideas about what food to grow on what land; tech lords have different ideas about what people want in a smartphone. They all offer their ideas on the marketplace and the consumers decide.

The best way to undertand the process is to think about Microsoft as it brought out its first verion of Windows in 1985. Suppose you were an investor with $10,000. Should you sink it into Microsoft, knowing that Windows would transform the computer world? Well, actually, back in the early 80s, nobody had a clue that in another 15 years everyone would have a laptop on their desk. Back then, any sensible person would have thought: yes, Windows is a cool idea, but just how good, and just how many people will buy it? Microsoft went public at $0.10 a share in 1986; it closed at $433.30 o September 30, 2024. So, your $10,000 investment would be worth $43,000,000 today.

Take Apple. They amazed the world with the Apple II. And the first Apple Macintosh. But by 2000 they were limping along. Then Steve Jobs returned to Apple and put out the iPod. Yeah, the kids all liked having their music on their iPod, but… Then came the iPhone in 2007. How about putting that $10,000 on Apple stock then? It was $2.94 per share in December 2006. Today September 30, 2024, it cloed at $233. So your $10,000 investment in 2007 would be worth $792,000. How many of us did that?

All I am trying to say is that nobody has a clue what is coming next, and what will take over the world and what will disappear without a trace.

And unless we are really facing an existential peril like an asteroid heading for Earth, then dollars to donuts the best thing to do is to let the market decide. And dollars to donuts if we let John Kerry or Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Donald Trump make the decision for all of us they will Make Things Worse.

Because the way that humans work, and human society works, and all the millions of species of animals and plants and fungi, is that we let things work themselves out without some great lord putting his thumb on the scales all the time.

The point about the future is that nobody has a clue. So when Regime Heavyweights tell us that the have to phase out fossil fuel, because climate change, or when President Wilson tells us we have to make war on the Kaiser, to make the world safe for democracy, or we have to regulate mortgages because greedy bankers, or we have to give government economic power so we can “plan” the economy, and when they say that anyone disagreeing with them is guilty of “misinformation” or worse — well, you know that Regime Heavyweights have always said stuff like that, and always tried to silence their opponents with censorship. And most of the time they are selling us a bridge in Brooklyn.

To me, it all goes back to Kant, who wrote that we cannot know things in themselves, but only appearances. We try to imagine things in themselves with our philosophy, our religion, our science, and our wisdom.

But the truth is that we don’t have a clue.