To Speak, or Not to Speak

I started listening to the Misinformation and the Three Languages of Politics (with Arnold Kling) episode of EconTalk. I made it about a third of the way through, and then gave up. Not because I had a problem with Professor Kling's notions that giving one entity the power to censor others is dangerous, or the idea that the antidote to bad speech is more speech, but because the discussion between Professor Kling and Professor Roberts seemed to go out of its way to avoid the real question that lies at the heart of things like "misinformation" and "censorship": Who is empowered to decide what is harmful?

It was already a given that some speech should be punishable, because it was harmful: Professor Roberts called out threats of violence early on. And in the wake of this, the idea that Holocaust denial, for instance, was effectively harmless was assumed, but never examined.

And while I understand the idea that thee is no harm done to anyone by the simple fact that someone claims that the killings of some six million Jewish people and another six million others didn't actually happen, there are nations in Europe that have decided otherwise. So rather than simply condemn them for being overly censorious in a misguided attempt to protect the hypersensitive, I think that a discussion of the various metrics have for determining whether, and when, people are harmed by speech was in order.

Because no matter which decision a government comes to, someone is going to be unhappy. Either someone feels that their free speech rights are being trampled (or they aren't being given a right that they should have) or someone's going to conclude that harms to them have been trivialized.

And the body that decides between these incompatible interests is not the censor, but whomever decides what it is the censor can sanction people for.