Elon Musk has been touting “free speech absolutism” as justification for shaking up Twitter. Twitter, Musk rightly says, serves as our contemporary public square. To protect it, he wants to own it.
That one very wealthy man gets to decide how to run one of democracy’s busiest markets for opinions and ideas is not typically the way we think about democracy. The more common rule of thumb is that in a democracy, no man is above the rules. The necessary corollary is that no one man gets to make the rules.
“Absolute freedom” is a catchy phrase. It has been extolled on both the left and the right. But there’s a serious catch. Freedom of speech and action is never absolute. Meaningful freedom cannot exist without mandatory ground rules — rules that seek to limit the abuse of freedom for freedom’s sake.
Whether it’s a free market of goods and services or the proverbial free market of opinions and ideas, we need rules to safeguard the minimum operating conditions markets need to survive and flourish. Setting up and maintaining a working republic conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal is hard work, and endlessly at risk of breaking down. Especially by fraudsters and political con artists hell-bent on robbing others of the enjoyment of their rights and liberties.
That’s why we have rules to prevent people from claiming they have a cure for cancer (and it’s a bargain to boot!) when they don’t. There are legal sanctions against...
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