Hey folks, I’ve got a couple of great ideas. Let’s ban free speech and use the subterfuge that we are doing so to protect children! Let’s also quit trading with the rest of the world such that the United States is an economic island. That way we don’t have to compete with folks who make better products!
Actually, these aren’t great ideas, they are unbelievably stupid ones, but this is effectively the position of those who want to ban Tik-Tok. The ostensible reasoning for banning Tik-Tok is its content is deliberately manipulated to poison the minds of children and to cause social havoc and unrest. No doubt, like other social media sites, Tik-Tok may contribute to children having shorter attention spans and more emotional instabilities due to the instant gratification nature of social media. Let’s assume all this is true. It’s never a good idea to cancel speech, and since I’m just a nobody, I will back this assertion up with a couple of quotes from history’s greatest proponent of free speech, my fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves: nor can they be safe with them without information, where the press is free….all is safe.”
“The only security of all is in a free press.”
It seems that my fellow conservatives are leading the charge to ban Tik-Tok, but fellas, your efforts are misguided and short sighted. Free speech is already under attack in every corner of our nation. All across our land people are afraid to challenge government sponsored narratives for fear of losing their jobs, being physically attacked and having our own government arrest them for nothing more than “thought crimes.” It’s time to stand up for unfettered free speech. Just by advocating banning Tik-Tok, you are giving despots and tyrants more fuel to set fire to our God given liberty to think and express ourselves freely.
Mao Zedong killed as many as 80 million of his own people. He didn’t die until 1976. He was a bad dude, and China for the most part is still run by bad dudes. Nixon made a lot of economic mistakes, decoupling the dollar from gold his biggest, but he was right to open up China. I once read that Nixon understood the debilitating effect the Corn Laws of 1815 had on Great Britain. If one understands Britain’s mistakes in enacting the Corn Laws, then one generally understands the benefits of free and open trade.
It works like this, the larger the market, the more hands and more capital combine to create the greatest good. Efficiencies are created, prices drop and wealth is created. A simple illustration, if the town of Podunk is closed off from the world, it does not have access to goods and services to produce anything of value. It can’t produce a shovel, much less something as complicated as a pencil. It is miserably, miserably poor. Open Podunk up to a free trade zone within the United States, but closed to the rest of the world, and Podunk can produce many more products and also enjoy many more products produced within the United States, but it still cannot even enjoy the benefits of a simple pencil as some of those components are not available in the United States. Open Podunk up to world trade, and Podunk suddenly has the advantage of 8 billion people using their capital and skills to produce goods and services that others voluntarily buy in every corner of the globe. World competition forces all those 16 billion hands to find a niche where they can produce what others want to buy. World trade is people voting with their property, buying and selling, creating efficiencies, driving prices down and doing so on a totally voluntary basis with no government coercion. Each party gets what they want or else there would be no transaction. Governments want to muck this up as they do with everything, and the results are “Corn Laws” which makes markets smaller with less available product, less innovation, destroys efficiencies and drives prices up. The silliest argument governments make is “unfair” trade practices. If Mr. Smith wants to buy from Mr. Chinn in China, what right does the government have to tell Mr. Smith he can’t execute the transaction because it is “unfair?” If one assumes that China or any country for that matter enacts protectionist policies to bolster their native industries, all those countries are doing is hurting themselves and making their own people poorer; that’s no reason why Mr. Smith should not be able to buy his pallet of widgets from Mr. Chinn.
170 million people have Tik-Tok in the United States. 1.5 billion people in China have access to American goods and services. The transformation of China from a completely closed economy to an open one is amazing, and yes China’s government is still bad, but if humans have but a taste of economic freedom it becomes an insatiable urge. China is not going to become warm and fuzzy overnight, but the wealth creation benefits of trade makes countries more civilized and less apt to want to destroy what gives them such great benefit. When a country’s citizens aren’t starving and living in utter poverty, they then have the time and resources to demand greater liberties from their leaders. If China is to become a better and more noble country, it will be due to free trade.
Assuming Tik-Tok is bad, the way to “beat it” is through competition, and of course the way to have greater competition is by lowering burdensome regulation and capital costs which is done via lower taxes and drastically reduced federal spending. Let’s not forget, politicians always need a boogeyman to stoke up their base or to deflect from their own bad policies. Moreover, follow the money. If Tik-Tok is banned, there will be immediate domestic winners and you can bet that there are politicians this moment with their greasy palms extended trying to make these entities winners.
If Tik-Tok is as bad as the greasy palmed political class says it is, then its demise can be assured through the good ole American way of private enterprise driving it out of business by creating a better product, perhaps one that loudly pronounces Tik-Tok’s malevolent nature. I wish the Nanny State would concentrate on making government smaller and parents less reliant on it to make decisions for them. Every parent has the power to decide if their child has Tik-Tok on their phone.
We have two “Golden Gooses.” Free speech and free trade. Let’s not degrade either for a temporary fix, as we end up losing much more in the long run.
