Hooray for the Supreme Court?
by Max Raskin
Rights to free speech are not absolute, but are rather contingent upon property rights. For instance, a person doesn’t have the right to speak freely on my property and he does not have the right to go into the New York Times and hijack their facilities to exercise his "freedom of the press." Thus we find that human rights are intricately tied up with property rights; without the right to do with one’s property as one chooses, "human" rights are meaningless. In communist countries where all property is controlled by the state, there is no possible way for person to actually express his freedom of speech. Thus the proper rule regarding freedom of speech is that a person should be allowed to say or print whatever he wants provided he is on his own property, and not coercing against anyone else’s. It can be seen that far from being a crime against the public, necessitating a restriction of liberty, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is nothing more than a crime against the theater owner who would have grounds to sue if anything was shouted in his establishment. If a private, Catholic school wants to prohibit the wearing of yarmulkes, then that is their right. If a private, Jewish school makes wearing yarmulkes mandatory, then that is their right. The owners of private institutions have the moral right to make rules concerning the use of their property. But what about the public school system? Here comes the inevitable problem that comes given the nature of public property. Because no one really "owns" public property, the rules regarding its use must necessarily be arbitrary and capricious. If we really espouse to be a country of freedom, then why doesn’t a person have the right to bring a bullhorn into school and disrupt the history class that he finds particularly offensive? The answer is that the school board, Supreme Court, federal, local, and state governments, have all set up a system of rules and regulations that govern the school system. Instead of having meaningful decisions made regarding the best way to provide education, the school system becomes a bureaucracy devoted to a dogged insistence on regulations and red tape. It seems logical that we should restrict speech in public schools, as we restrict speech in most private facilities, but the important question becomes: To what extent should speech be restricted in the public schools. In Tinker v. Des Moines, the Court ruled that a student has a right to free speech provided his actions don’t "materially and substantially" disrupt the learning environment. This sounds like a very good benchmark, but who is to decide what is disruptive and what is not? Wearing a shirt that says "Bring the Troops Home" or "Support Gay Marriage" in my high school in New Jersey will certainly be less disruptive than wearing those shirts in a high school in Mississippi. And what about wearing a shirt that says "I Hate Redheads"? If the redhead student community reacts violently to the shirt, then certainly the blame cannot lie with the person wearing the shirt anymore than the blame can lie with a woman wearing suggestive clothing who gets raped because she was "asking for it." There are a slew of Court decisions that try to establish the proper line, but in the end, the line can have no real meaning and our right to free speech is totally dependent upon the generosity of the current Court. Obviously there need to be rules regarding speech in the school system, but local governments, or any governments for that matter, have no right to make up these rules if we are a country of equal protection under the law. Free speech is not what a school board says free speech is. But this is the nature of having the government involved in schools. So while the Supreme Court is right to assert that a student must have a right to free speech, the larger lesson is that as long as a public school system exists we are going to have insurmountable problems. Rules regarding the proper use of scarce resources, including school facilities, can only be decided upon through the assignment of property rights. The solution to the problem comes in totally privatizing the school system. The involuntary servitude (read: slavery) of compulsory attendance laws have nothing but a deleterious effect on both the education of the nation’s youth, as well as the respect for individual liberty that this country was ostensibly founded upon. Thus, the real cheer for the Supreme Court will come when it strikes down all compulsory attendance laws, and illegalizes the public school system, allowing competition, which will always yield more freedom and better services. July 2, 2007 Max Raskin [send him mail] goes to high school in New Jersey. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |
