What is the origin of the idea of free speech as embodied in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? An introduction to the answer to this question can be found here. The writer identifies strands of thought that led up to this important amendment and the extremely important idea that freedom of speech and of the press shall not be infringed by the U.S. government. I’d say that freedom of speech (or the right of free speech) is an absolutely crucial and essential component of a free society. It exposes people to dangerous and evil ideas as well as beneficial ideas, but without its presence the power of government becomes too easily an instrument of domination, control, tyranny, corruption, suppression of all rights, and totalitarianism.
The idea of free speech in the first amendment, according to the article’s author, came from “parliamentary privilege of freedom of debate, the abolition of prior censorship in England, the letters of ‘Cato’, the theory of natural rights, the growth of religious toleration, and the limited function of a national government in a federal system”. Although private property rights are useful to analyze the case of hecklers operating at a political rally, this does not mean that there is no such thing as freedom of speech or free speech rights. The rich history of free speech suggests the opposite. To cut ourselves off from this history and its meaning by saying that there is no such thing as free speech rights is imprudent and unnecessary. Every one of us has the right to speak or write or publish our thoughts without prior censorship or restriction by government.
The question of where and how we effectuate the free speech actions is a separate question. We cannot properly do so by interfering or impeding other rights. We cannot do so by the destruction or degrading of property that belongs to others privately or in common.
We need not defend or deepen the extremely useful concept of private property by extending it to exclude the also useful and allied concept of freedom of speech, rooted in so much history and some of the very same history as private property. These ideas work together. The idea of private property enables the exercise of free and uncensored speech, subject to no penalties or prior impedance because of its content. The legal framework that supports or creates private property, that continually defines private property rights and deals with changes in them, does not function properly without the exercise of freedom of speech in legislatures, the press and media more generally. These two ideas work together.
Hecklers and worse who shout down or otherwise put a halt to a speech at a forum are obviously out of order. They are stopping the exercise of free speech, not exercising it themselves. There are obvious social rules that determine how and where we may exercise freedom of speech. To understand and spell these out may benefit by referring to private property rights, but this doesn’t require a theory that uses private property ideas to rule out free speech ideas altogether.
9:08 am on April 30, 2016
