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“Alvah, if I had not sat on the stairs of the Gazette for a week…where would be the press for them to be free on?” –Newspaper baron Gail Wynand in ‘The Fountainhead’
A piece of art is an expression of the artist’s creativity. The material expression of art is in fact, an idea conceived in the artists mind, put into action. The same goes for any literary work or scientific invention. The content of ones mind is his own property & if obtained through legitimate means, so is the material through which he gives expression to that idea.
A creator has every right to sell, give away or even destroy his work. No one has the right of objection to the possession of an object or the resulting subjective evaluations in the mind of another person. As in the case of an artist, writer or scientist, an ordinary citizen too has the right to his own mind & property. To any sane, intelligent person, freedom of expression can only mean that each and every one of us has the right to propagate his or her views through legitimately chosen means.
If there is anything implicit in the statement that valuations differ, it is that subjective valuations have consequences. In the case of a drug addict or an alchoholic, the consequences are confined to himself. No act made out of mutual consent for mutual benefit can ever be declared illegal. A vice is not a crime. Yet, few would argue against the prohibition of narcotics.
Most crimes arise from man’s incapability to place rational self-interest over crass self interest. In the rest of the cases, they reach their convictions second hand-which, mostly are their religious beliefs or political convictions. As in earlier times, philosophy was intertwined with religion, nowadays it has political roots. In essence, all crimes are intellectual. Socialism was a movement led solely by intellectuals.Marx, Engels, Lenin & other self-proclaimed intellectuals & ‘humanitarians’ were in a sense responsible for all the starvation deaths & mass murders in the name of Socialism. Obviously, they were worse than any serial killer or tyrant, on a deeper & much more important level.
If drugs harming the body are to be prohibited when the consequences are confined to the addict, shouldn’t literary material too be prohibited, which are detrimental to both body & soul, through which a society’s course is set & results aren’t confined to the consumers? The answer is obvious, in a society professedly dedicated to placing soul over body & others over self. Prohibition at any level would eventually lead us straight down to the totalitarian cage. What starts from a pack of drugs ends with a philosophical treatise.
Some men haven’t a spark of brilliance or a vestige of self-respect left in them. They ask, “Why not restrict it to drugs?” They argue that it is the issues that matter, but not the principles. They see to it that people accept the notion that there are no principles other than the principle that there aren’t any. It is in the very nature of the government to extent its power once secured. Men incapable of seeing this obvious fact is incapable of any intellectual task & their views can only be seen as a fools blabber. One wouldn’t want to pay heed to a rotten dog’s yelping.
The Government can control the media & arts through various means. The worst case scenario is as in totalitarian regimes the Government seizes whole media & subsidizes all of art. As the witchdoctor has always sought an Attila, incompetent intellectuals are overly fond of totalitarianism. Posing intellectuals, aware of their own inferiority are only too happy if the Government would prohibit all art except that of bootlickers. They know well enough that the public are averse to mental exertion, much less of their orientation. There is something more that they know. On a free market, people would see through their fallacious views. They aren’t yet ready for that humiliation. Intellectual thugs pave way for physical thugs while the rest simply stare & blink.
A much more subtle way is in which Government can censor ‘inappropriate’ material by appointing a body of self-styled intellectuals. Intellectuals are an amusing bunch to watch. It’s only they who seem to be unaware of the fact that a country’s progress is a function of its economic freedom. They take it as their prerogative to pass judgments on everything beneath the sun even when they have no idea of what they are talking about. It never occurs to them that they are utterly incapable of the task they have arrogated to themselves & that even the street dogs looks down upon them with utmost contempt.
If the citizens are incompetent to choose literary material on their own, they obviously are helpless when it comes to choosing their representatives & evaluating their economic policies. As we all know, many are uneducated & illiterate. Even the most pretentious are incapable of analyzing economic policies as proficiency in social sciences is none among their vices. They are cut off from reality no matter how often they stare at their TV screens & cheer the pseudo-intellectuals smiling at them from studios. Such childish pretensions can only be evaluated when one realizes the agony one goes through while trying to solve a third order differential equation with no knowledge whatsoever in Algebra or Trigonometry.
We will leave apart the incompetence of these citizens & their representatives. Let’s not expatiate on the fact that intellectuals are hell-bent on expanding the machinery. A much more important issue is to be addressed. Every human being is unique. It is this uniqueness which makes individual liberty essential & a division of labor society providing all of us with unlimited potentialities possible. In other words, uniqueness makes human life possible-Or else, it means we would all perish in an egalitarian society. Ones right to deviate from the common path is the most crucial of human rights. It is no exaggeration to say that one who stands against the right to disagree stands against the right to live, as from that right comes all of our inventions and innovations.
An innovation is what crushes all existing conceptions. This crucial aspect is at stake when ideas are let to be regulated by a horde of old bozos. Every new idea will be opposed out of the simple fact that it refutes all prevailing myths. It is in human nature to be suspicious of any innovation & they are not to be blamed on this account. The most competent of men, having considerable investment in prevalent myths, are worse than the man on the street in this account.
Every controlled economy starts out by paralyzing the media. Prohibition of narcotics & pornography is just an overture to censorship in literature of freedom. In China, communist conspirators, beneath their moralistic pretense have banned many websites dedicated to individual freedom. In most Middle East countries, the whole literature of liberty, including novels of Ayn Rand is banned. In Iran, youngsters who had never known what freedom means, spread those books by typing out five copies & handing it out to friends on the condition that they would be doing the same. In India, students interested in a career in Social Sciences still have no book at all to start with. Once Economics is prohibited, the rest is only a matter of time as all of Social sciences are interrelated. It explains why no research work of considerable merit comes out of developing countries.
The ‘Free’ press in totalitarian regimes, in no sense means ‘Freedom of the press’. The press never let out the fact that millions were dying out of starvation & torture beneath those atom bombs & space ships, fed up on stolen technology from US, UK & Canada by Soviet spies. It served as a model for blood thirsty political thugs all over the world, including India, eager to cash in on the illusion that political rights aren’t essential for industrialization & scientific progress. These simpletons believed scientific progress was a spoon that hanged on their roof, devoid of any ideological context & technological education would catapult them to a scientific paradise. Even today Indians stare at those imported modern gadgets with the mindset of an uncultivated savage.
Why should we go to the extremes? Why scare people off? Isn’t a regulated media the ideal? A regulated press is not ‘Free’. I am yet to see an article in support of laissez-faire in any Indian publication. Political agendas, threat of annulations of special privileges & fear of censorship makes things only a little better off. Unions never hesitant on using a ‘little bit of force’, hold insurmountable power over media houses. Historical & foreign policy documents are usually not in the reach of honest & capable writers. The Government threatens publishers keen on such works. Book clubs & other avenues for sale are under the power of parasitic union leaders. They threaten to boycott the whole publishing house if they set out to publish such works. Boycotting is perfectly moral if there is no initiation of force, or seeking of privileges handed out by force behind that move. Such is not the case here.
Movies are no exception. Hollywood was for long a bastion of Communism. Artists are scared off from movies running individualistic themes. The uncertainty of the industry forces them to hunt for an Attila to protect them in the long run. Unions of artists & screen writers hold wield substantial power over the theatre. Most old Hollywood movies subtly portray happy pictures of Red China & Soviet Russia. In Malayalam movies, we see communist agenda on one side & glories of the feudal era on the other. Those film makers haven’t yet gotten over the humiliation of their grand parents being kicked out of their dens & are shamelessly seeking new avenues for their never quenched blood hunger.’
Universities are even worse in this regard. Economics education is prohibited in all parts of the world. Universities, controlled by political pressure groups, as a rule don’t let in professors dedicated to Capitalism, who, in fact are the only men capable of imparting Economics education. Mises, the greatest Economist ever, never had a permanent academic job. Competent theorists usually have a hard time finding publishers, as the private publishers are incapable of taking on the task. Though it is usually used as an argument against private publishing, it is only because books of considerable merit are rejected by the academia. The fact that the few of the ones rejected by the private publishing firms were accepted by University Presses rich with Government subsidies further obscures the issue. In the three of such cases I know, the editors were fired in the two & the book was mangled in the other. So much for the façade!
The incestuous relationship between politicians & intellectuals, Government controls & trade union activities makes ‘Freedom of Speech’ a joke in a mixed economy. An image conceived in an artists mind, materialized by the paint spilled on his canvas & the subjective evaluations hence created in the mind of the public isn’t a blank check on anyone else’s freedom. Cows aren’t condemned for eating grass. Morality pertains only to issues of choice, and is not to be ensured at the threat of an electric chair. Fight for ones life by start out to fight for the freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is the foundation of a free, prosperous society.
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